The Universe Exists Only in This Instant

Abstract

Based on the author's previously proven Closed-System Self-Update Paradox (Chen, 2026a), this paper extrapolates the conclusion to a cosmological model. We first clarify the conditionality of this extrapolation: if the universe satisfies (1) finite information capacity and (2) absence of external storage reference, then all theorems of Paper A apply automatically. Under this premise, we rigorously prove the following core propositions: The past is inaccessible: By Theorem 2 of Paper A (Historical Degeneracy Collapse Theorem), after sustained updates, infinitely many historical paths converge to the same current state; past information is physically irreversibly unrecoverable, hence equivalent to non-existence. The future cannot be pre-stored: If the future state already existed in current storage, the evolution map would be bypassed, violating the rigidity of update direction; therefore the future has not yet arrived. Physical reality is strictly equivalent to the current global state Uk, where k is the discrete update counting primitive—the Meta-Instant (denoted as Y). The meta-instant carries no information entropy (H(Y)=0), serving only to provide ordinal relations for the state sequence. Classical time readings are proven to be not independent physical quantities, but rather scalar projections of the current state under observation functions. The continuous spacetime of general relativity is reconstructed as a fitted representation of discrete lattice coupling strengths under the coarse-graining limit.