Time as Actualization: A foundational ontology reconciling the quantum future and the relativistic past

Abstract

Quantum mechanics describes the potential future; general relativity describes the actualized past; the present is the process of actualization that turns the one into the other. That single move is Time–Actualization (TA), the foundational ontology set out here. TA assumes the quantum formalism and the relativistic causal structure, and derives neither: it adds no new physics, makes no new prediction, and asks to be judged on coherence and unifying power rather than on a measurement. What it buys is an ontology in which the measurement problem, the EPR puzzle and the arrow of time are read off one process, and in which the basis an event actualizes in is fixed by that event's own causal past instead of being posited. In detail. The ontology is a minimal triplet (ρ, ν, ⟨P,≺⟩): a positive normalized state ρ on a local net of algebras (the conditional future potential), a primitive tempo ν (the rate of becoming), and a growing causal set ⟨P,≺⟩ (the past). What is not derived, and is named as such throughout, is the Born rule, Einstein's equations, and the constants. Eight core hypotheses yield seven consequences. A structural arrow of time, prior to thermodynamics (D1). The dissolution of the measurement problem (D2), of the EPR paradox (D3), and of the worry about superluminal signalling (D4). A causally determined preferred basis (D5): the actualization basis is einselected — environment-induced superselection — by the event's own causal past, rather than posited. A thermodynamic arrow via Landauer–Jaynes–Spohn (D6). And a conditional coherence lemma (D7): the actualization dynamics is generally covariant and no-signalling once the substrate carries the standard locality of physics. D7 claims less than the Rideout–Sorkin Bell causality condition, which is a screening-off analogue of Bell's local causality and is not inherited. We then develop the physics of TA's own primitive, the tempo ν: a parsimony law that pins it to the local energy scale, and a closed signature gate, both empirically silent. Two cadences are kept apart — the growth of the substrate, whose scale is the causal set's discreteness scale and which is what builds proper time, and the far rarer tempo ν at which a given system actualizes. Measurement, becoming and causal-set growth are then one process seen at two grains: an identity of process, not of rate. TA is empirically equivalent to quantum mechanics on a causal-set substrate, a consequence we label P5. It makes no distinctive prediction. Its sole observational signature is the generic causal-set "swerve" — the momentum diffusion a particle undergoes as it propagates on a discrete causal order — which is inherited from discreteness rather than specific to actualization. The contribution is ontological clarity and a unifying reading, not a new number. We close by positioning TA among the interpretations of quantum mechanics and the philosophies of time, and by stating the four problems it leaves open — and why each is, by construction, not TA's to close.