Reality & time models evidence.
Block universe, presentism, eternalism, emergent time. This hub collects the relevant claims, strongest and weakest evidence positions, source records, and map/library views for the cluster.
Related research reports
Strongest claims in this topic
Does time exist?
Umbrella entry for the time question. Time, in some real sense, undeniably organises both experience and physics. Whether it is fundamental, emergent, or illusory is what's actually contested.
Block Universe / Eternalism
The 4D 'block' picture follows naturally from special relativity, where there is no objective universal 'now'. Many physicists and philosophers accept it.
Determinism
Classical physics is deterministic; quantum mechanics complicates the picture; many-worlds and Bohmian readings restore determinism.
Emergent time
If quantum gravity is right, time may be derived rather than fundamental. Active research; nothing settled.
Many-Worlds Interpretation
Everett's solution to the measurement problem. No collapse — every outcome happens in branching universes.
Growing Block Universe
The past is real and growing. The future is not yet. A compromise that preserves becoming.
Weakest or most speculative claims
Simulation Theory
Nick Bostrom's 2003 trilemma: civilizations don't reach the simulation stage, or don't run simulations, or we are almost certainly in one. The argument is rigorous; whether any horn is true is empirically open.
Growing Block Universe
The past is real and growing. The future is not yet. A compromise that preserves becoming.
Presentism — only the present is real
The natural common-sense view: only what exists now exists. Hard to reconcile with relativity but not refuted.
Determinism
Classical physics is deterministic; quantum mechanics complicates the picture; many-worlds and Bohmian readings restore determinism.
Key verified sources
The single study most often cited as evidence against libertarian free will. Almost every later debate is downstream of it.
Major reinterpretation of Libet — important counterweight to popular 'neuroscience disproves free will' framing.
Gives the time-exists page a canonical anti-realist anchor rather than treating the question as only a physics issue.
The default canonical reference for what compatibilism actually claims, against which most popular versions are pitched.
Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential): The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act
The single study most often cited as evidence against libertarian free will. Almost every later debate is downstream of it.
An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-initiated movement
Major reinterpretation of Libet — important counterweight to popular 'neuroscience disproves free will' framing.
The Unreality of Time
Gives the time-exists page a canonical anti-realist anchor rather than treating the question as only a physics issue.
Compatibilism
The default canonical reference for what compatibilism actually claims, against which most popular versions are pitched.
Fine-Tuning
Frames the anthropic / multiverse / design debate that simulation, mathematical-universe, and theism claims all engage with.
Causal Determinism
Useful for separating physical determinism (a contested empirical claim) from determinism in the popular sense.
Fatalism
Use this as the conceptual guardrail for destiny and 'it was meant to be' claims. It separates fatalism from causal determinism, which popular spirituality often blends together.
Everett's Relative-State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics
Steel-manned reference for what the many-worlds interpretation actually says, useful because popular versions often overstate what the physics entails.
Free Will
Establishes the philosophical landscape any modern empirical claim about free will is sitting inside.
Being and Becoming in Modern Physics
Direct treatment of the physics-of-time question — exactly the territory the block-universe claim lives in, without reducing the debate to a slogan.