Here is a visualization of the simultaneous dimensional overlay in the toy cellular automaton.

Blue (Trace T): shows the record of past activity at each cell.

Red (Actuality A): highlights active presence at that moment.

Green (Potential P): represents future possibilities, gradually suppressed where actuality occurs.

Observe how all three layers coexist at each spatial point, producing an emergent, visually coherent “present-layer.” The overlay demonstrates dimensional simultaneity, as the past (blue), present (red), and future (green) are expressed together in the same lattice.

-/-

Platohagel: Yes let us move in that direction as to what it resolves and what new problems it raises.

Socrates: Then let us proceed, Platohagel, by setting your simultaneous dimensional overlay against the others, asking what it clarifies and what it complicates.

Problems It Resolves

Against Sequential Time (Aristotle, Augustine): Removes the puzzle of how the past no longer is, and the future not yet is. By layering all three, the moment contains its own continuity.

Against the Block Universe: Avoids the charge of “frozen eternity.” Time is not inert geometry but dynamically expressive at each locus.

Against Illusion: Grants time reality, not dismissal. Yet reality is not linear succession, but dimensional simultaneity.

Bridging Physics and Experience: Entropy gives direction, relativity gives geometry, psychology gives felt presence. Your view unites these by holding all aspects co-expressed within the moment.

Problems It Raises

Measure: If past, present, and future are simultaneous, by what means do we distinguish them? How do we quantify succession, clocks, or causality?

Causality: If future potentials already “overlay” the present, does cause precede effect, or do they co-exist in layered expression? This risks collapsing the distinction between what is actual and what is possible.

Physics Compatibility: Relativity treats simultaneity as relative to observers. Your view suggests simultaneity is absolute at each point in space, which may conflict with relativity unless reinterpreted as dimensional structure, not observational fact.

Ontological Status: Are the past and future fully real, or present only as “traces” and “potentials”? Without clarity, this account risks blending actuality with possibility in a way some will call obscure.

Thus, your account resolves the frozen/static problem of eternalism and the vanishing problem of succession, but it raises the distinction problem (how to separate layers of time once they all co-exist).

Do you wish, then, that we refine your view toward sharper ontological distinctions—between the way past, present, and future are expressed within simultaneity?

Platohagel: Ontological distinctions are important as they exist in simultaneity. How might this be approached from such an ontological distinction?

Socrates: Then let us carve carefully, Platohagel. If simultaneity holds, we must still distinguish what kind of being the past, present, and future have, lest all dissolve into blur. Ontology demands each layer bear a different mode of existence, though all coexist dimensionally.

Ontological Distinctions Within Simultaneity

1. Past → Trace (Being-as-Record)

-The past exists as actuality impressed.

-It is fixed, unalterable, carried as memory, residue, or causal imprint.

-Ontological mode: Immutable record.

2.Present → Actuality (Being-as-Event)

-The present exists as the only point of active expression.

-It is the surface where traces of the past and potentials of the future converge.

-Ontological mode: Active manifestation.

3. Future → Potential (Being-as-Possibility)

-The future exists not as fixed actuality but as structured openness.

-Its mode is possibility constrained by past traces and present actuality.

-Ontological mode: Virtual potential.

Simultaneous Overlay Restated

At any locus in space:

The record of the past (immutable being) The actual present (active being) The potential future (possible being) …are dimensionally expressed at once.

Thus, simultaneity does not mean collapse into sameness, but coexistence of different ontological modalities.

This way, your proposal holds both unity (all expressed together) and distinction (each in its proper mode).

Shall we next examine how these three modes interact dynamically—what happens as the trace, the event, and the potential continually interplay?

See Also: Questions Regarding the Nature of Time

.