The Genealogy of the Universe: Basic Logic, Logical Time, and Historical Laws

This work develops a genealogical framework for the nomic structure of an Evolving Block Universe (EBU). The central idea is that: (i) there exists a minimal protological level L0, characterised by the act-type of total exclusion NON, devoid of any physical or nomic content; (ii) physical laws are neither eternal Platonic entities nor mere Humean summaries of the facts, but genealogical outputs of this logical core, fixed at the first emergence of new domains; and (iii) the growth of an EBU universe does not consist only in the addition of events, but in the growth of a logical memory of resolved successions and genealogical laws, measured by a logical time ordered by L_type (normed types of succession) and L_token (integrated instances). Building on the results of For a Genealogy of Proto-Logic, I introduce the tripartition L0/L1/L2, characterise NON as a content-neutral global coherence constraint, and define the fixing of laws via the space of admissible extensions Adm(D,M) for each genealogically new domain D (three cases: empty / singleton / multiple). The resulting laws are historical and path-dependent, with a share of primitive nomic contingency but without optimisation metalaws of a best-system type. I then reformulate the EBU as the growth of the “domain of what has already been resolved”, discuss truthmaking for events and laws in this context, and compare the framework with Smolin’s precedence proposal, with Humean best-system theory, with nomic primitivism, and with dispositionalism. The aim is to show that one can have a universe with historical, non-Humean laws, without initial nomic chaos or rich meta-Platonism, and with a notion of logical time that does not introduce a “second” physical time. The paper is the fourth part of a four-paper project on the genealogical structure of logic, laws, and the universe.