I've been working on this paper on and off for the last year or so, and I think I want to say something about what I'll post here in the paper.

Here's an argument against growing block (the view that the past and present exist, but the future does not):

(1) If growing block is true, then we don't know that we're present.
(2) We do know that we're present.
(3) Therefore, growing block is not true.

Support for (1): According to (the targeted version of) growing block, nothing about a moment changes when the moment goes from being present to being past. It merely gains a relation of precedence to some future slices. (This is C.D. Broad's view, roughly.) So, imagine some past person, like Caesar, at some past moment in his life, t. Imagine that at t, Caesar thought something like "Here I am in the present moment." According to the growing blocker, it is true (now) that [Caesar is thinking "Here I am in the present moment" at t]. When t was the present moment, or on the growing edge of the block, Caesar thought something true. But now t is in the past. So, Caesar thinks something false. Upshot: why should we think we're in any better position? How do we know that 2008 isn't sometime thousands of years in the past? It seems like the growing blocker has to say that we don't. For a more detailed version of this argument, see Merricks, "Good-bye Growing Block", which is in one of the Oxford Studies in Metaphysics volumes.

Here's a reply to that argument given by Peter Forrest:

Forrest denies (1) from the argument above. He claims that life and consciousness can only occur on the growing edge of reality, or the present moment. So, since we know we're alive and conscious, we know we're in the present moment.

I have one argument against this "dead past" hypothesis, but I won't go into it here.

Forrest talks about life and consciousness being "by-products of the causal frisson between being and non-being", so that they can only occur on the growing edge.

If Forrest can make this work, I think it may be a way for him to get out of my argument that I mentioned above. But, I have two problems with it.

A. It sounds spooky, and I don't like it.
B. It seems weird that he can talk about causal frisson between being and non-being. What sorts of causal relationships can things which do not exist enter into?

I know the presentist has something to say about this with regard to past objects (to get out of the cross-time relations objections to presentism).

Finally, the point of this post: does anyone know of any literature that may be good for me to look at with regards to (B)? I suppose the presentist stuff about cross-time relations would be good, but is there anything...better?