Becoming Past and Becoming Nothing

In a piece from April 2020 Bill asks,

Suppose that 
(1) X ceases to be temporally present by becoming wholly past. 
Does it follow that
(2) X ceases to exist?
Perhaps a spatial analog of (1) will help convey what I mean:
(1*) X ceases to be spatially present by becoming wholly elsewhere.
Now (1*) is not idiomatic English, but the thought is clear.  And the thought is trivially true. Suppose the boundaries of the spatially present are given by the dimensions of my lot.  So when I say 'here' I refer to the area of my lot together with all its sub-areas. Suppose a cat that is wholly within the boundaries of my lot trespasses onto your adjacent lot thereby becoming wholly elsewhere. Max was wholly here in my yard, but now he is wholly there in yours.  Spatial translations such as this one typically occur without prejudice to the existence of the moving item. Thus the cat does not cease to exist by moving from my property onto your property.  (Nor does the cat suffer any diminution of its degree of existence, if there are degrees of existence, or any change in  its mode of existence, if there are modes of existence.)

In short, Max the cat exists just as robustly in your yard as in mine.  Spatial translation is existence-neutral.  No one is a spatial presentist.  No one holds that all and only what exists here, exists.

Surely it is conceivable -- whether or not it is true -- that becoming wholly past is existence-neutral.  It is conceivable that something that becomes wholly past not be affected in its existence by its becoming wholly past.  On this understanding of (1), (1) does not straightaway -- i.e., immediately, without auxiliary premises -- entail (2).  (1) and the negation of (2) are logically consistent.

Now if you insist that (1) entails (2), then I will point out that this is so only if you assume that all and only the temporally present exists.

What to say?  Surely it is conceivable, Bill says, on the strength of his analogy between spatial and temporal translation, that becoming wholly past is existence-neutral. Well, we have arrived at a rock-bottom point of disagreement.  For me, 'becoming wholly past' is synonymous with 'ceasing to exist'.  Bill often speaks as if becoming wholly past were simply a matter of the passage of time.  'Annihilated by the passage of time' is a favourite phrase.  The Berlin Wall wasn't annihilated by the passage of time.  It took pickaxes, wrecking balls, and bulldozers.  Becoming wholly past is not a translation in time.  It's a process that takes place in the present whereby a (material) thing loses its integrity as an individual that stands out from a background of indiscriminated stuff and sinks back into that background.  'Past' here has less to do with time and more to do with existence, or rather its cessation.  So I find Bill's existence-neutrality of becoming past inconceivable.

What are we to make of Bill's analogy?  The temporal analogue of (1*) is,

(2*) X ceases to be temporally present by becoming wholly elsewhen.

But does this make any sense?  Everything is constantly becoming elsewhen as the clock ticks, but most things remain present.  So there is more to ceasing to exist than merely becoming elsewhen.  There are significant disanalogies between space and time.  A non-moving body can remain in the same place but not in the same time.  Translation in space necessarily involves translation in time: instantaneous displacement for a material body does not occur.  Suppose a body were to be translated forwards in time to the neighbouring century.  Its mass would vanish temporarily only to reappear one hundred years later, a violation of macroscopic mass conservation.  The problems of translation backwards in time are well known from fiction.  These are Moorean facts about time that Bill is ignoring. Or so it seems to me.

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