A local present inside continuing activity

6. Presentness, continuity and anticipation

6.1 A local present

Presentness is a live role within interpreted activity. Incoming source coupling, bodily organization, learned calibration and uptake anchor that role. It is not necessarily the last raw signal received: a delayed input can represent an earlier source event. A current interpretation can concern the past or an anticipated possibility while preserving those modes.

Hartle's information-gathering and utilizing systems provide a physical account of local present organization (2005). The present construction adds its explicit experiential constitution and differentiated live, retained and anticipated contributions. Its local present is no universal spacelike surface. An absolute-present selector beyond those relations adds an ontological condition that needs independent warrant.

6.2 Nested and continuing experience

The $C$-to-$E$ and $E$-to-$G$ relations can be distinguishable within a continuing melody experience. Stable stream binding, retention and anticipation organize them without first making isolated experiential packets and later assembling them. Humming several notes within one breath does not multiply subjects.

Write an attribution as $(A,J;e)$: $A$ is the person, $J$ supports interpretive activity, and $e$ is an event or content taken up. Their extents need not coincide. A long event can be experienced while unfolding and again in recollection. A walk can be one experience with encounters with rain or another person within it. Such nested or overlapping descriptions are permitted where relevant portions are actually interpreted. A description neither creates a subject nor guarantees uptake for every subdivision an analyst can draw.

Overlap is weaker than integration. Pair constructions containing $\{C,E\}$ and $\{E,G\}$ do not establish an integrated phrase by set union alone. The computational construction explicitly consolidates the three-note phrase at its third stage. Pair and phrase descriptions can both be legitimate without making every past contribution part of an unbounded simultaneous field.

Continuity of the person, continuity of an auditory source, mathematical continuity and absence of a perceived gap are different predicates. The proposed mechanism supplies lineage, binding and continuing uptake. It does not need a universal partition into naturally bounded experiential packets before integration can be investigated. Auditory continuity studies, including different percepts for acoustically identical stimuli, constrain constructive grouping and its cortical correlates (Riecke et al., 2007). They show why experienced continuation is not simply uninterrupted stimulus energy, without resolving its complete causal implementation.

6.3 Retention, later loss and records

Operative retention can support ongoing integration without durable episodic recall. In a severely amnesic patient, narrative responses indicated integration over tens of seconds despite major memory impairment (Zuo et al., 2020). Residual tissue, scanner differences and reused controls limit the inference. The finding does not demonstrate experience without any retention or certify uptake at every moment.

Later deletion changes access. It does not change whether an earlier construction was actually taken up. If the source event is first taken up during later reconstruction, that is a later experience concerning the event, not an experience created retrospectively. Equally, asserting that an earlier experience occurred does not assert that it is ongoing at the later stage. Occurrence and ongoingness are different questions.

Records require more than correlation. Causal history, prepared resources and physical boundary conditions support usable memory; thermodynamic accounts make some of these conditions explicit (Mlodinow and Brun, 2014). Reversible record mechanisms remain possible. The argument assumes no universal dissipation charge for each memory operation, and it does not derive the cosmological low-entropy boundary from this local construction.

6.4 Anticipation without access to the actual future

Proposition: 5. Shared local prefix

In a causal deterministic temporal model, equal relevant local state, received input history, operative uptake and learned parameters through stage $v$ give equal modeled current content and prediction at $v$, even if later inputs differ. For a stochastic model with the same relevant conditional law, the same premises give equal conditional distributions. Equal realized samples additionally require equal realized random inputs.

Proof. Deterministic update and content maps receive equal arguments. Stochastic transition and content kernels receive equal conditioning arguments. Differences in later input enter only after reception or after endogenous activity registers an unmet expectation.

The prefix is observer-local. It is not an identical complete global state assumed to branch under deterministic laws. Different environments can preserve the same local organization and later supply different inputs.

The constructed $C$-to-$E$ prefix therefore has identical present content before a continuation with $G$ or one with $D$. A chosen learned distribution assigns probabilities 0.75 and 0.25. Subsequent surprises are $-\ln0.75=0.287682$ and $-\ln0.25=1.386294$ nats. An omission produces an “expected note not received” state without counting the absent note as received. These probabilities and deadlines are model choices.

Context-dependent responses to physically identical omissions distinguish predictive organization from received sound (Wacongne et al., 2011). Mismatch does not alone establish experiential admission. Even if a block description is adopted, the embedded participant does not thereby receive the actual future: retention and anticipation retain different causal and interpretive roles.