Against Dualisms: how Changism prevents metaphysical inflation
Dualisms don’t usually arrive wearing villain capes.
They arrive as “realism.” As seriousness. As the instinct that the most important part of reality must live behind what we see.
Then we commit the same category mistake again and again: we reify our ledgers.
We discover an ongoing territory (the world’s change), build ledgers to track it (concepts, measures, models, equations, laws), and then—forgetting we built them—treat the ledger as a second realm that runs the territory.
Changism blocks that move at the root.
Its starting picture is deliberately austere:
Reality is one ongoing field-in-act: a global field of change, not a frozen inventory.
“Things” are stable patterns of doing inside that field—knots of co-change that maintain themselves.
“Facts” are what you get when patterns meet, register, and leave marks that can stabilize and travel.
And tense is not three ontological regions. It’s three roles inside the ongoing field: records under maintenance (past-role), ongoing activity (ongoing-role), and standing dispositions/potentials (future-role).
With that discipline in place, the classic dualisms start to look less like discoveries and more like ledger/territory confusions.
1) Mind / soul vs body: the “second substance” impulse
The oldest realism says: bodies are physical, minds (or souls) are something else.
And because they’re “something else,” we spend centuries trying to explain how two different kinds of being can touch without breaking the rules of each other.
Changism doesn’t solve the interaction problem. It dissolves the mistake that created it.
From a Changist point of view, what you call “mind” is not a second substance floating beside the body.
It is a mode of organized activity inside a living pattern—especially the internal ledger a nervous system keeps while staying coupled to a changing world.
That internal ledger is not “merely subjective” in the dismissive sense.
It’s a real, physical, difference-making regime of registration, trace-making, prediction, and control—an evolved way of keeping an organism coherent through change.
Changism also notices something we often ignore: we already use two legitimate dashboards over the same flux.
There’s an external ledger: public clocks, instruments, measurements, repeatable counts.
And there’s an internal ledger: embodied timing, affective salience, ongoing prediction, attention, memory, anticipation.
These are not rival realms.
They are two interfaces to the same ongoing field of change.
So “mind vs body” becomes: a living body-pattern implementing a sophisticated internal registration-and-forecasting system, nested inside the same world it tracks.
No ghost required.
No metaphysical bridgework required.
2) Math vs bodies: Platonism by habit
Modern realism often swaps souls for numbers.
Bodies are down here. But the real reality is “up there”: mathematical objects, perfect forms, timeless structures.
The universe, on this picture, doesn’t just obey math.
It somehow runs on math.
Changism doesn’t deny that mathematics is astonishingly effective.
It denies the inflationary leap: the jump from “math describes patterns” to “math is the ontological engine.”
On the Changist view, mathematics is the evolving grammar of our ledgers.
It is an extraordinarily powerful language for writing compressions of stable relational patterns in the field.
But it remains a ledger.
The territory is the ongoing field of change itself: meetings, constraints, registrations, stabilizations, breakdowns, repairs.
Mathematical entities gain their bite by tracking difference-making structure—what can, in principle, show up in admissible interactions and leave stabilizable marks.
When math is treated as a second realm that creates the world, we’ve repeated the same error in cleaner clothes.
We’ve mistaken the best map for the source of the landscape.
3) Laws of physics vs bodies: rulebooks that supposedly govern reality
A subtler dualism says: matter is brute and local, but laws are abstract and global.
Bodies are “down here,” bumping around.
Laws are “up there,” commanding what’s allowed.
The world becomes a kind of puppet show, with invisible strings called Laws.
Changism flips the dependency.
The primary reality is the field’s ongoing constraint-structure as it is realized in actual interactions.
“Laws,” in the human sense, are compressed ledger-regularities: exportable summaries and mathematical descriptions of how patterns tend to co-change under repeatable conditions.
Think of it this way: a “law” with no world is like a rulebook with no game. It doesn’t do anything.
Its only grip is through the territory: through what actually happens when structures meet, register, and stabilize outcomes.
So the clean Changist translation is:
Not “laws vs matter.” But constraint-talk vs world-talk.
Constraint-talk is our high-level ledger for the field’s repeatabilities.
World-talk is the field doing what it does: change, patterning, interaction, and record-making.
One territory. Many ledgers. No second realm.
4) Time dualism: the most persistent reification of all
Now we reach the dualism that hides inside everyday grammar.
We say “in time” as if time were a container. We picture events as beads on a string.
We talk as if the past has vanished into a vault, the future is waiting in a hallway, and the present is a moving spotlight.
This is time dualism: Time on one side, events on the other.
Time becomes the stage. Events become the actors.
And the stage starts to look more real than the actors, because the stage is what “allows” anything to happen.
Changism calls this out as the purest form of ledger reification. Because time, as we actually use it, is a ledger built out of change.
Clocks don’t reveal a pre-existing medium called Time. Clocks are repeatable changes we use to count other changes.
This is the Changist rule that cuts through the fog: We do not live in time; we measure change with time.
And from that, a second rule follows:
Measures never outrank what they measure.
If time is your measure of change, time cannot be the thing that makes change possible.
Change is already there—ontologically basic. Time is the bookkeeping we layer on top.
How clocks expose the mistake
Look closely at what every clock needs, no matter the technology.
A clock requires a repeater: something that cycles or ticks in a stable, countable way.
It requires a counter: a way to accumulate those repeats into an ordered sequence.
And it requires a rule: a convention for how those counts map onto durations (“seconds,” “hours,” etc.).
That’s it: Repeater → Counter → Rule.
Notice what’s missing. There is no ingredient called “Time-stuff.”
There is only a carefully engineered pattern of change, made regular enough to serve as a comparison standard.
So when time gets treated as an independent arena in which change occurs, we’ve upgraded the clock’s output into a metaphysical substance.
We’ve mistaken the ledger for a second territory.
What tense really tracks in Changism
Tense-talk feels like it must refer to different kinds of being.
Past: no longer real.
Present: uniquely real.
Future: not yet real (or already real, depending on your favorite philosophy).
Changism treats this as another case of mixing levels.
Tense is not a set of three cosmic zones. It’s three roles played by structures inside one ongoing field:
Past-role is record-structure. Not “the past realm,” but records under ongoing maintenance: traces, memories, inscriptions, fossils, archives, scars, updated states in systems. The past is how the field carries its own history forward.
Ongoing-role is active interaction. It’s where patterns are meeting, registering, and writing new marks. This is not a magical knife-edge “present.” It’s the active interface where new constraints and traces are being produced.
Future-role is dispositional structure. Not “the future region,” but standing potentials constrained by current configuration: what can happen next, what is likely, what is blocked, what is permitted. The future is real as constraint and affordance, not as a pre-existing archive of already-finished events.
This is why Changism is naturally anti-dualist here. It doesn’t need to pick between “only the present exists” and “everything exists eternally.” It doesn’t need to inflate reality into multiple temporal realms.
It needs one thing only: the ongoing field of change, plus the internal and external ledgers by which patterns keep track, leave records, and project possibilities.
Why time dualism keeps tempting us
Because the ledger is unbelievably useful. Time-coordinates let us coordinate. Clocks let us engineer. Equations let us predict.
So we slide from “useful” to “fundamental.” We forget the direction of dependence.
Changism insists we keep the dependency honest: Change is ontologically basic. Patterns are what exist as stable doings.
Records are how the field holds onto outcomes. Dispositions are how the field is poised toward what’s next.
Time is a ledger we build from repeatable change to compare other changes.
That’s the antidote. No second realm. No metaphysical inflation. No container-time running the universe like a conveyor belt.
Closing synthesis: one field, many ledgers
Dualisms multiply when we promote our ledgers into extra ontologies.
Mind becomes a ghostly substance. Math becomes a timeless heaven. Laws become abstract governors. Time becomes a cosmic container.
Changism refuses the promotion.
It’s a realist process monism: one ongoing field-in-act, within which different kinds of stable patterns do different kinds of work.
“Minds” are internal ledgers inside organism-patterns.
“Math” is ledger-grammar for compressing relational structure.
“Laws” are ledger-regularities that summarize constraint-patterns in the field.
“Time” is ledger bookkeeping for comparing change, not a stage that makes change possible.
That’s why Changism is not merely anti-dualist as an opinion. It’s anti-dualist by construction.
It keeps reality lean, continuous, and doing what it has always been doing: changing—while we build better and better ledgers to keep up.