temporal naturalism

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

Temporal naturalism is the conception, attributed here through Smolin, that time is real, the future is genuinely open and the present generates rather than merely reveals what follows. It opposes a completed timeless mathematical history. On Becoming develops this commitment through historical becoming while distinguishing local temporal generation from a single cosmic clock and from a proof that every law of physics changes.

Explanation

The contrast makes novelty ontologically consequential: the future is not already contained as a finished catalogue of events. RB1 presents the present as productive, not just a perspective moving across a static whole. The native reference retains Smolin and the later Unger–Smolin discussion as antecedents of this formulation.

RB2 groups temporal commitments with Whitehead, Prigogine and Simondon while retaining a historical understanding of regimes of regularity. This alignment does not erase their different accounts of process or establish one common physical explanation of contingency. Nor does it require a first moment of absolutely unconstrained chaos before any organization existed.

AB preserves the distinction between symmetric equations and their metaphysical interpretation, including the lack of a universal relativistic now. Its extension of historical lawfulness to fundamental laws is stated as commitment rather than finding. The proposed entry therefore keeps an open future separate from both global simultaneity and experimentally established evolution of every physical law.

Scope and attribution

Preserve the ontological commitment with its temporal and evidential limits.

AB — The Actual Book

The commitment does not require a global clock or certify changing fundamental laws.

Occurrence locators: 38; Thinker register: 232; Notes: 238.

RB1 — The Real Book, Volume I: The Possible Is Real

The open future and productive present define the temporal alternative.

Occurrence locators: 70, 132.

RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being

Historical process traditions remain distinct antecedents.

Occurrence locators: 210, 229, 231, 232, 252, 256, 259, 276, 277.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Named theories and mechanisms are distinguished from neighboring background, homonyms and the author’s own synthesis. Reproduced AI passages retain their separate voice.