The Non-Storage of Time and the Present-Record Universe From Past-Light Observation to Finite-Capacity Temporal Ontology

This paper develops the present-record interpretation of temporal observation. It distinguishes a physical record of a past event from the event itself. In cosmology, light emitted under earlier conditions propagates, interacts with a detector, and becomes registered at a later observation event. The resulting record supplies information about the emission without being identical to that emission event. The paper adopts the single-present constraint as an ontological postulate: physical instantiation belongs to the currently actualized configuration, while completed moments do not persist as additional coexisting temporal objects. Statements of present-only existence throughout this paper are made within this postulated ontology. They are not derived from the existence of records alone. Under this constraint, temporal non-storage follows conditionally, and records remain current physical structures with a causal history. The present-record universe permits causal succession, propagation, memory, and reconstruction. It distinguishes the mathematical representation of a history from the physical resources used to encode that history. Its schematic succession of states does not define a universal coordinate clock. Relativistic coordinate freedom alone neither establishes nor refutes the ontological postulate. Finite capacity enters FCLET as a separate physical postulate for bounded operational causal domains under specified resource and resolution conditions. Temporal non-storage alone does not bound the number of distinguishable current states or the amount of information a record can carry. The connection to finite-capacity physics therefore combines present-record ontology with independently specified capacity constraints and latency dynamics. Observable predictions follow from that additional physical construction, whose mathematical development is given in the subsequent articles.