In the Wake of the Moving-Spotlight: Surfing the Passage of Time with a Wave-Theoretic Hybrid Metaphysics

The Moving Spotlight Theory (MST) attempts to reconcile the eternalist picture of spacetime with the A-theorist’s commitment to a privileged, dynamically shifting present. Yet, MST faces longstanding challenges concerning metaphysical obscurity, motion, rate, and epistemic mismatch. Recent “wave-theoretic” successors developed by Kristie Miller and Nikk Effingham attempt to resolve these issues by reinterpreting the spotlight as an intrinsic structural feature of spacetime; either by identifying the present as a crest of causal manifestation, or as an occurrence of object constitution. This thesis argues that while both models improve upon the obscurity of MST’s metaphorical spotlight, neither fully satisfies a reasonable set of desiderata needed for a defensible account of temporal passage. After identifying this need, I develop a theory dubbed the Manifest Constitutional Wave (MCW), a hybrid wave model that integrates Miller’s causal manifestation framework with Effingham’s relativized constitutional ontology, while avoiding their respective liabilities. MCW grounds passage in a dual-aspect, neutral-monist modal field whose dispositional structure reciprocally manifests both causal efficacy and object-constitution synchronously and diachronically across Cauchy surfaces intrinsic to the spacetime manifold. This avoids the need for super-time, dissolves the motion and rate problems, blocks epistemic mismatch without invoking philosophical zombies, and prevents perspectival collapse by distinguishing global modal manifestation from relativized local phenomenology. By showing that neither existing wave theory meets all criteria for a viable successor to MST, and by demonstrating how MCW addresses the full taxonomy of desiderata and A-theoretic objections, my thesis concludes that the Manifest Constitutional Wave provides the most metaphysically coherent account of temporal passage available within a wave-theoretic, eternalist framework.