Committed Presentism: A Single-History Ontology of Quantum Mechanics

Committed Presentism is a single-history commitment ontology preserving the tested predictions of quantum mechanics while giving real work to the present: existence, becoming, truthmaking, and the non-recoverability of the past. It holds that only the present exists, that the present suffices, and that the present carries no operational signature. This silence is symmetric across the competing ontologies, eternalism included; it establishes consistency with tested physics, not evidential support for the present over its rivals. No-signaling at the marginal requires pointer completeness alone; full indistinguishability additionally requires Born-faithfulness. The silence is exact on the accessible marginals in the idealized commit regime and holds to leading order at finite record overlap. There is a single global now, advancing across the cosmos, and commitment is the primitive act by which possibility becomes actuality. The future is open because it has not yet committed. The past is non-recoverable because the present continually advances: a past event labels a prior configuration rather than a stored region or archive, and a commitment that cannot be undone leaves no way back to it. What remains of the past are present records, traces, and laws. Reality is the currently committed set: a configuration is real precisely when it is the present at which commitment is occurring. The committed set carries a third role beyond existence and becoming: it is where truth is made. Past-tensed claims are grounded by present records alone, and a record-free past has no truthmaker. The now is what the theory explains; it is not a reading taken off an instrument. Commitment selects without adding amplitude or coherence: among the alternatives already separated, one history commits and the rest never become actual. The act adds nothing to the world. If this is how reality works, then the present was never supposed to show up as an extra reading on an instrument. The present is the condition under which any reading is actual at all.