Changism: Beyond Time as a Dimension

Bringing Time Down to Earth with the Philosophy of Change

Sergio Montes Navarro

46 min read

·

Sep 22, 2024

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Myth of Time as a Dimension and the Reality of Change

Part I: Unmasking Time

Chapter 1: Time Is Not What You Think It Is

Chapter 2: Cyclical Change and Temporal Intuition

Chapter 3: What Is Change? — From Substance to Pattern

Chapter 4: The Experience of Change — Consciousness, Duration and the Illusion of Flowing in Time

Chapter 5: Causality and Freedom in a World of Change

Chapter 6: Einstein Reinterpreted — The Relativity of Change

Chapter 7: Relational Quantum Mechanics and the Rhythm of Change

Chapter 8: The Universe as Becoming

Appendix A: Addressing Common Objections to Changism

Introduction: The Myth of Time as a Dimension and the Reality of Change

Most of us never question time. We grow up measuring it, budgeting it, “saving” it, “wasting” it. We watch it pass. We feel it “flow.” We speak as if the past is behind us, the future ahead, and the present a razor-thin edge of reality that keeps slipping away.

And we inherit a powerful picture: time as the stage on which everything happens — a dimension like space, a container, a cosmic highway with events arranged along it.

But what if that picture has it backwards?

What if time isn’t the deep fabric of reality at all — not a substance, not a river, not a fourth dimension we drift through — but something we use to keep track of what’s more basic?

Changism begins with a simple but radical claim:

Change is fundamental. Time is the bookkeeping.

Time is real, yes — but real in the way a map is real. A map isn’t the territory; it’s a disciplined way of representing the territory. Likewise, time isn’t the engine of the universe; it’s one of our most powerful tools for describing and coordinating change.

That distinction matters. Because saying “time is a tool” can sound like we’re saying “time is made up.” Changism does not mean reality depends on us, or that without humans there would be no structure. Stars would still burn, planets would still orbit, particles would still interact, lives would still unfold. We don’t invent the world’s change. What we invent are the conventions that let us compare changes: clocks, units, calendars, coordinate systems, and the language that stitches these comparisons into a story.

Think of it this way: whenever you say “that took ten seconds,” you’ve already made three choices — often without noticing.

1. You picked a clock (a counted process): a pendulum swing, a quartz vibration, a cesium transition, a heartbeat, a sunrise.

2. You picked events to mark (what counts as the start and the finish).

3. You agreed on a conversion rule (how many of those ticks equal a “second,” “minute,” “day,” and so on).

This is the “time-talk contract” Changism insists we make explicit: name what is being counted, name what is being compared, name the events that anchor the comparison. Once you do that, “time” stops behaving like a mysterious cosmic fluid and becomes what it has always secretly been: a relational ledger of change — a record of how one process paces another.

So we are not beings “in time,” carried from past to future like passengers on a train. We are patterns of activity inside an ever-shifting web of transformations. The world is not a static block we move through, and it is not a timeline that flows. The world is happening: locally, unevenly, and with structure. Time is what we write down when we compare those happenings.

This isn’t New Age poetry dressed up as philosophy. Changism is a rigorous stance that treats sloppy metaphysics as a source of needless confusion in science. Modern physics itself keeps warning us that the old picture of time as a universal background is suspect. Relativity shows that clocks don’t magically agree, that “now” doesn’t come stamped on the cosmos, and that how fast or slow changes happen depends on motion, gravity, and the path taken. Quantum theory shows that the crisp facts we like to talk about are tied to co-changes (interactions and registrations), not floating freely as perfectly defined properties. And ordinary experience shows that “the present” isn’t a thing you can hold; it’s a viewpoint that shifts as the world updates.

Changism doesn’t reject these lessons. It organizes them.

It also reconnects us with an older wisdom that modern language often buries: Heraclitus’s insight that everything is in flux, the Stoic sense of an internally ordered cosmos (logos), and the Buddhist intuition that things are what they are through relations and conditions, not through isolated self-subsistence. Changism is not “nothing is real.” It’s the opposite: reality is intensely real — but it is real as process, as transformation, as dependence and constraint. What “is” is never separable from what it is doing, what it has done (in records that persist), and what it can do next (in dispositions that constrain the future).

In this first article, I’ll lay out the foundations of Changism in a way that doesn’t require a degree in physics or a background in philosophy. We’ll start by exposing the illusion of time as a cosmic container — how our language and our measuring tools seduce us into reifying a bookkeeping system into a substance. Then we’ll show how change — not time — underlies everything we associate with temporal flow. From there we’ll explore causality, freedom, and what it means for something to be real in a universe that is not built out of static “things,” but out of structured transformation.

This won’t be a new “model of the universe” in the usual sense. It’s a shift in stance: a way of seeing that makes time less mystical and reality more solid. Time becomes a measure, not a monster. And change — ceaseless, local, structured, irreducible — takes its rightful place as the core of ontology.

Welcome to Changism: not a philosophy of time, but a philosophy of transformation.

Chapter 1: Time Is Not What You Think It Is

We live inside a forest of clocks.

Wristwatches, phone alarms, school bells, work calendars, transit timetables — tiny machines and social rituals that keep whispering the same story: time is a thing that moves. It “passes.” It “flows.” We “save” it, “spend” it, “run out” of it — as if it were a substance sloshing through the universe.

But when you try to point to time itself, it slips through your fingers. You can point to a clock. You can point to a calendar. You can point to an aging face, a melting ice cube, a growing tree. What you cannot point to is a river called Time that makes these things happen.

So let’s start with a clean claim — simple, but unforgiving:

Time is not a thing. Time is a way of comparing change.

This isn’t wordplay. It’s a correction. We don’t discover “ten seconds” the way we discover a mountain. We construct “ten seconds” by choosing a process to count (a clock), choosing events to mark (start/stop), and choosing a convention for converting that count into units we agree to share.

A “second” is not a fluid that flows. It is a tick-count in a chosen rhythm.

That’s why the best way to talk about time is to make the contract explicit:

• What process are we counting? (pendulum swings, cesium vibrations, heartbeats, Earth rotations)

• What are the events being compared? (the instant the race begins; the instant it ends)

• What rule converts the count into a unit? (this many ticks = one second, one minute, one day)

Do that, and time stops looking like a cosmic ingredient. It becomes what it has always been in practice: a relational ledger of change — a disciplined way to say how one process paces another.

The Present Is Not a Portal

People often try to rescue the old picture with a simpler one: “Only the present exists.”

Changism agrees with the impulse (don’t reify an invisible timeline), but not with the conclusion (don’t shrink reality into a razor-thin now). “Only the present exists” is a trap phrase. It tends to smuggle in exactly what it claims to reject: a privileged, universal “master now,” sliding forward through an otherwise unreal past and future.

The present is not a glowing dot traveling down a line. It’s not a cosmic portal through which reality enters existence.

In Changism, past / present / future are not three regions of a timeline. They are three roles played by structures in the ongoing world. Same world, three roles:

1) The present-role: ongoing activity (meetings).
What we call “present” is the world in the act — interactions occurring, processes unfolding, systems coupling, things happening. This is not a moving slice. It’s simply the fact that reality is active rather than frozen.

2) The past-role: maintained records that encode earlier activity.
The “past” is not a ghost-realm behind us. It is what the world is still carrying — traces, marks, memories, fossils, scars, receipts, photographs, tree rings, radiation arriving from distant stars, files on a hard drive, habits in a nervous system. None of these is “the past itself.” They are ongoing structures whose form only makes sense because of earlier processes. Past-truth is grounded in records under maintenance: patterns that persist and constrain what is being the case.

3) The future-role: ongoing dispositions and constraints that shape admissible continuations.
Likewise, the “future” is not a hidden realm waiting to arrive. It is the set of real constraints and powers already in play — the tension in a drawn bow, the stored chemical potential in a battery, the momentum of a moving train, the stress distribution in a bridge, the dispositions of a living body, the rules of a game, the commitments of a promise. Future-truth is grounded in standing dispositions/potentials: what the ongoing configuration makes possible, likely, forbidden, or inevitable.

So when you say “the past is gone” and “the future isn’t here,” you’re half-right in a way that misleads. What’s right: there is no need to posit a timeline-substance containing “past-stuff” and “future-stuff.” What’s misleading: it makes past and future sound unreal, when in practice they are everywhere — as records and dispositions embedded in the present activity of the world.

Changism is not presentism. It’s beyond it. It refuses the master-now, and it refuses to impoverish reality by pretending records and potentials are second-class.

Not “Things Change,” but “Change Things”

Here’s the deeper shift, and it’s easy to miss because grammar fights it.

We say “things change,” as if “things” come first and “change” is something that happens to them. Changism flips the priority:

Change is not what happens to things. Change is what makes things.

A “thing” is a temporarily stable pattern in a stream of activity: a whirlpool that holds its shape while water passes through it; a flame that persists by consuming fuel; a living organism that maintains itself by constant exchange; a society that exists as repeated practices and institutions.

You are not a static object that undergoes time like weather. You are a continuity of self-maintaining change — a pattern that holds together through transformation. Identity is not the absence of change; it is a particular style of change.

This is why Changism can sound severe — “everything changes” — and yet be strangely comforting. It doesn’t dissolve the world. It explains how stability is possible without pretending that stability requires timeless substance.

Why We Got Confused

If time is a ledger, why does it feel like a river?

Because our minds are prediction engines. We track change, compress it, store traces of it, and project likely continuations. That inner machinery — memory, anticipation, attention — creates a powerful sense of “flow.” Language then hardens that sense into metaphors: “behind,” “ahead,” “time flying,” “time dragging,” “time running out.”

Metaphors aren’t evil. They’re efficient. But when we forget they’re metaphors, we start treating bookkeeping as physics.

Physics can accidentally reinforce the confusion. Many equations place time in the same position as a spatial coordinate, which tempts the imagination: “Maybe time is literally a dimension like space.” Relativity then delivers the punchline that this imagination tries to dodge: different observers do not share a single cosmic ‘now.’ There is no universal clock ticking beneath the universe. Clocks are physical processes; they register change along their own histories, and those histories can differ.

Relativity doesn’t make time unreal. It makes time local, relational, and clock-bound — exactly what Changism expects once you stop treating time as a substance.

Toward a Clearer View

In Changism, we begin not with time, but with change — the only thing that truly is. From this foundation, we can reframe physics, philosophy, and even the experience of being alive.

“Time” reappears — not as a mysterious dimension that causes events, but as a useful, disciplined practice:

• choose a stable rhythm,

• count it,

• compare it to other rhythms,

• record the relations.

And once you stop demanding that the universe contain a master timeline, a lot of conceptual fog lifts. The present becomes what it actually is: ongoing activity. The past becomes what it actually is: records that remain. The future becomes what it actually is: dispositions and constraints already at work.

Time, then, is not the engine of becoming. It is derived. It is how we describe the unfolding of what exists — not a thing that causes it, but the ledger we keep because everything becomes.

And this shift — from time to change — changes everything.

Chapter 2: Cyclical Change and Temporal Intuition

Before time was a concept, there was rhythm. The earliest humans did not measure time with clocks — they lived by the repetition of natural patterns: the rising and setting of the Sun, the phases of the Moon, the migration of animals, the return of the rains. These recurring changes are not only how we first experienced time — they are, in a deep sense, where time itself comes from.

We often speak of time as if it were a river that flows independently of anything else. But in truth, our ability to even imagine time depends entirely on observing regular, repeating changes in the world around us. Time, in this sense, is a measure of cyclicality — a way of describing how patterns repeat and evolve, not a background in which they occur.

From Celestial Cycles to Clocks

Consider what we call a “day.” It is not a unit that exists in nature by itself. It is a measurement derived from one full rotation of the Earth relative to the Sun — a cycle that produces light and dark, activity and rest. Likewise, a year is not an ontological unit drifting through the cosmos. It is a complete orbit of the Earth around the Sun, marked by changing temperatures, shifting constellations, and seasonal transformations.

These patterns gave rise to the first calendars and agricultural systems, and eventually to our modern conception of time. Time, as we know it, emerged from watching the sky.

Even our most precise modern clocks rely on repetition. A second is currently defined as 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation produced by the transition between two energy levels of the cesium‑133 atom. That’s not a number someone just invented — it’s how often a particular physical change occurs. Our most sophisticated timekeeping systems are, at their core, refinements of observing cycles.

Nature Breathes in Cycles

The universe is saturated with cyclical processes — and life itself is no exception. Nearly all organisms operate according to circadian rhythms: internal biological cycles of approximately 24 hours that govern sleep, metabolism, hormone release, and cognition. These rhythms are not imposed from outside but emerge from deep evolutionary entanglement with the cycles of light and darkness, warmth and cold.

Plants follow seasonal cycles of germination, growth, flowering, and decay — all influenced by light, temperature, and the surrounding web of changes. Animals migrate, hibernate, or reproduce according to lunar phases or solar cycles. Even in cosmology, we see pulsars rotating with clock‑like regularity, and binary stars orbiting one another in strict intervals.

The Moon pulls the tides into daily oscillations. The Sun follows an 11‑year cycle of activity, influencing Earth’s magnetosphere. These recurring patterns are not just useful — they are foundational. They are the scaffolding of change upon which we hang our concept of time.

Time as the Grammar of Change

What, then, is time?

Time is not a force. It does not “pass” or “flow.” It does not cause anything. Rather, it is a grammatical structure that we have invented to describe how change happens — especially when that change recurs.

To use an analogy: if change is the music, time is the partiture. The partiture doesn’t cause the notes — it organizes them. In the same way, time is not the cause of change. It is a system we created to count and coordinate the visible pulses of change, to make sense of the rhythms in nature and in ourselves.

From this perspective, the so‑called “arrow of time” isn’t something built into reality. It’s a way of speaking about the fact that changes tend to unfold in consistent, directional sequences — seeds become trees, not the other way around. But this directionality comes from the internal structure of change, not from time itself.

Predictive Power through Pattern Recognition

What makes time valuable is its predictive usefulness. Once we recognize a pattern — like the length of a day or the cycle of the seasons — we can synchronize our behavior to it. We know when to plant, when to harvest, when to rest. In modern science, we use time to coordinate events, run experiments, and send satellites into orbit with astonishing precision.

But all of this is only possible because the world changes in regular ways. We do not measure time itself. We measure how things change, and we call that time.

Changism emphasizes this point: change is the fundamental reality, and time is our abstraction for keeping track of its rhythm. It is a map, not a territory; a system of measurement, not a dimension of being.

Chapter 3: What Is Change? — From Substance to Pattern

We live our entire lives immersed in change — yet few of us stop to ask what change actually is. We talk about things changing, as if change were a property added onto otherwise stable entities. But what if we have it backwards? Changism proposes a radical inversion: change is not something that happens to things — change is what makes things possible. It is not that “things change,” but rather that change things. This reversal is not just poetic. It is metaphysical. And it is central to understanding the world as it is, not as we’ve been conditioned to think it is.

Beyond the Present Moment

Changism begins with a simple but profound observation: reality is a continuous process of transformation. What we call the “past” is the trace of changes that have already occurred, while the “future” consists of unrealized potentialities — possibilities that may emerge through further transformation. But the present is not a thin slice of time moving forward like a conveyor belt. It is not a moment at all, in the conventional sense. It is a label we give to the active field of ongoing change — what ancient thinkers called the eternal now, not because it is frozen, but because it is always unfolding. In this “eternal present,” change is not enclosed within time — rather, time is derived from how change happens.

Change Is Not in Time — Time Is in Change

When a seed sprouts into a plant, or when electrons jump energy levels, these are not events happening in time. They are instances of transformation, and the concept of “time” arises only when we want to measure and coordinate these transformations. Modern physics already hints at this. Clocks don’t measure a flowing substance called time — they track repetitive change. Whether it’s a swinging pendulum, a rotating planet, or the vibrations of a cesium atom, all timekeeping reduces to counting cycles of change. Without change, there is no time to measure.

Thus, change is ontologically prior. Time, like the metric system, is a relational framework — real and useful, but not fundamental. To paraphrase: time is to change what meters are to distance.

Change as Cosmos: Not Chaos, but Pattern

But what is change itself? Changism defines change as the ongoing differentiation and reconfiguration of reality. Change is not an event that begins or ends; it is a continuum — unfolding in lawful, patterned ways. Stars form and die, organisms evolve, particles interact — all without stepping outside the domain of continuous transformation. Importantly, this doesn’t imply chaos. The universe operates within an internal logic — what the Stoics called logos, and what modern physics expresses through laws, symmetries, and conservation principles. These do not impose change; they structure it.

From this view, change is not a disruption of being. It is being. There is no static background of “existence” that occasionally shifts — the cosmos itself is a flow, and every apparent object is a stable pattern within that flow.

What “Things” Are: Patterns, Not Substances

Here, Changism breaks from Aristotelian metaphysics. There are no eternal essences behind the appearances. What we call a “thing” — a table, a person, a planet — is a coherent pattern of change, like a whirlpool in a river. The whirlpool persists for a while, but it is never made of the same water — it is the pattern that stays, not the substance.

This insight dissolves the traditional question, “What changes?” The answer is: change itself changes, and in doing so, it brings forth the appearances of things. What we treat as stable objects are recurrent forms of change — processes that persist by renewing themselves moment by moment. Alfred North Whitehead called these stable patterns “societies” — clusters of events that inherit structure from previous ones. Your body, for example, is not a static object, but a cascade of metabolic, cognitive, and physical changes that maintain coherence. Identity, from this view, is not violated by change — it is produced by it.

Relational Being: The Stoic and Quantum Insight

This understanding is reinforced by both ancient and modern thought. The Stoics argued that all existence is corporeal — but not static. Their universe was a single, dynamic substance, animated by logos, and continuously transformed. Modern relational quantum mechanics echoes this: particles are not absolute entities, but relational events. They exist only in interaction, only as change that relates.

From a Changist lens, reality is a web of interlocking processes, not a mosaic of static parts. Individuals are emergent — like quasi‑particles in physics or whirlpools in a stream — defined by their patterns and relations, not by independent essence.

Persistence Without Substances

A common objection arises: if everything is change, how can anything persist? Changism replies: persistence is not the absence of change — it is structured continuity through change. Like a cyclist balancing by constant micro‑adjustments, or a flame maintaining its shape by constant combustion, stability is a process. Enduring forms are dynamically stable, not inert.

Identity, then, is not tied to substance, but to pattern and coherence. This reframes puzzles like the Ship of Theseus: we care about continuity of form and function, not sameness of matter. Changism affirms this fluid conception — a thing is “the same” as long as the pattern it expresses persists.

The Final Reversal: Change Things

In the end, Changism offers a new metaphysical grammar. It doesn’t just say “things change.” It says: change things — as a verb. Change is not a property added to being. It is the process that generates being. Like a dance with no dancer apart from the dancing, or a melody with no note apart from its movement, reality is process all the way down. Objects, identities, and boundaries emerge as semi‑stable forms in the greater pattern of change.

Change as Primary Reality

To ask “What changes?” is to impose an unnecessary frame. The more fitting question is: How does change configure itself into the appearances of things? In Changism, the answer lies in pattern, relation, and structure — not substance. There is no need for a prime mover, no temporal dimension “through” which events flow. There is only ongoing, lawful transformation.

By replacing the static assumptions of substance metaphysics with the dynamic intelligibility of pattern and process, Changism reveals a world not of timeless truths, but of eternal becoming — a cosmos in motion, intelligible not by what it is, but by how it changes.

Chapter 4: The Experience of Change — Consciousness, Duration and the Illusion of Flowing in Time

We do not merely witness change — we live it. Yet our experience of change does not come to us as isolated events or abstract measurements. It arrives in a seamless stream: music unfolding note by note, thoughts forming across breath and memory, gestures rippling into meaning. This deeply intuitive sense of the flow of reality is at odds with how time is described in physics — as a coordinate in a four‑dimensional block. So which view is more real?

Changism offers a synthesis: it agrees with our lived experience that reality is dynamic, but explains this dynamism not as a product of an illusory “time flow,” but as the mind’s immediate experience of real, ontological change. The sense of passage is not delusion. It is the subjective expression of the cosmos’s intrinsic transformation — change consciously perceived.

Bergson’s Duration: Against the Spatialization of Time

Henri Bergson famously distinguished between two radically different notions of time: the measurable, divisible time of science, and the duration (durée) of lived experience. While physics breaks time into discrete units — seconds, milliseconds, Planck intervals — Bergson argued that consciousness experiences time as a continuous unfolding, not as a sequence of frozen moments.

Duration, for Bergson, is not “in” time — it is the flow of experience itself. When we listen to music, we don’t hear each note as a separate data point. We feel the melody as an interwoven, evolving movement. The past resonates in the present, and the future’s anticipation shades our perception now. In this way, duration is qualitative, creative, and irreducible to clock time.

Changism takes this insight seriously. What we call “temporal flow” is not the movement of time — it is the subjective experience of participating in change. The mind does not perceive instants. It perceives patterns of transformation: the fading of what was, the emergence of what is, and the shaping of what might be. This isn’t illusion. It is change becoming conscious of itself.

The Block Universe vs. Lived Change

Einstein’s theory of relativity, and its expression in Minkowski spacetime, led many physicists to endorse the block universe model. In this view, all events — past, present, and future — coexist in a four‑dimensional continuum. There is no real “flow”; our sense of time passing is, they say, a psychological artifact.

But this model faces deep philosophical problems. If all events are fixed, how can dynamic processes — like perception, decision, memory, or even neural activity — occur? Some appeal to brain processes to explain the illusion of flow, yet if those processes are also frozen in the block, we are left with an illusion explaining an illusion, in infinite regress. Nothing moves — not even the neurons that supposedly create the impression of movement.

Changism breaks this deadlock. It rejects the static ontology of the block universe. Instead, it affirms: there is one present, eternally unfolding, and what we experience as flow is the structure of change itself — not an illusion, but the texture of real becoming.

Changism vs. Presentism and Relativity

Presentism — the view that only the present exists — comes closer to our lived sense of dynamism. But critics argue that it conflicts with relativity, especially the relativity of simultaneity. Two observers in different frames may disagree on what is “now.” Does this mean multiple presents exist?

Changism dissolves the confusion. It interprets these disagreements as differences in the rate and locality of change, not as ontologically distinct “nows.” Every observer measures change relative to their own process — their own motion, their own local rhythm. Time, in this view, is not a dimension but a system we devise to measure change. Observers are not embedded in different presents, but in different rates of change unfolding within the same universal present.

This interpretation aligns with the insights of Carlo Rovelli, who treats time as relational rather than absolute, and Hilary Putnam’s work on the perspectival nature of temporal statements. Not by embracing the block, but by reframing its geometry as a relational map of change, not a frozen landscape.

Husserl’s Time‑Consciousness: The Flow of Awareness

Edmund Husserl analyzed how we experience what we call time. He proposed that consciousness structures experience through three interwoven components:

• Retention: the just‑past, still echoing in awareness.

• Primal Impression: the vivid immediacy of the present.

• Protention: the anticipation of what is about to come.

This triadic structure is not a metaphor — it is how the mind assembles the continuity of experience. Without retention, there would be no melody — only isolated sounds. Without protention, no sentence would make sense. Each moment is not a point, but a horizon, stretched by what has been and what could be.

Changism embraces this model and gives it ontological depth. These structures are not illusions produced by a linear time. They are how consciousness tracks real change. We don’t perceive the passage of time. We perceive the passage of change, organized by memory, attention, and anticipation.

The Phenomenology of the Global Field of Change

From a Changist standpoint, there is only one ontological frame: the global field of change. This does not mean a frozen “now” or a fleeting instant. It is an ongoing process— a self‑renewing field in which change manifests.

When we say “time passes,” we are expressing how change flows through us, and how we interpret that flow through memory and expectation. The illusion, if there is one, is not the feeling of change — it is the projection of that change into an imagined “timeline.”

Changism resolves the paradox raised by J. M. E. McTaggart — that time both must and cannot pass — by removing the timeline itself. There is no sequence of temporal objects moving past us. There is only a cosmos in motion, and we are part of its pulse.

Consciousness in the Dance of Change

Our experience of time is not an illusion, nor a window into a four‑dimensional block. It is our cognitive participation in a universe that changes. Bergson called this duration. Husserl called it internal time‑consciousness. Changism calls it what it is: the subjective face of objective change.

Rather than attempting to reduce experience to spacetime geometry, Changism invites us to understand experience as the mind’s resonance with the ceaseless creativity of reality. In this view, every moment is not a point in time but a pattern of transformation — one in which memory, sensation, and anticipation compose a living awareness of change.

We are not travelers moving through time. We are nested processes within the field of change, each of us a localized rhythm in the greater symphony. The perception of passage is not separate from the cosmos — it is the cosmos, reflected in us.

Chapter 5: Causality and Freedom in a World of Change

If the past no longer exists, and the future has not yet come to be — how can we speak of causality at all? Doesn’t causality require a “before” and “after”? How can one thing cause another if there is no timeline to place them on?

This is one of the most intuitive objections to Changism. But it stems from a misunderstanding — not just of Changism, but of causality itself. What Changism proposes is not a denial of causality, but a re‑centering of it within a dynamic, living universe — one where cause and effect are not frozen on a timeline, but expressions of the unfolding pattern of change.

The Modern View of Causality: Chains and Choice

In modern philosophy and science, causality is often imagined mechanistically: event A causes event B, like billiard balls colliding. This Newtonian picture was imported into theories of human freedom as well. Thinkers like Daniel Dennett and Harry Frankfurt developed compatibilism, the idea that even in a deterministic world, we can be free — as long as we act from internal desires, not external coercion.

In this model, freedom means being the right kind of link in the causal chain — not a broken link, but a rational one. Yet this still treats the universe as a machine and freedom as a kind of internal machinery. The problem? It rests on a static framework — a block of events governed by abstract laws, where causality is something imposed from outside, and “freedom” is redefined to fit the machine.

The Stoic View: Causality as Organic Order

The Stoics offer a very different vision.

For them, the universe is not a mechanism — it is a living whole, structured by a rational, immanent order they called logos. Everything that happens is a modification of a single, unified cosmos. But this order is not imposed from without. It arises from within — from the very corporeal interactions that make up reality.

They called this dynamic coherence heimarmenē — not a rigid fate, but a relational unfolding, like a tightly woven tapestry where each thread conditions the others. Chrysippus compared it to a rolling cylinder: its motion is caused not by a single push, but by the interaction between its shape and the push. This model doesn’t negate causality — it naturalizes it. Causality is not a line on a timeline. It is the pattern of change itself, unfolding according to structure and relation.

Rethinking Freedom: Mastery Within Change

If causality is internal and organic, what does that mean for freedom?

The Stoics offered an answer: freedom is not doing whatever you want — it’s understanding what is happening and acting in harmony with it. True freedom is assent — the capacity to align your judgment with the logos, the way of things. This is not fatalism. It is mastery: governing your inner world in concert with the outer one.

They called this inner faculty the hegemonikon — the ruling principle. When it sees clearly and assents wisely, you are free. When it errs in judgment, you are enslaved by passions and false impressions. Responsibility, then, is not about metaphysical free will. It is therapeutic: it’s about clarifying perception and correcting judgment.

Changism inherits this view. In a world made of change, freedom is not exemption from change — it is the intelligent participation in it.

Causality Without Time? Yes — If You See Clearly

So what about the original worry? Without a “past” and “future,” how can causality work?

Here’s the answer: causality doesn’t need a timeline. It needs change with structure.

Even in physics, causal relations are local. The cause doesn’t come from “the past” as a place — it arises from prior configurations of the system, within the current unfolding of change. What we call “effects” are just further differentiations of the present, conditioned by what has already occurred — changes that have left their trace, not as ghostly “past events,” but as real, present conditions.

Causality is simply the orderly pattern of how change propagates. The present is not a frozen slice between past and future — it is a living, dynamic field where causes and effects are the process of change.

Freedom, then, is not “outside” of causality. It is inside the logos, the living reason of the world. You are not free despite the causal structure — you are free within it, by mastering how you relate to it.

The Dance of Causality

Modern compatibilism tried to make peace between freedom and determinism by changing the definition of freedom. The Stoics — and now Changism — offer a deeper resolution: causality is not alien, and freedom is not rebellion. Both are aspects of the same rational flow.

Changism affirms that:

• Change is Fundamental — not events on a timeline, but a living pattern of unfolding.

• Causality is Structured Change — not imposed laws, but relational coherence.

• Freedom is Participatory Mastery — not escaping causes, but wisely assenting to how change unfolds.

We are not trapped in a machine, nor puppets of time. We are nodes of change in a self‑renewing cosmos. And the more clearly we see this, the more freely we can dance in step with the world’s rhythm.

Chapter 6: Einstein Reinterpreted — Relativity Without the Stage

By now Changism has made two moves that matter here.

First, we cleaned up our time-talk: “time” is a ledger over change, not a thing that flows.
Second, we cleaned up our equations: t is a parameter we use to index change, not a mysterious dimension we move through.

This chapter is where that grammar meets relativity.

In the standard story, relativity sounds like time turns weird: it dilates, it slows down, it bends near black holes. On the Changist reading, nothing mystical happens to a substance called time. What changes is simpler — and more physical:

• how fast lawful processes run under different conditions, and

• how we compare their counts when those processes have taken different routes.

Relativity is a rulebook for reconciling ledgers.

6.1 What a clock really records (and why two good clocks disagree)

A clock is not a portal into a dimension. It’s a reliable repeating process plus a way to count repeats:

• pendulum swings

• quartz vibrations

• atomic transitions

• optical lattice pulses

Each clock has: (1) a cycle, (2) a counter, and (3) a convention for turning counts into “seconds.”

Now do the classic experiment: synchronize two identical clocks, send one on a journey, reunite them, and compare.

What does the travelling clock bring back?

Not “time.” A single number:

I completed this many cycles.

Textbooks call that accumulated tally along a path “proper time.” In Changist language, call it what it operationally is:

Proper count = the total number of internal cycles a process accrued along its actual path.

If two perfect clocks take different histories through motion and gravity, they return with different totals. That mismatch isn’t a paradox. It’s the measurement.

6.2 Two levers on tempo: speed and gravity

Once you see clocks as counted processes, relativity’s core claim becomes almost embarrassingly direct:

There are two master knobs on how fast processes run:

Lever 1 — Speed (special relativity).
Move a system fast relative to a reference and — when you later reconcile ledgers — its internal rhythms have accumulated fewer cycles than the reference. The old slogan “moving clocks run slow” is just story flavor for: the cadence depends on the motion-history.

Lever 2 — Gravitational depth (general relativity).
Place identical processes at different heights in a gravitational field and they accumulate cycles at different cadences when compared. Deeper down, processes run slower relative to higher-up ones; this stamps itself into signals as gravitational redshift: wave crests arrive more widely spaced when compared against the receiver’s faster local beat.

Put both levers together and you get the whole menu of “time dilation” effects:

Different routes through different speeds and gravitational depths
→ different local cadences
→ different proper counts on reunion.

No time-fluid is being stretched. Your processes are.

6.3 The world as a tempo field (not a stage)

Now we can compress the whole interpretation into one picture.

Tempo field = a map from “conditions here” to “how fast a well-behaved process would run here.”

At any location, in principle, you can ask:

Given the local motion, surrounding mass–energy, and environment,
what cadence would this process have?

Where conditions differ, cadence differs.

Relativity’s famous geometry is then best understood as a compressed manual for those rate differences:

• The metric doesn’t add a new “arena.”

• It encodes how ledgers compare across routes.

Give the geometry a path and it tells you the proper count an ideal clock would accrue along that path. Give it two paths and it tells you how their tallies differ on reunion.

So: spacetime diagrams and curved metrics are superb maps — but maps of rate structure, not proof that the universe is a frozen four-dimensional object.

6.4 Signals and the c-rule: causality’s speed limit as bookkeeping discipline

Relativity also gives us a second structural fact: there is a maximum speed for causal updates. Instead of treating this as mystique (“light cones!”), treat it as a practical constraint on comparison:

If influence outran c, ledger reconciliation could be made inconsistent.
Different observers could stitch together update-loops that scramble causal ordering and break the shared accounting procedures physics depends on.

Changism reads this cleanly:

• c partitions access, not being.

• It limits who can coordinate with whom yet, not what belongs to the one ongoing world.

6.5 GPS: the everyday audit

If this still sounds like philosophy, GPS turns it into hardware.

Satellites and ground clocks do not keep the same cadence, because the two levers pull in opposite directions:

• orbital speed slows satellite processes (relative to ground references)

• higher altitude (weaker gravity) speeds them up

Engineers pre-offset and continuously correct these drift rates so the system’s many local ledgers remain coherent enough to locate you. GPS doesn’t assume a cosmic master clock behind the scenes. It builds a working “time” out of:

• many local clocks,

• the tempo field (speed + gravity), and

• c-limited signaling.

Every accurate location fix is a demonstration that relativity is a theory of rates, paths, and reconciled ledgers, not a tale about time as a stretchy substance.

6.6 Twin-style differential aging, minus the metaphysical fog

The “twin paradox” becomes trivial in Changist grammar.

Start together → take different routes → reunite → compare totals.

At departure, the clocks/twins are locally side by side: same conditions, same cadence, matched ledgers.
During separation, each follows a different motion/gravity history through the tempo field.
At reunion, each brings home a single number: how many internal cycles occurred along their path.

Those numbers differ. That’s differential aging.

Notice what we did not need:

• no global “simultaneous slice”

• no question like “what is happening right now on Earth?”

• no metaphysical claim that the future is already real

We only need two meetings and the rate structure along the routes between them. The geometry does the accounting.

6.7 Simultaneity: coordination, not ontology

Special relativity shows that distant simultaneity depends on frame: different observers assign “at-once” differently when they align clocks across distance.

On the Changist reading, this is not a fracture in reality. It’s a reminder that:

• “simultaneous” is a coordination choice (a way of aligning notebooks), and

• finite signal speed limits how those alignments can be operationally established.

Relativity doesn’t force “many presents.” It forbids a universal bookkeeping convention from masquerading as ontology.

6.8 Conclusion — Keep the ledger, drop the stage

Einstein gave us a stunningly accurate calculus. The block-universe gloss is optional metaphysics, not a consequence forced by the equations.

Changism keeps every empirical tooth of relativity while shifting the story we tell about it:

• Clocks are processes; what they return is proper count.

• Motion and gravity shape cadence; “time dilation” is rate difference.

• Geometry is compressed bookkeeping for the tempo field, not an arena.

• c is the upper bound on causal updates — the constraint that keeps comparisons consistent.

Relativity, read changistically, is not about time becoming strange.
It’s about change being structured — and about how disciplined your ledger must be if you want to compare it across the universe.

Chapter 7: Relational Quantum Mechanics and the Making of Facts

Quantum mechanics doesn’t mainly confuse us because it’s complicated. It confuses us because it tempts us into a bad picture.

The bad picture goes like this: the world has a universal state “out there,” written in nature’s own ink; that state evolves smoothly; then “measurement” interrupts it with a magical collapse. Once you swallow that story, everything starts to feel haunted.

Changism takes the same corrective stance here that it took with relativity: keep the empirical core, drop the ontological upgrade. In relativity, the upgrade was to treat a bookkeeping surface (“now-slices”) as cosmic furniture. In quantum theory, the upgrade is to treat the wavefunction as the inventory of being.

Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM), associated with Carlo Rovelli, offers the clean diagnosis: the trouble begins when you demand a view from nowhere — one observer-independent state-description everyone must share at once. Changism agrees, and then tightens the screws:

A quantum state is not what a system is. A quantum state is a ledger kept by one physical system about another, summarizing what outcomes are to be expected in future interactions given the interactions that have already occurred.

That isn’t “anything goes.” It’s the opposite: it’s disciplined bookkeeping in a contact-limited universe.

7.1 One world, many ledgers

Let’s say this clearly, because people mishear it.

RQM does not say reality is relative. It says state-descriptions are relative — relative to who has met whom, which marks exist in which physical notebooks, and which protocols define the questions being asked.

Changism adds one carefully limited ontological claim: even if no one can operationally write a single universal state-description, there is still one world in act — one global happening — whose articulation is given by the whole network of interactions, records, and constraints.

So the slogan isn’t “many worlds.” It’s:

• One reality.

• Many legitimate ledgers.

• Reconciliation happens when contact happens.

7.2 “Measurement” is not a ritual: it’s a meeting

Quantum mechanics becomes conceptually tame the moment we stop treating “measurement” as a mystical category and treat it as what it always was: a physical meeting.

Changism gives a simple backbone for what a meeting must involve if outcomes are to be more than private hallucinations:

approach → coupling/registration → stabilization/propagation

• Approach: the possibility of a mark. Two systems enter a relation where an interaction could register something. Different ledgers can legitimately disagree here; nothing paradoxical has happened yet.

• Coupling/registration: the writing of a relative fact. An event occurs when the systems couple in a way that registers — when some degree of freedom in one system becomes correlated with, and effectively serves as a record of, some degree of freedom in the other.

• Stabilization/propagation: the difference between a flicker and a fact. A single microscopic correlation is fragile. To become the kind of fact we normally mean — something checkable, shareable, resistant to ordinary erasure — a mark must stabilize and begin to propagate into wider record networks.

This is the crucial rewrite of the sentence you flagged.

Not: “Events are actualized only when systems interact.” (which sounds like nothing is real until “observed”)
But: Facts and properties become determinate-as-recorded at meetings — when interactions write marks that can, in principle, stabilize into records.

7.3 No facts without meetings ≠ “observers create reality”

Changism’s “no facts without meetings” principle is easy to caricature, so let’s guard it properly.

“Observer” in this framework does not mean “a conscious mind.” It means any physical system capable of entering correlations and storing marks: a detector, a rock face, a photographic plate, a biological memory, an environment full of scattering photons.

And “meeting-dependence” is not “human-dependence.” The criterion is not who is watching, but whether the entity can, in principle, make a recordable difference in an admissible meeting.

This is why neutrinos are the perfect sanity check: neutrinos did not become real when we built detectors. Their reality is grounded in the dynamical admissibility of meeting-structures capable of registering them — even if no such meeting occurred in our neighborhood for a long time.

So the Changist distinction is:

• Reality (existence-in-situ): couplable in principle; capable of recordable difference-making in admissible meetings.

• Fact: a registration outcome encoded in stabilized-and-propagated record structure (a mark that “took hold”).

That’s not anti-realism. It’s realism with a physical spine.

7.4 Stabilization: how “relative facts” become effectively objective

A quantum interaction can produce a relative fact — something definite for the participants — without immediately producing the kind of public, boring, everyday objectivity we rely on.

Objectivity is not a metaphysical blessing. It’s an engineering achievement of nature.

A mark becomes effectively objective when it stabilizes through processes like:

• Redundancy: copies of the mark get written into multiple degrees of freedom — multiple traces, multiple “witnesses.”

• Dissipation: information about alternatives leaks into uncontrolled surroundings, making reversal practically inaccessible.

• Copying and carriage: the record propagates so other systems can later consult it.

In ordinary lab terms: the detector clicks, the pointer moves, the data file updates, the notebook gets written, the result can be checked. In Changist terms: the mark doesn’t just appear; it becomes part of the onward-going fabric of records that later meetings must respect.

This also explains why “objectivity” comes in degrees: a fragile microscopic correlation is weakly objective; a redundantly copied record (instruments, memories, documents, environmental imprints) is strongly objective because it reappears in almost any later interaction you try.

7.5 Particles, properties, and the inversion of substance-talk

Traditional metaphysics imagines the order of explanation like this:

things first → properties inside things → interactions reveal them

RQM flips it: properties are not free-floating inner labels; they’re defined by registration structure — by what a given kind of meeting can discriminate and record.

Changism goes one step further: the “things” themselves are not little inert pellets. They are patterns of co-change — stable enough, for long enough, to be tracked, re-identified, and made into the subject of a ledger.

So when we say “a particle has spin up,” Changism hears:
relative to this interaction protocol, the meter registered this outcome, and the registration is stabilized enough to count as a fact for future accounting.

That doesn’t make the particle unreal. It makes our talk precise.

7.6 Relational time without a master clock

Once states are ledgers and facts are marks, “time” stops looking like an external river even inside quantum theory.

Systems do not evolve “in” a universal time any more than they share a universal simultaneity slice. What we actually have are:

• local processes ticking (local metronomes),

• records carried forward,

• and update rules for how ledgers change when new meetings occur.

This is the quantum twin of the relativity lesson: don’t smuggle a stage back in — whether that stage is a universal Now or a universal wavefunction evolving on a hidden cosmic clock.

7.7 The Quantum Present, rewritten without observer-magic

Here’s the sentence that needs to change most.

Not: “Events become real only when systems interact.”
But:

Events become facts when interactions write marks that can stabilize into records; systems are real insofar as they are couplable in principle — capable of making recordable differences in admissible meetings.

The “present,” in Changist role-language, is simply the ongoing activity of this record-writing world in act — not a magical slice, not a consciousness-lit stage, but the physical happening in which marks get made, stabilized, and carried forward.

7.8 Closing: quantum mechanics as disciplined change-talk

Relational Quantum Mechanics teaches a humility that matches relativity: there is no view from nowhere. Changism adds the ontology that keeps that humility from sliding into nihilism: one world in act, articulated by meetings, marks, and the networks of records that turn local registrations into public facts.

So the Changist-RQM summary is:

• No master wavefunction as the universe’s furniture. States are ledgers.

• No facts without meetings. Facts are stabilized records of registrations.

• No observer-magic. “Observer” means physical mark-maker; reality is couplable in principle.

• Objectivity is earned. Stabilization + redundancy + reconciliation build the public world.

Quantum theory doesn’t say the universe is unreal until watched. It says: the universe becomes articulate at its joints — where interactions write marks, and those marks survive long enough to matter.

Chapter 8: The Universe as Becoming

We have arrived at the end of this introduction — but not at the end of change. There is no finality in a universe where change is fundamental. No resting point, no frozen frame. Reality, as Changism affirms, is not a sequence of snapshots laid across an invisible timeline. It is a living process — a ceaseless becoming.

The cosmos is not a block of events stacked in spacetime. It is a wave of relations, interactions, and transformations — a dynamic weave of presence. What we call “the past” is the ongoing record of change that once unfolded. What we call “the future” is the ongoing open‑ended horizon of potential change, the standing dispositions yet unactualised. What we call the present is the ongoing change that is taking place.

Changism proposes no mysticism, no speculation for its own sake. It offers a simple, logical shift: start with change, and let everything else emerge from it.⁴ Time, space, causality, identity — all are reinterpreted not as preconditions, but as emergent patterns within change.

We are not objects drifting down a river of time. We are that which flows — organized eddies in the great flux of becoming.¹ We are processes — not passengers.

To live in such a world is to reimagine what it means to be. Not as something that is, but as something that is happening.⁵ Every “thing” is a momentary cohesion of transformation. Every law, a rhythm of the cosmos. Every identity, a pattern dancing itself into stability — for a while.

In this vision:

• Time is not the stage, but the score — how we measure the tempo of the dance.

• Energy is not fuel, but geometry’s memory — how structure remembers what has already changed.

• Laws of nature are not external commands, but logoi — the inner coherence of flux, the grammar of change itself.

Changism invites us to see the cosmos not as a place, but as a gesture — not as a story already written, but as a story being written now, and only now.

To be is to participate in change.
To know is to track the rhythm of transformation.
To live is to dance in the eternal present.

There is no cosmic clock ticking. No hidden timeline beneath our feet. Only change, forever unfolding.

And in that unfolding — we are not observers. We are the unfolding itself.

1. Michael Stokes, ed., Heraclitus, trans. T. M. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), fragment 49 (p. 34).

2. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984), 42.

3. Huw Price, Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 131–32.

4. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Free Press, 1978), 21.

5. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 12.

6. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 38.

7. Emmy Noether, “Invariant Variational Problems,” Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Mathematisch‑Physikalische Klasse (1918): 235–57.

This article is part of a broader framework developed in my book Changism, which explores time, change, cosmology, and philosophy in depth. The book is available on Amazon (Kindle and paperback):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GB12HLCT

Appendix A: Common Objections to Changism — and Clear Replies

Changism invites resistance for the same reason relativity and quantum theory once did: it asks you to stop treating a bookkeeping convenience as a piece of cosmic furniture. If you rethink time, you inherit a predictable set of objections — some philosophical, some scientific, some psychological. This appendix doesn’t try to “win” by rhetoric. It tries to clarify the commitments so disagreements land on the right target.

A recurring theme: many objections assume Changism is saying “time isn’t real.” That’s not quite it. Changism says:

• Change is ontologically basic.

• Time is a disciplined comparison system for change (clocks, counts, conventions, “time-functions”).

• “Past / present / future” are roles inside the ongoing world: records, activity, and dispositions — not three boxes in a cosmic container.

A.1 “The past happened and the future will happen — so don’t they exist?”

Objection
World War II happened. Tomorrow’s eclipse will happen. If they’re true, don’t past and future have to “exist” somehow?

Reply
Changism makes a sharp distinction between truth and ontology.

• The past-role is real as ongoing structure: records, traces, memories, fossils, documents, scars, radiation arriving from distant galaxies. These are not “the past itself.” They are ongoing configurations that encode earlier activity.

• The future-role is real as ongoing structure: constraints, dispositions, stored potentials, plans, stresses, commitments, probabilities, dynamical tendencies. These are not “a future realm.” They are present factors that shape admissible continuations.

• The present-role is the world in act: ongoing interactions, registrations, and transformations.

So Changism doesn’t trivialize history or prediction. It refuses a particular metaphysical upgrade: the idea that “true statements about X” require “X existing as a region of time.”

A.2 “Isn’t this just presentism?”

Objection
You keep saying “the present-role is what exists.” That sounds like presentism with better vocabulary.

Reply
Changism is not presentism in the usual sense, because it rejects two presentist habits:

1. A master Now.
   Presentism often smuggles in a single global “now-slice” the whole universe shares. Changism denies this. There is one ongoing world-in-act, but no privileged cosmic simultaneity standard.

2. A thin ontology.
   Presentism tends to treat past and future as “nothing.” Changism treats them as thickly present: records and dispositions are real structures with causal teeth. The past-role constrains the present via records; the future-role constrains it via dispositions.

Changism keeps becoming without shrinking reality to a vanishing instant. What is actually real and available to you is the ongoing world of change, including the records it has left and the potentials it carries. Changism begins where presentism was aiming: with one ongoing actuality. Yet by refusing to treat time as a thing — a line, a block, a container — it leaves the presentist camp entirely.

· The reality is not a special time (the present) among other times.

· The reality is the ongoing process itself, of which our talk of “times” is merely a way of measuring and organizing change.

In one sense, Changism looks like a “presentism-ready” ontology: it keeps the core insight that only what is happening exists, and that “past” and “future” are ways we talk about records and potentials, not extra realms of entities. But once we drop the picture of a moving slice of time — once we stop thinking of “the present” as a metaphysical point sliding along a timeline — the view ceases to be presentism at all.

There is no privileged time among competing times. There is no time-stage to stand on. What is fundamental is not a moment but a process: the ongoing field of interactions that time-talk is our way of tracking and comparing. In that sense, Changism is what presentism becomes when it outgrows the idea of time as a thing and returns to the deeper insight that change itself is primordial, that the most fundamental aspect of reality is not the present moment, but change; not presentism, but changism.

A.3 “But we feel time flowing. Isn’t that evidence?”

Objection
The passage of time feels immediate. Memory, anticipation, and the sense of “moving through moments” are deeply real experiences.

Reply
Changism agrees: the experience is real. The interpretation is what’s optional.

Your nervous system is a change-tracker that:

• retains records of earlier states (memory),

• runs simulations of likely continuations (anticipation),

• and stitches them into a coherent action-guiding field (attention).

That produces a powerful “flow” phenomenology. But that phenomenology is better explained by how an ongoing organism manages change than by a literal flowing time-substance that no one has ever perceived or measured. Changism doesn’t deny the feeling; it relocates what the feeling is about.

A.4 “Relativity implies a block universe. Doesn’t that refute you?”

Objection
Relativity treats time like a dimension; simultaneity is relative; therefore all times must be equally real in a 4D block.

Reply
Relativity forces discipline, not a block metaphysics.

• Relativity shows there is no universal simultaneity convention that everyone shares. That’s a constraint on coordination, not a proof that “the future exists already.”

• The spacetime formalism is an extraordinarily powerful ledger: it compresses facts about signal limits and how rates of processes vary with motion and gravity.

The block-universe is one interpretive gloss. Changism rejects that gloss while keeping every predictive success. It treats geometry as bookkeeping for local tempo and causal structure, not as a frozen museum of events.

A.5 “Quantum mechanics says nothing is real until observed. Are you endorsing that?”

Objection
Your ‘meetings’ language sounds like: no interaction, no reality. That’s observer-created reality.

Reply
No. Changism’s claim is narrower and more physical:

• Reality is not observer-dependent.

• Facts/properties become determinate-as-recorded at meetings — when interactions write marks that can, in principle, stabilize into records.

The criterion is couplability in principle: whether something can make a recordable difference in admissible interactions, not whether a human is watching.

Neutrinos didn’t become real when we built detectors. Detectors made neutrinos registrable for us. Changism distinguishes:

• existence (difference-making capacity / couplability), from

• fact (a stabilized record in some ledger).

A.6 “But different observers can disagree in quantum scenarios — doesn’t that destroy objectivity?”

Objection
If state descriptions are relative, aren’t facts private? Doesn’t this collapse into ‘anything goes’?

Reply
Objectivity, in Changism, is not a magical property. It is a stabilization achievement.

A registration becomes effectively objective when it is:

• stable (not easily erased),

• redundant (copied into many degrees of freedom),

• and propagated (available to many later meetings).

That’s why laboratory outcomes become public facts: detector clicks, data logs, notebooks, memories, environmental records — multiple independent traces that later interactions must respect. Relativity limits coordination; quantum theory limits global state descriptions. Neither eliminates the emergence of robust public facts.

A.7 “If time is ‘just a measure,’ why does it appear in every equation?”

Objection
Physics is filled with (t). Differential equations “evolve in time.” If time isn’t fundamental, aren’t you fighting the math?

Reply
Changism is not anti-mathematical. It’s anti-reification.

Equations use parameters to track change. You can choose:

• a clock variable,

• a convenient coordinate,

• a gauge-fixed time-function.

The success of the formalism shows that the bookkeeping is powerful. It does not force the further claim that time is a substance or a universal stage. Changism says: keep the parameter; don’t worship it.

A.8 “If everything is change, what changes? Isn’t that circular?”

Objection
Change must be change of something. If there are no enduring substances, what is doing the changing?

Reply
This is a grammar trap: our nouns demand a “thing,” so we imagine a substrate behind activity.

Changism treats “things” as stabilized patterns of change — repeatable structures with enough persistence to be tracked, re-identified, and recorded. A whirlpool is the classic illustration: it’s real, stable, causal — and yet it’s not a substance over and above the flow.

So “what changes?” gets a Changist answer:

• Patterns reconfigure patterns.

• Stability is structured repetition, not a timeless core.

That’s not circular; it’s a refusal of an unnecessary extra layer.

A.9 “Does Changism deny laws of nature or make causality vague?”

Objection
If the future isn’t “already there,” do laws become mere habits? Does causality lose teeth?

Reply
Changism does not dissolve law; it relocates it.

Laws are descriptions of constraints on admissible change — descriptions of regularities and symmetries in how processes can update. You don’t need a pre-existing future to have constraint. You need:

• present dispositions,

• present boundary conditions,

• present record structure,

• and stable update rules.

Causality remains real because it is about difference-making propagation under constraints, not about a timeline’s furniture.

A.10 “What about the arrow of time and entropy?”

Objection
Thermodynamics gives a clear arrow: entropy increases. Doesn’t that mean time has a direction, hence is fundamental?

Reply
Entropy is a statement about how change behaves in large systems under typical conditions — especially how records, correlations, and usable gradients degrade or spread.

Changism can treat the “arrow” as an asymmetry in change, not a sign that time is a flowing substance. The directionality lives in:

• the persistence and loss of records,

• the depletion of low-entropy gradients that power organized activity,

• the practical irreversibility of many stabilization processes.

The arrow is real. The extra claim — “therefore time is a dimension-stuff that flows forward” — is optional.

A.11 “So are you just saying ‘time is an illusion’ in fancy words?”

Objection
This still feels like eliminativism: time isn’t real, only change is.

Reply
Changism doesn’t eliminate time; it demotes and clarifies it.

• Time is real as a measurement practice and a coordination technology.

• Time is not real as a cosmic medium or universal stage.

That’s the same move we make elsewhere without drama: maps are real; money is real; coordinate systems are real. But none of those are fundamental substances. They are structured representations that work because the underlying reality has a stable structure.

Closing: What Changism actually commits you to

If you want one clean summary that avoids the common misunderstandings:

• There is one world in act: an ongoing, global, structured field of change.

• Past / future are roles inside the present world: ongoing records and dispositions.

• Relativity disciplines coordination (no master clock, no master simultaneity), without forcing a frozen ontology.

• Quantum theory disciplines facts (no facts without meetings), without making reality mind-dependent.

• Time is the ledger: powerful, extremely useful, but non-fundamental.

The question Changism keeps putting back on the table is not “Is time real?” but: Are we confusing a superb bookkeeping system with the thing it measures?

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