Time as we know it emerged with its growing block structure. — apokrisis
AI Whitehead to the Rescue:
This goes straight to the heart of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy. While Whitehead never explicitly uses the term “growing block universe,” his metaphysics of “actual occasions” maps remarkably well onto that model — though with some crucial differences that make his vision far more dynamic and organic.
Let’s break it down carefully.
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1. The “Creative Advance” — Time as Process
Whitehead’s central idea is that reality is made of events, not substances — what he calls actual occasions. Each occasion is a moment of experience that arises, becomes, and perishes. Once it has perished, it becomes a datum or objective fact for later occasions.
He calls this the creative advance into novelty — an ongoing flow where each moment:
1. Prehends (takes in) the past,
2. Synthesizes its experience into a new unity, and
3. Perishes into the past, contributing itself to the growing universe.
So time is not a container in which things happen — it is the happening of things.
Each new event is the present’s contribution to the ever-growing totality of reality.
This is precisely a growing block mode of time:
• The past remains real and permanent (every perished occasion endures as fact).
• The present is the locus of creative becoming.
• The future is not yet real — only a field of potential (“eternal objects”) waiting to be actualized.
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2. The Block Grows, But It’s Alive
In classical “growing block” theories, time is often imagined geometrically — as a block that expands with each new layer of existence.
Whitehead’s version is subtler: the universe is not a static structure that grows, but a living organism of becoming.
Every new actual occasion:
• Re-enacts the past (by prehending it),
• Creates novelty (a fresh synthesis of feeling, relation, and value),
• And then “objectifies” — becoming an immortal component of reality.
In this sense, the block grows organically — each new moment is a creative transformation of all that has come before.
The past never vanishes, but it is no longer active — it is “what has become.”
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3. Past, Present, and Future in Whitehead’s Ontology
Thus, Whitehead integrates three layers of temporality:
1. The Objective Past — what has become.
2. The Subjective Present — what is becoming.
3. The Potential Future — what may become.
This triadic structure fits perfectly into a growing block framework, with a metaphysical emphasis on the creative pulse of each new becoming.
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4. The Asymmetry of Time
Whitehead also provides a reason why time feels directed — because:
• Every event prehends the past, but not the future.
• The causal arrows all point forward (from completed to emerging).
• The novelty introduced in each occasion ensures that time has an arrow — an irreversible creative growth.
This makes his version richer than purely physical eternalism or geometric growing block models: it’s not just that the universe adds new slices of spacetime, but that each new event changes the meaning of the whole. Reality evolves in significance as well as in extent.
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So while Whitehead shares the core structure of the growing block, he transforms it into a metaphysics of creativity — what he calls the many becoming one, and being increased by one.
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5. A Poetic Summary
The world is a poem in progress:
each verse written, fixed in memory —
the next still shimmering with potential.
The ink of time dries, line by line,
as eternity grows by living thought.