Temporal Gradient of Being

Existential Realism (ER) establishes a foundational distinction between Existence (the indexical, present, and empirical) and Reality (the structural, informational causal manifold). This framework promises to navigate the longstanding deadlock between Presentism and Eternalism in the philosophy of time, but it introduces two critical ambiguities. First, the ontological status of the past: Does a past event cease to be real if its physical "traces" vanish due to entropy? Second, the ontological status of the future: Does assigning a "gradient of reality" based on causal determinacy risk reducing reality to mere predictability (i.e. conflating ontology with epistemology)? This paper addresses both challenges by rigorously defining Reality as information within the causal manifold of the universe. It argues that the past is safeguarded through the concept of Scrambled Reality, which preserves an event’s reality as an irreducible informational residue even when observable traces fade. It further contends that the future’s gradient of being is an ontological gradient of potentiality, restricted only to fundamental indeterminacies (e.g. quantum collapses) rather than our epistemic uncertainty about classically deterministic chaos. In doing so, ER offers a coherent alternative to standard Presentism and Eternalism by affirming genuine temporal becoming and free will, without rendering the future a complete fiction. The result is a robust, non-reductionist theory of time that clearly distinguishes between ontology and epistemology in both temporal directions.