Neuroscientific Support for Existential Realism: Memory, Anticipation, and the Present

Existential Realism (ER) is a present-centered ontological framework that distinguishes between existence, restricted to the present, and reality, which spans the causally or informationally relevant past and future. This paper explores how core processes of human temporal cognition—memory, anticipation, and the perception of the present—support ER’s framework. Insights from cognitive neuroscience suggest that the brain actively constructs time: the mind extends beyond the instantaneous now by retaining recent past information and projecting immediate future possibilities, all within a conscious “window of presence.” We examine how memory encodes past events both as physical traces in the brain and as reconstructed experiences in consciousness, how anticipation and predictive coding generate internal models of probable futures, and how our perception of ‘now’ is an integrated interval, not a dimensionless instant. These findings reinforce ER’s claim that only the present moment is ontologically existent, while past and future are real insofar as they are cognitively represented and integrated into the present through internal models. By linking philosophical ideas of time with empirical neuroscience, we show that human brains treat the past and future as parts of reality (through records and expectations) despite their lack of present existence. This interdisciplinary approach lends naturalistic support to Existential Realism’s view of time and offers a clearer understanding of why the present looms so large in experience even as past and future remain experientially—and ontologically—significant.