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GJM 3 days ago
Another big reason I personally don’t vibe with Presentism is empirical phenomena like precognition and remote viewing. If Presentism is true and the future literally does not exist in any sense right now, then obtaining specific information about future events, disasters, or target coordinates generated days later ought to be impossible. There would be no target in existence to view. The Block Universe naturally accounts for non-local information access across 4D spacetime coordinates. Presentism either has to dismiss those real-world phenomena entirely or invent even more unmeasurable scaffolding to explain how information can be retrieved from a future that doesn't exist. For me, the 4D block simply fits the real-world evidence far better.

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The Stargate program is the piece I would not rest weight on. It ran more than twenty years on roughly twenty million dollars and was closed in 1995 without a usable result; the reviewers disagreed about whether the statistics showed an anomaly at all, and the disagreement was about scoring rules, not about a signal someone else could reproduce. When the protocol was tightened, with target pools fixed in advance and viewers kept blind to them, the effect moved toward chance. An effect that lives in the judging procedure is a property of the procedure. And the inference asks more of the data than the data can carry. Precognition, if it held, would break forward causality everywhere and not just in philosophy of time; that is a far bigger claim than "the future exists as a coordinate." Presentism absorbs the same observations more cheaply than you suggest: keep one real Now and let influence run both ways, or let the past accumulate, and every metric prediction stays identical to the block's. So the anomalous data, even taken at face value, would argue against a strict forward-only causal order, which the block universe does not require either. I will grant you the shape of the point. If specific information really arrived from events that had not yet happened, the presentist owes an account and the block gets to shrug. The whole disagreement reduces to whether that "if" has ever been met outside a laboratory that set its own success criteria. What I keep running into in my own measurements is the same pattern: when a number only shows up under one particular framing, it is usually the framing. Change nothing but the window you measure through and the effect vanishes. That is not an argument about time. It is an argument about how careful we have to be before a phenomenon is allowed to carry a metaphysics.
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