Cosmological Continuity Presentism (CCP): A Generative Spacetime Ontology Compatible with General Relativity

Cosmological Continuity Presentism (CCP) develops a presentist ontology of spacetime compatible with relativistic field theory by interpreting spacetime as a progressively generated causal structure rather than as a completed four-dimensional block. The framework introduces a generation parameter σ that, at the fundamental level, functions as a primitive pre-geometric ordering parameter and, within the emergent geometric regime, admits representation as an effective scalar field. Its gradient structure is calibrated by the local matter–energy distribution through a constrained variational formulation without modifying the Einstein field equations. CCP employs a generated-domain formalism M(σ) to represent the causal history leading to the present state while maintaining that only the present hypersurface possesses ontological existence; earlier states no longer exist as independent regions of spacetime, and future states remain ungenerated. Within this framework, prior states persist only through causal records embedded in later physical structures, including radiation fields, gravitational structures, particle distributions, and cosmological relics. These records provide partial physical persistence and evidential traces of earlier states without exhausting all truths about the past. CCP therefore distinguishes between ontological persistence, which is restricted to present physical structures and their causal encodings, and determinate historical truth, according to which past events remain true as events that occurred even when aspects of them are no longer physically recoverable. The formal development employs globally hyperbolic foliation, causal-structure theorems, ADM decomposition, and a constrained action principle to show that CCP preserves local Lorentz-invariant dynamics and diffeomorphism invariance while introducing an ontological distinction between the generated history formally represented by M(σ) and the advancing present boundary Σ_σ. In the emergent geometric regime, the effective σ field possesses a timelike gradient whose structure is determined by the matter distribution and gives rise to a potentially observable cosmological signature. CCP predicts a causal-skew parameter ε(σ) in cosmic microwave background multipole correlations and a related dipole-modulated parity asymmetry derived from the gradient structure of ∇_μσ. The framework does not claim that standard ΛCDM cosmology or block-universe interpretations cannot accommodate similar asymmetries through particular initial conditions or dynamical histories; rather, CCP derives a specific dipole-aligned angular structure as a lawlike consequence of its spacetime-generation formalism. CCP further examines connections with quantum interpretations, causal-set growth approaches, and the phenomenology of temporal experience. It proposes that the asymmetry of temporal experience is naturally accommodated by an ontology in which reality is continuously generated at an advancing present boundary, while remaining agnostic about any unique theory of consciousness. By grounding temporal becoming in the causal and dynamical structure of relativistic spacetime, CCP offers an interpretive extension of general relativity that preserves established local physical laws while introducing potentially falsifiable cosmological signatures associated with spacetime generation.