Changism 5: The Philosophy of Changism

It’s not that things change; rather, change “things.”

Sergio Montes Navarro

57 min read

·

Apr 25, 2025

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 Pre‑Socratic Groundwork

3 Aristotle on Kinesis and Chronos

4 Stoic Relational Time

5 Late‑Antique & Medieval Presentisms

6 Non‑Western Convergences

7 Modern Challenges to Temporal Substance

8 Process Metaphysics

9 The Physics Interface

10 From Presentism to Changism

11 Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendix A: Changism’s Ontology

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1. Introduction

Philosophical reflection on time has long been pulled between rival pictures of reality: one makes the present the only fully real slice (presentism); the other treats past and future as equally real in a completed structure (the “block universe”). Both pictures disagree about which parts of time exist — but they quietly agree on something deeper: that reality is fundamentally arranged in time.

Changism rejects that shared assumption. The view defended in this essay is change-first and ledger-second: we do not live in time, nor in a privileged “now” moving along it. We live in an ongoing field of change, and what we call “time” is the ledger we keep when we compare changes — a numerical ordering and scaling abstracted from how processes match up, much as metres compare spatial extension. Time is therefore neither a cosmic substance nor a mere illusion; it is a derivative tool of comparison.

This also reshapes what “past,” “present,” and “future” mean. Changism does not treat them as three regions of being. It treats them as roles inside the field: the “present” is the role played by ongoing interaction and registration; the “past” is the role played by maintained records that encode earlier activity; the “future” is the role played by standing dispositions and constraints that shape what can happen next. In other words, tense is not a map of what exists; it is a way of speaking about how the field is functioning.

This claim resonates with neglected strands in the tradition. Aristotle, for example, insists that time is not change but “the number of change with respect to the before and after,” while the third-century Stoic Chrysippus defines chronos as “the measure corresponding to the motion of the cosmos.” In late antiquity, Augustine argued that past and future exist only as memory and expectation “in the distension of the mind.” Such remarks, far from being historical footnotes, anticipate a coherent metaphysics in which time is measurement and ordering — secondary to the underlying reality of alteration.

Modern philosophy of time brings this subterranean current to the surface. Bergson reproached the “spatialization” of duration and urged us to recover the lived modulation that analytical clocks conceal. Husserl exposed the retentional-protensional structure by which consciousness constitutes a dynamic field rather than a sequence of instants. Whitehead’s process philosophy dethroned substance in favor of creativity — “the creative advance into novelty.” Yet each of these thinkers, for all their power, still tends to speak as if temporality is a primitive framework — whether as a “living present,” a stream of inner time, or an ordered succession of occasions. Changism’s wager is that these residues are not necessary. What is fundamental is not a privileged slice of becoming, nor a completed timeline of it, but becoming itself — with order, measure, and tense reconstructed as derivative roles and comparisons within the ongoing field.

1.1 Aims and Contribution

This paper has two principal aims. First, it offers a historical-critical reconstruction of major figures who approached but did not fully articulate the Changist view — from Heraclitus and Aristotle, through the Stoics and Augustine, to Bergson, Husserl, and Whitehead. Second, it presents Changism as a coherent metaphysical framework that draws from this lineage while completing a specific reorientation: from an ontology that treats time as basic to one that treats change as basic and time as ledger.

Two original contributions are developed:

• Philological. Literal re-translations of key passages from Aristotle’s Physics and Chrysippus’ fragments reveal subtle but decisive shifts in meaning, especially where modern renderings obscure the distinction between time as entity and time as measure. Correcting these readings brings ancient Greek thought into surprising alignment with a change-first ontology.

• Systematic. By synthesizing process metaphysics with analysis of measurement and reference — especially the logic of “rate” and comparison — the paper argues that temporal quantities arise only when changes are set against other changes under a chosen standard. It then extends this into a Changist account of tense: past- and future-tensed truths are grounded, not in absent events or already-existing regions, but in ongoing structures (records and dispositions) within the field.

1.2 Methodological Orientation

The investigation unfolds along two intersecting axes. Historically, it traces a line of thinkers who intuited the primacy of change but were constrained by the vocabulary of their era. This includes Western and non-Western traditions — from Heraclitus to Augustine, from the Tao Te Ching to early Buddhist philosophy. Analytically, it draws on tools from contemporary metaphysics — measurement theory, modal semantics, ontological parsimony — to formalize Changism as a viable ontological stance.

A recurring theme is the role of language in metaphysics. Following Wittgenstein’s therapeutic approach, the paper shows how inherited grammatical structures (“time flows,” “the present moves”) smuggle in a picture of time as a thing. Changism’s method is partly translational: it tries to cash out time-talk in change-talk — reframing puzzles about “passage” or “the present moment” as artifacts of reified syntax plus incomplete bookkeeping.

1.3 Outline of the Argument

Sections 2–4 reconstruct the development of a relational view of time in Heraclitus, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Section 5 addresses late-antique and medieval positions that intensify the present into a metaphysical gateway (Augustine, Eckhart). Section 6 surveys convergent intuitions in Taoism, Buddhism, and Vedānta.

Sections 7–8 analyze modern critiques of temporal substance — Bergson’s durée, Husserl’s time-consciousness, Whitehead’s processual ontology — showing both what they accomplish and where time-based grammar remains tacitly structural. Section 9 then brings in physics, where relativity and quantum theory operationalize time not as a flowing dimension but as a parameter in comparative descriptions of processes.

Section 10 articulates Changism in full: the field-in-act ontology, the ledger account of temporal quantities, and the role-based account of tense. Section 11 concludes.

Changism is not a return to mysticism nor an esoteric metaphor. It is a disciplined ontological proposal: reality is not in time, nor in the present. Reality is in change — and time is the measure we invent to keep our comparisons straight.

2. Pre-Socratic Groundwork

The first Greek philosophers already stage the central tension that later “philosophies of time” try to manage: is reality fundamentally stable being with change as a surface disturbance, or is reality fundamentally change with stability as a derivative achievement? Heraclitus and Parmenides are the two magnetic poles. Read together, they expose why time-talk becomes tempting: it can seem to offer a neutral stage on which “the same thing” persists while “different states” come and go. Changism treats that stage as optional. It keeps the reality of change, but relocates order and identity into the world’s own comparative structure — a ledger of relations among changes, not an independent temporal container.

2.1 Heraclitus: Change as World-Texture

Heraclitus survives in fragments, so he’s easy to turn into a slogan. “Everything flows” is better treated as a faithful paraphrase than as a literal quotation. But the fragments do insist on something decisive: stability is not the default condition of reality. What looks stable is a maintained pattern inside a field of alteration — like a river that is “the same” only by being continuously replaced.

Three Heraclitean motifs matter for Changism:

• Identity is downstream of activity.
  The river image is not merely poetic. It is a metaphysical warning: if you want “the same,” you must explain the pattern that persists through replacement, not posit a static substrate that happens to change. Changism takes this literally: “things” are stabilized regimes of co-change within an ongoing field, not basic units that later acquire motion.

• Order without a container.
  Heraclitus is not preaching chaos. His appeal to logos — ratio, account, gathering — signals that change is structured. The world has intelligible constraints and proportions. Changism leans into this: what we call “temporal order” is not a cosmic conveyor belt; it is the order we extract when we compare changes under stable constraints. A lawful world makes measurement possible without requiring an extra medium called Time.

• Measure-language points toward ledger-language.
  Heraclitus often speaks in terms of measure: the cosmos kindling and extinguishing “in due measure,” limits that are not to be overrun, rhythms and balances. Read Changistically, this is a hint that what matters is not “when” something happens in an external time, but how changes relate — by ratio, constraint, and comparison. That is the ancestor of the ledger idea.

Heraclitus does, of course, talk about cycles — day and night, seasons, the sun’s bounds. But that does not force a commitment to time as an independent dimension. Cycles are processes; and counting cycles is one of the oldest ways humans build a ledger of comparisons. Heraclitus helps us see why that ledger is useful — without granting it ontological sovereignty.

2.2 Parmenides: The Challenge of Changeless Being

Parmenides meets this world of change with a famous refusal. In the surviving poem, “coming-to-be and passing-away” are treated as incoherent: what is cannot arise from what is not; what is cannot become what it is not. The result is a severe metaphysics: being must be ungenerated, imperishable, whole, and unmoved.

For Changism, Parmenides is not merely “wrong.” He is a diagnostic genius. He identifies a real pressure point:

If you treat reality as a thing that must remain identical to itself, then change looks like contradiction.

The Eleatic argument bites hardest when “being” is imagined as a stable something that persists while properties swap in and out — an imagination that easily recruits time as the silent bookkeeper: first it is F, then it is not-F. Under that picture, “change” threatens the law of non-contradiction because we keep asking for an unchanged bearer of incompatible predicates.

Changism’s response is not to abandon logic, nor to declare change illusory. It is to revise the target: reality is not fundamentally a persisting thing with a history; it is an ongoing field-in-act whose apparent “things” are patterns. On that basis, “identity” is not a primitive absolute; it is a role we assign when a pattern remains coherent under permitted transformations. What looks like Parmenidean contradiction is often a grammatical artifact of forcing a pattern-world into a substance-template.

2.3 Dialectical Consequences

The Heraclitus–Parmenides confrontation sets up a dilemma that echoes through the entire later tradition:

• If flux is primary, how can anything count as the same?

• If unchanging being is primary, why does change seem unavoidable?

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Much classical metaphysics can be read as an attempt to escape this forced choice by adding structure:

• Plato splits reality into an eternal order (Forms) and a temporal order (becoming).

• Atomists keep changeless particles but allow their configurations to change.

• The Aristotelian–Stoic line takes a different tack: it treats time less as a realm and more as a measure — a way of numbering and comparing motion/change.

Changism belongs to this last trajectory, but with a stricter conclusion. The move that loosens Parmenides’ grip is not to deny logic, nor to posit a second world, but to recognize that “before/after,” “earlier/later,” and even “the same” are not metaphysical primitives. They are comparative outputs of how changes relate, stabilize, and leave records. If time is a measure, then it belongs to the ledger; and if identity is a pattern, then it belongs to the field — not to a timeless substrate drifting through a timeline.

This pre-Socratic prologue therefore frames the task ahead. Heraclitus teaches that change saturates reality; Parmenides shows why change becomes paradoxical when being is forced into a substance-template. The next sections trace how Aristotle and the Stoics develop the decisive middle move — time as number/measure — and how Changism carries that move to completion by rebuilding temporal vocabulary out of comparison, constraint, and record.

3. Aristotle on Kínēsis and Chrónos

Aristotle is the first philosopher to treat time with the seriousness of a dangerous concept. He does not begin by defining chrónos; he begins by showing why time is metaphysically slippery — why it seems to exist and yet resists being treated as a thing.

To stage the problem, Aristotle writes (Physics IV, 217b33–218a8):

217b33 ὅτι μὲν οὖν ἢ ὅλως οὐκ ἔστιν ἢ μόλις καὶ ἀμυδρῶς, ἐκ τῶνδέ τις ἂν ὑποπτεύσειεν.
217b34 τὸ μὲν γὰρ αὐτοῦ γέγονε καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν, τὸ δὲ μέλλει καὶ οὔπω ἔστιν.
218a1 ἐκ δὲ τούτων καὶ ὁ ἄπειρος καὶ ὁ ἀεὶ λαμβανόμενος χρόνος σύγκειται.
218a2 τὸ δ’ ἐκ μὴ ὄντων συγκείμενον ἀδύνατον ἂν εἶναι δόξειε μετέχειν οὐσίας.
218a3 πρὸς δὲ τούτοις παντὸς μεριστοῦ, ἄνπερ ᾖ, ἀνάγκη, ὅτε ἔστιν, ἤτοι πάντα τὰ μέρη εἶναι ἢ ἔνια·
218a5 τοῦ δὲ χρόνου τὰ μὲν γέγονε τὰ δὲ μέλλει,
218a6 ἔστι δ’ οὐδέν, ὄντος μεριστοῦ.
218a6 τὸ δὲ νῦν οὐ μέρος· μετρεῖ τε γὰρ τὸ μέρος, καὶ συγκεῖσθαι δεῖ τὸ ὅλον ἐκ τῶν μερῶν·
218a8 ὁ δὲ χρόνος οὐ δοκεῖ συγκεῖσθαι ἐκ τῶν νῦν.

3.1 A fresh translation (and why Aristotle phrases it cautiously)

A close, modern translation (keeping Aristotle’s “tentative” mood intact) runs like this:

• 217b33 “That time, then, either does not exist at all, or exists only barely and dimly — someone might suspect from the following.”
  (Aristotle is staging an aporia; he is not delivering a verdict.)

• 217b34 “For part of it has happened and is not, and part is going to be and is not yet.”

• 218a1 “And from these [parts] both infinite time and time that is always being taken/assumed is composed.”

• 218a2 “But what is composed of non-beings would seem impossible to partake of being.”

• 218a3–5 “Further, for anything divisible, if it exists, then when it exists it is necessary that either all its parts exist or some of them.”

• 218a5–6 “But of time, some has happened and some is going to be, and none of it exists — yet it is divisible.”

• 218a6–8 “And the now is not a part: for it measures the part, and the whole must be composed of parts; but time does not seem to be composed of nows.”

Two things matter immediately for a Changist reading.

First, Aristotle repeatedly speaks in the mode of might suspect / would seem. This is not time-denial. It is a warning: if you treat time as a thing with parts, you generate contradictions.

Second, the phrase “time that is always being taken” (ἀεὶ λαμβανόμενος χρόνος) is striking. Time is not presented as a ready-made substance; it is something picked up, taken as, grasped through a practice. That already leans toward the Changist thought: time is a ledger-artifact of comparison.

3.2 The aporia: why time resists being a “thing”

Aristotle’s difficulty can be put cleanly:

1. Time seems divisible into past and future.

2. Past is no longer; future is not yet.

3. So time seems built from what is not.

4. And if something exists while divisible, at least some of its parts should exist.

5. But time’s “parts” do not.

6. You cannot rescue time by saying it is made of “nows,” because the now is a limit/measure, not a constituent part.

This last point is essential and often underplayed. Aristotle is rejecting the seductive picture in which time is a line made of point-nows. A point can mark and measure without being a brick.

Changism endorses this diagnosis. Most confusions about time come from the same mistake Aristotle is trapping: treating the ledger as though it were the furniture.

3.3 Aristotle’s positive move: time as number/measure of motion

Later in Physics IV Aristotle gives his constructive definition, the one everyone quotes:

ἀριθμὸς κινήσεως κατὰ τὸ πρότερον καὶ ὕστερον.
“Time is the number (count/measure) of motion/change with respect to before and after.”

This is Aristotle’s great anti-reification move. Time is not an extra ingredient added to motion; it is a numerical relation extracted from motion — counting change under an order.

It also clarifies the status of the now (νῦν): the now is the measuring handle, the boundary at which counting gets its grip. It is indispensable to measurement without being an ingredient out of which a whole is composed.

So Aristotle’s package is already close to the Changist instinct:

• without change, no time;

• time is measure, not container;

• the now is a boundary, not a brick.

3.4 What Changism adds: ledger-time and role-talk (the completion of Aristotle’s cure)

Aristotle’s aporia depends on a tacit assumption: that past and future must be parts of time in a way that makes them “beings” or “non-beings.” Changism dissolves the assumption by changing the ontological grammar.

On Changism’s ontology (see appendix), past / present / future are not regions. They are roles within the ongoing field of change:

• “Past” names the record-role played by ongoing structures: traces, inscriptions, memories, fossils, propagated marks — any ongoing stabilized pattern produced by earlier activity.

• “Future” names the disposition-role played by ongoing structures: standing constraints, affordances, and open pathways licensed by the ongoing configuration and its lawful regularities.

• “Present” names the activity-role: ongoing interaction and registration — the living interface where records are being written and dispositions are being tested.

Once you speak this way, Aristotle’s line “time seems composed of non-beings” stops being a threat. Past and future are not “non-beings” out of which time is built; they are ways of indexing present record/disposition structure inside an ongoing field.

This is where Changism also tightens Aristotle’s “before/after.” Aristotle tends to treat “before/after” as intrinsic to motion in a robust way. Changism treats order more austerely: ordering is ledger-derivative — a structure abstracted from comparisons among changes (and, in a physics-facing setting, from the constraints imposed by interaction, registration, and propagation). In short: Aristotle makes time depend on motion; Changism makes even temporal order depend on comparative bookkeeping over motion.

3.5 Summary table: Aristotle’s achievements and the Changist revision

3.6 Bridge to the Stoics

Aristotle hands later thought a powerful tool: time is not a container, but a measuring relation grounded in change. The Stoics will radicalize that tool by making the cosmos itself a continuous, structured activity — then treating chrónos even more explicitly as measure corresponding to that activity. Changism follows that trajectory to its end: reality is change (field-in-act); time is ledger.

4. Stoic Physics: Chrónos as Incorporeal Measure of Cosmic Change

The Stoics inherit Aristotle’s anti-reification insight — time is not a substance — but they sharpen it into one of antiquity’s cleanest “change-first” accounts. Chrónos (χρόνος) is not a hidden river beneath events. It is an incorporeal interval/extension (diastēma, διάστημα) that belongs to motion and is intelligible only through motion. In Stoic terms: bodies do the work; time merely “tags” their doing.

4.1 Time as an incorporeal (asōmaton), not a body

Stoic ontology draws a hard line between corporeals (bodies: what can act and be acted upon) and incorporeals (things that are in some sense real, but without causal power). Time is placed with the incorporeals — alongside place, void, and “sayables.” The key idea is not mystical: time doesn’t have causal powers; it cannot push, pull or undergo collision. It is a structural accompaniment to physical process, not an extra ingredient inside it.

Diogenes Laertius condenses the orthodox view bluntly: time is incorporeal because it is an interval (diastēma) “of the motion of the world.” Past and future are “infinite,” while the present is “finite.”

4.2 The core definition: diastēma of motion (and the measure of fast/slow)

The early Stoics offer definitions that are as close to “ledger language” as antiquity gets.

• Zeno: time is the diastēma of motion, and the measure/criterion of fast and slow.

• Chrysippus: time is the diastēma of motion “according to which” we speak of the measure of fast and slow; equivalently, it is the interval that “accompanies the motion of the cosmos,” according to which each thing moves and is.

Two features matter:

1. Time is comparative. The explicit appeal to “fast and slow” makes chrónos a standard of comparison: it is what lets us say this process outruns that one.

2. Time is cosmic in scope. Chrysippus ties time not to isolated motions but to the motion of the whole world-process. Zeno’s “all motion” and Chrysippus’ “the world’s motion” are reported as variants of the same idea: no motion, no time.

The hinge-term here is διάστημα (diastēma): interval, span, extension, dimension. The Stoics are not saying time is a stream; they are saying time is the stretch-of-motion that makes duration and speed-talk possible.

4.3 Continuity: no “smallest now” and no time made of instants

Stoic time is continuous and infinitely divisible. They explicitly deny a smallest indivisible moment — one reason they can reject the picture of motion as a sequence of frozen instants (and thereby blunt paradoxes like Zeno’s arrow).

This is a quiet but major shift: instead of treating time as built from atomic “nows,” the Stoics treat “the now” as a limit-concept we use in description, while the physical world remains a seamless activity.

4.4 Chrónos, kairós, aiṓn: three temporal vocabularies, three jobs

Stoic writers also inherit (and use) a broader Greek temporal vocabulary, and it helps to keep the terms distinct:

• Chrónos (χρόνος): quantitative, sequential time — the continuum/extension of change. Past/present/future here are not separate species, but relations to the ongoing process.

• Kairós (καιρός): qualitative “right time” or timeliness — an ethical and practical category (when to act, what fits the situation), not a second metaphysical time-fluid.

• Aiṓn (αἰών): “age” or “eternity” — the long view, often used to shrink the ego: the present slice is a pinprick against the whole.

This division already hints at something Changism later makes explicit: temporal language performs different roles (measurement, practical timing, cosmic perspective) rather than naming one metaphysical “stuff.”

Stoic Time vs Changism — A Comparative Summary

Changism insists on a strict separation between change and time: change is ontic activity (what reality is doing), while time is a bookkeeping layer we construct from comparisons among processes. Stoicism — especially the early Stoics (Zeno/Cleanthes/Chrysippus) — lands surprisingly close to this stance, even though it speaks in a different metaphysical idiom (incorporeals, cosmic motion, pneuma). The overlap is real; the differences are equally instructive.

1) Time is not a substance or container

Changism: time is not a thing “beneath” events; it is a representational register abstracted from change-relations. Temporal quantities are not primitive additions to ontology; what is basic is “a network of comparisons among change-processes,” and familiar durations are just representational “gauge-fixed” faces of that ledger.

Stoicism: early Stoics also refuse to treat time as a causal ingredient. They call time incorporeal, and define it via motion as an interval/extension (diastēma) and as a criterion for fast/slow. In other words, time is not a flowing “stuff,” but an abstractable dimension/measure tied to change.

Shared core: both frameworks try to “deflate” time: drop the idea of a temporal container, keep the comparative structure that lets us order and measure processes. Changism makes this into a methodological rule: don’t let the index inherit the ontology of what it indexes.

2) No “master clock”: relativity pushes Changism further than Stoicism

Changism (relativity-informed): there is no operational master clock and no preferred frame/foliation. Any realized clock is just one process among others, embedded in the comparison network and subject to path- and context-dependence. Changism is explicit that even when we parameterize the world “for formal bookkeeping,” that parameter is not ontic time — just an index we use to describe configurations.

Stoicism (single-cosmos picture): Stoics speak as if the cosmos is one unified process and time is coextensive with (and defined through) the world’s motion as a whole. In that setting, it’s natural to treat “cosmic motion” as a kind of global reference process — effectively a universal clock within the Stoic worldview.

Difference (stated cleanly): Stoicism can sound “cosmically universal” because it works inside a picture of one integrated cosmos with one global unfolding; Changism generalizes the bookkeeping idea to a world where no global time standard is physically privileged (and where simultaneity itself is not absolute). Changism keeps a “global field of change,” but refuses to promote any single clock — or any single “now” — to ontological authority.

3) Past / present / future: “obtains vs subsists” (Stoic) versus role-language (Changism)

This is the most delicate comparison, because Stoics sometimes sound presentist in their moral rhetoric (“only the present…”), yet their technical view is subtler than modern presentism.

Stoicism (technical tense-metaphysics): Chrysippus is reported to say that “no time is wholly present,” and that only the present “belongs/obtains,” while past and future “subsist.” The “present” has a privileged status, but the past/future are not simply annihilated — they have a weaker mode.

Changism (role-language): Changism is deliberately stricter: it does not treat “past” and “future” as regions of a block, nor treat “present” as a privileged metaphysical slice. Instead, tense is role-language over one thick field-in-act:

• the field is “thick”: it includes ongoing interactions, maintained records, and standing dispositions/constraints.

• “past” and “future” are ongoing roles played by ongoing structures (records, and dispositions/potentials).

• in the summary triad: “Present” names ongoing activity; “Past” names maintained records; “Future” names standing dispositions.

So where Stoicism grants the present a special “obtaining” status, Changism goes further in deflation: the present is not an ontological privilege; it is the activity-role within the same ontology that also contains record-roles and disposition-roles.

4) Relativity of clock-rates: Changism’s modern version of “time as comparison”

Changism: time dilation is not “time itself slowing,” but a difference in ledger-comparisons between internal cycles and external change. Changism is explicitly build (constrained) in “relativistic empirical parity,” insisting that the ledger must reproduce the observational structure of SR/GR, including path dependence and the absence of a master clock.

Stoicism: historically, Stoic physics doesn’t develop anything like relativity of simultaneity or path-dependent durations. Still, the interpretive move remains intelligible in Stoic terms: if time is a measure/interval of motion, then different motions can, in principle, be compared by different measures. Changism simply disciplines this with modern physics and strips away the last temptation to treat any one measure as “the” time.

5) “Flow” and the lived present: psychological and ethical resonance

Changism: the felt “flow of time” is explained as an organism’s change-tracking and record-updating — nothing in the world needs to be a flowing temporal substance.

Stoicism: even without neuroscience, Stoic therapy repeatedly urges attention to what is “up to us” now, and treats temporal anguish as a cognitive/moral problem (ruminating on what is not in our power). Seneca and Marcus deploy river and transience imagery, but the philosophical point is not that there is literally a cosmic “time-river”; it’s that clinging to what cannot be held is a mistake.

Changism agrees with the demystification, but gives it a sharper metaphysical backbone: the river-talk is a metaphor for processes and record-loss, not a description of a thing called Time.

Summary

Shared core: both Stoicism and Changism reject time as an independent substance or container, and both treat time as derivative of (and definable through) the comparative structure of change — fast/slow, interval/measure, ordering, and record-dependence.

Key differences:

1. Ledger-status (Changism is stricter): Stoicism says time is incorporeal yet real; Changism insists time is explicitly representational bookkeeping (and even when we parameterize the world, that parameter is not ontic time).

2. Relativity (Changism generalizes the Stoic insight): Stoicism works naturally with a “cosmic reference process” in a single-cosmos picture; Changism denies any privileged master clock and enforces relativistic constraints.

3. The present (Stoic privilege vs Changist role-language): Stoics often privilege the present (obtains/belongs) while letting past/future subsist; Changism treats past/present/future as roles inside one thick field — ongoing activity, maintained records, standing dispositions — without reifying a privileged Now.

Closing note on kairos and aiōn: distinguishing chronos (measurable interval/ordering) from kairos (the opportune moment for action) and aiōn (life-time/age/eternity, depending on context) can help keep Stoic ethics from being mistakenly read as a metaphysical theory of “the now.” Changism’s parallel is similar: metaphysics is about what exists (field-in-act + roles), while kairos-style talk is about how to live wisely within that structure.

5. Late-Antique and Medieval Present-Fixes

Late antiquity inherits two powerful impulses that don’t sit easily together: the Greek discovery that reality is dynamic, and the religious demand for a divine life untouched by change. The compromise that dominates much of the period is a present-fix: diminish the ontological weight of past and future, elevate the “now,” and — when theology requires it — inflate that “now” into an eternal present.

This is close to Changism in one respect and far from it in another. It is close because it treats temporal distinctions as derivative of how we relate to change (memory, attention, expectation). It is far because it typically keeps a privileged Now — either as the only fully real slice, or as an atemporal divine “Now” hovering above creaturely succession. Changism keeps the anti-reification lesson while refusing the privileged slice: the “present” is not a metaphysical region, but a role played by ongoing activity and registration within the field of change.

5.1 Augustine: Distensio Animi and the “Three Presents”

In Confessions XI Augustine confronts time with a philosopher’s honesty:

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know.”⁴²

His crucial move is to relocate temporal talk from the cosmos into the structure of experience. Past and future do not exist as present objects. What exists, strictly speaking, is what is present to the soul — and the soul has different modes of presence:

• memory: the present-of-the-past

• attention: the present-of-the-present

• expectation: the present-of-the-future

Time, on this view, is a distension or stretching of the mind — distensio animi — by which consciousness holds together retention, presence, and anticipation.⁴³

This is a genuine conceptual advance. Augustine is already gesturing toward what Changism later formalizes as role-talk: “past” and “future” are not regions you travel to; they are ways the present system is structured — through retention and anticipation.

Where Changism diverges is the anchoring. Augustine makes the decisive structures mental. Changism treats them as world-structures: records and dispositions are not primarily features of introspection, but features of the ongoing field itself — traces, stabilizations, constraints, and propagations that exist whether or not anyone reflects on them. The point isn’t to deny lived time; it’s to refuse the slide from “time is experienced this way” to “time is made by experience.”

5.2 Boethius: the Nunc Aeternum and the Two-Level World

Boethius gives the period its classic theological template: eternity is “the whole, simultaneous, and perfect possession of endless life.”⁴⁴ God does not have time; God has an all-at-once completeness. Creatures, by contrast, live in a succession of “nows.”

Philosophically, this is a stabilization strategy. It protects divine perfection from the vulnerabilities of sequence — waiting, loss, change of mind — by treating temporality as a creaturely limitation.

From a Changist perspective, the cost is conceptual: it reintroduces a metaphysical hierarchy of two “presents” — a human now that passes, and a divine Now that does not. Changism declines the split. It does not need an atemporal vantage to explain order or meaning. Order is ledger-derivative — extracted from comparisons within the field — not bestowed by a timeless overseer.

5.3 Meister Eckhart: Mysticism of the Ever-New Now

Eckhart radicalizes the Augustinian impulse: salvation is not a journey through time but a collapse into immediacy. The “Now” becomes the site of union — an ever-renewed actuality in which the soul meets God without mediation.⁴⁵

This has a real metaphysical intuition: what is real is not an inventory of past and future objects but actuality-in-act. Yet Eckhart’s language also shows why “Now-talk” is dangerous. The word “now” carries temporal grammar even when one tries to make it timeless. It invites the very picture it is meant to dissolve: a privileged point on a line, or a spotlight illuminating one slice of reality.

Changism keeps the insight (reality is in act) while dropping the noun. Instead of an “Eternal Now,” Changism speaks of an ongoing field whose patterns include (i) active interactions, (ii) maintained records, and (iii) standing dispositions. “Present” names a role within that field, not a mystical location.

5.4 What these thinkers get right — and what they leave unresolved

(Insert your image here if you like, or use the following as text.)

Conceptual gains

• They break the spell of time-as-substance by showing how “past” and “future” are not present objects.

• They uncover the role-structure of tense (memory/attention/expectation), anticipating the idea that temporal categories function as modes of relation to actuality.

• They expose the temptation to treat “the present” as metaphysically special — and thereby clarify what any change-first view must explain.

Lingering limits

• They often keep a privileged Now, either as the only fully real slice (in practice) or as a divine atemporal Now (in theology).

• They tend to make time primarily a feature of mind or spirit, rather than a ledger-structure grounded in the world’s own records and constraints.

• They retain “flow,” “passage,” and “eternal now” idioms that quietly rebuild the very stage they meant to remove.

5.5 Why Changism moves beyond the “privileged present”

Late-antique and medieval present-fixes correctly sense that past and future are not sitting somewhere as objects. But they often respond by enthroning the present. Changism presses the diagnosis one step further: if time is a measure and tense is role-language, then even “the Now” is not a metaphysical slab. It is a boundary-term we use when we do our bookkeeping, and a practical name for the role played by ongoing activity and registration within the field.

What remains is not “present-being,” but ongoing becoming — a world that is not housed in time, but articulated by change. And in that light, the old Stoic verdict sounds less like aphorism and more like ontology: the cosmos is alteration.

If you want, I can also rewrite the short “bridge paragraph” that follows this section (into your Taoism/Buddhism section) so it carries the same role/ledger vocabulary forward without repeating itself.

6. Non-Western Convergences

If Changism were only a Greek afterimage — Heraclitus cleaned up by Aristotle and radicalized by the Stoics — it would be easy to dismiss it as a local temperament. But philosophies that matured far from the Aegean basin repeatedly land on a similar contour: what is basic is transformation; what we call “time” is secondary, pragmatic, or derivative. The point of this section is not to flatten traditions into one doctrine, but to use them as independent triangulations: different intellectual climates discovering the same temptation (reifying time) and the same cure (returning to change).

Changism sits comfortably in this shared direction, while insisting on its own discipline: it is not a spiritual metaphor, and it does not replace time with a mystical “timeless realm.” It keeps the world as field-in-act, and treats time as ledger structure — a comparative bookkeeping abstracted from regularities within change.

6.1 Taoist, Buddhist, and Vedāntic accounts of becoming

Taoism: zìrán and cyclical self-transformation

The Tao Te Ching begins by warning that ultimate reality cannot be captured by fixed names. That warning is already metaphysical: it suggests that the world’s intelligibility is not the stability of objects but the coherence of transformation. The Tao is not a thing inside time; it is the pattern of change itself — a self-ordering that manifests as alternation, return, and balance (often pictured through yin–yang dynamics). Seasonal and diurnal cycles function as images of rhythm, not as proofs of a linear timeline. Alignment (wú-wéi) is therefore not passivity; it is competence in the world’s changing grain.⁴⁶–⁴⁷

Changist resonance is direct: Taoism offers a vocabulary for order without a container — regularity immanent to the world’s activity rather than imposed by an external clock.

Early Buddhism: impermanence, dependent origination, and “time” as convention

Buddhist analysis begins with instability: whatever arises also ceases. But it adds a structural insight: things do not merely change; they are conditioned — nodes in a dependence network (pratītya-samutpāda). Whether one emphasizes “momentariness” (in some Abhidharma streams) or the later Madhyamaka critique of intrinsic arising, the direction is consistent: what looks like a persisting entity moving through time is better understood as an evolving configuration sustained by conditions.⁴⁸–⁵⁰

In this framework, “time” (kāla) is not an independent substance. It is a conventional descriptor for patterns of conditioning: a way of coordinating sequences, predicting consequences, and narrating karmic continuity without claiming an extra ontic layer. This maps neatly onto Changism’s insistence that time-talk is a ledger convenience — useful, often unavoidable, but not fundamental.

Advaita Vedānta: non-temporal ultimate reality and the world as appearance

Advaita intensifies the anti-reification move by placing ultimate reality beyond temporal delimitation altogether. The world of change is treated as an appearance (vivarta) associated with superimposition (adhyāsa) and ignorance (avidyā). Time (kāla) is bundled with the rest of phenomenal structuring (space, causality, individuating form) and is said to dissolve with realized knowledge.⁵¹–⁵²

This is the closest tradition here to simply saying “time is unreal.” Changism is more austere and more physical: it does not require a privileged consciousness-substrate to “dissolve” time. Instead, it treats time as a derivative bookkeeping structure within the world’s activity. Where Advaita diagnoses time as illusion in relation to ultimate awareness, Changism diagnoses time as a category error — mistaking the ledger for the field.

6.2 Shared motifs and what Changism learns from them

These convergences matter for three reasons.

• Triangulation. When disparate traditions keep stumbling on the same anti-reification move, the move begins to look less like a cultural quirk and more like a durable philosophical option.

• Conceptual resources. Taoist rhythm, Buddhist conditionality, and Vedāntic superimposition supply different diagnostic tools for the same error: treating abstractions as substances.

• Existential diagnosis. Each tradition in its own way links temporal fixation to suffering or confusion — an ethical shadow of the metaphysical point: reifying time distorts how we inhabit change.

6.3 What Changism adds (and where it refuses to follow)

To keep the comparison honest, Changism is not simply “Taoism + Buddhism + Stoicism with footnotes.” It advances the shared direction in three specific ways:

1. A realist, world-first account of tense.
   These traditions often treat past/future either as mental constructions or as ultimately empty. Changism agrees that past/future are not ontological regions — but it anchors tense in world-roles, not merely in mind: past as maintained records, future as standing dispositions, present as ongoing activity/registration. This preserves everyday truth and scientific practice without reifying time.

2. Ledger time rather than mysticism or mere negation.
   It’s one thing to say “time is secondary.” Changism specifies how: time is a ledger of comparisons among change-processes. That is a stricter claim than “time is illusory,” and it plugs directly into measurement, coordination, and physics.

3. Parity with modern physics (no privileged cosmic ‘Now’).
   Many philosophical and spiritual critiques of time drift toward a privileged viewpoint — an eternal present, an ultimate awareness, a cosmic cycle. Changism is designed to avoid smuggling in a master clock or privileged frame. It treats “time functions” as representational choices over the ledger, not as the universe’s hidden pulse.

So the non-Western convergences strengthen Changism’s central wager — change is basic, time is derivative — while also clarifying Changism’s distinctive posture: it is a disciplined metaphysics aimed at clarity, truthmakers, and scientific compatibility, not a therapeutic dissolution into ineffability.

The next sections return to the modern Western revival of becoming — Bergson, Husserl, and Whitehead — showing both how powerfully they move in the same direction and where they still allow time-grammar to reassert itself.

7. Modern Challenges to Temporal Substance

By the early twentieth century, “time” had become a metaphysical magnet: philosophers argued about whether it flows, physicists treated it as a coordinate, and ordinary language insisted it passes no matter what the theories said. Two thinkers — Henri Bergson and Edmund Husserl — attack the shared assumption behind these disputes: the idea that time is a neutral container in which change merely occurs.

Changism agrees with their central negative lesson: there is no homogeneous temporal medium underlying events. But it also diagnoses a remaining temptation: both Bergson and Husserl keep speaking as if there must still be some special temporality — qualitative, lived, or “absolute” — that does the job of ordering becoming. Changism proposes a cleaner resolution: there is one changing world (field-in-act), and multiple ledgers over it. Physics writes one kind of ledger (comparative counts of repeatable processes); living systems write another (embodied, affective, predictive registration). The felt “flow of time” is not evidence for a time-substance; it is how a predictive organism experiences its own bookkeeping over change.

7.1 Bergson: Durée and the revolt against spatialized time

Bergson’s target is the quiet substitution by which we turn time into space. We draw a line, cut it into equal segments, and call those segments “moments.” We then treat succession as if it were a row of externally juxtaposed units. This is not merely a technical error; it is a metaphysical distortion. What we actually live, Bergson insists, is not a string of beads but an interpenetrating continuity — durée réelle — in which qualitative tones shade into one another.

He captures the basic intuition with a vivid image: duration is not a series of discrete slices but an ongoing thickening in which what-has-been continues to weigh on what-is-happening.⁵⁴

What Changism adopts from Bergson

• Anti-container therapy. Bergson is a master at exposing how “time” becomes a pseudo-thing by borrowing spatial grammar (a line, a container, a sequence of equal units).

• Qualitative integration. He insists that lived experience is not punctual but blended: a melody is heard as a unity because its phases overlap in consciousness.

• Memory as persistence-within, not storage-behind. The past is not a warehouse “back there”; it is a way the present is structured and thickened.

Where Changism diverges (without dismissing the insight)

Bergson’s language often keeps a privileged experiential “now” at the center — an enlarging present, a flow, an advance. Changism treats this not as a fatal mistake but as a category slip: it risks turning the felt style of registration into an ontological ingredient. Changism’s alternative is to translate Bergson’s phenomenology into ledger terms:

• Lived durée is the internal ledger at work: a biologically constrained way of integrating and weighting change for action.

• “Flow” is how continuous updating feels from the inside, not a substance moving beneath events.

• “Past in the present” is the role of maintained traces (memory, bodily state, context) that actively constrain ongoing registration.

So Changism keeps Bergson’s critique of spatialized time, but refuses to replace clock-time with a second, metaphysically privileged time-fluid called durée. It treats durée as a mode of bookkeeping done by organisms.

7.2 Husserl: the “living present” and the structure of temporal givenness

Husserl’s question is precise: how can something like a melody be experienced as one thing, rather than as a series of isolated “nows”? His answer is structural. Experience contains a three-part intentional articulation:

• Primal impression: what strikes now (the current phase).

• Retention: the just-elapsed held in a fading but still-effective way.

• Protention: an anticipatory horizon of what is about to occur.

Temporality, Husserl claims, is constituted in this retentional–protentional structure.⁵⁵ The “present” is not a mathematical point but a field with thickness.

What Changism adopts from Husserl

• The thick-now diagnosis. Husserl makes it hard to believe in a razor-thin present. The lived now has breadth: it includes a short tail of what-just-happened and a short head of what-is-about-to-happen.

• Constitution of order. The experience of “succession” is not read off from a time-medium; it is achieved by a synthesis that binds phases together.

• Anti-objectification discipline. Husserl is unusually careful in insisting that the deepest “flow” is not an object in time.

Where Changism goes further

Husserl’s analysis is phenomenologically brilliant but ontologically cautious. He brackets nature to describe consciousness, and therefore he leaves a gap: if inner time-consciousness is a constituting structure, what is the world such that a nervous system can constitute temporality in this way?

Changism fills that gap by refusing to treat “constitution” as the creation of time out of nothing. Instead, it treats Husserl’s triad as the signature of an organism writing an internal ledger over a changing world:

• Retention corresponds to the persistence of records/traces that remain active in the system (neural, bodily, contextual).

• Protention corresponds to standing dispositions and predictions — a forward-leaning model that guides action.

• The felt “living present” is the experiential face of ongoing registration — the system updating its ledger in real time.

On this view, Husserl’s “flow” does not reveal an absolute temporality beneath physics. It reveals the way a predictive, embodied system must track change to remain coherent and capable of action.

7.3 Einstein vs. Bergson as a false duel: two ledgers, one field

The famous Einstein–Bergson clash (1922) is often staged as a contest between “objective time” (clocks) and “subjective time” (experience). Changism reframes the dispute: it is not a war over the essence of Time; it is a conflict over which ledger gets to speak for reality.

• The external ledger (physics) counts repeatable processes under explicit comparison rules. It is powerful precisely because it is indifferent to mood, meaning, and local salience.

• The internal ledger (organisms) integrates sensory change, bodily signals, memory, and anticipation into a thick, usable “now.” It is selective, affect-laden, and action-oriented.

Both ledgers track the same changing world. They compress it differently because they serve different functions. The mistake is to treat either compression as a metaphysical fluid called Time.

7.4 What Changism adds: beyond “flow” and beyond “the present”

Bergson and Husserl jointly dismantle the idea of time as a homogeneous container. Changism takes the next step by supplying a disciplined replacement that stays consistent across phenomenology, metaphysics, and physics.

Changism’s advances in this chapter’s territory

1. A unified ontology with plural ledgers.
   There is one field-in-act (one changing world), and many valid ledger systems over it — external for coordination, internal for lived coherence. No “true Time” sits behind them.

2. Role-talk for tense.
   Past, present, and future are not regions. They are roles within the ongoing field: maintained records, current activity/registration, and standing dispositions. This preserves truth and reference without reifying a moving Now.

3. A non-mystical account of “flow.”
   The feeling of temporal passage is real — but it is the felt aspect of continuous updating in an internal ledger, not evidence for a time-substance.

4. Parity with physics.
   Changism keeps the operational discipline Einstein demanded (time-talk must cash out in comparisons) without denying the experiential realities Bergson and Husserl described. It refuses to turn spacetime diagrams or lived durée into metaphysical arenas.

With this in place, Bergson and Husserl stop looking like rival metaphysicians and start looking like expert witnesses about different interfaces to the same reality: change. The next section will show why modern physics — especially relativity — forces the same moral on the external ledger side: the universe does not come with a single global “now,” only with comparable processes and the bookkeeping we build from them.

8. Process Metaphysics

The most ambitious modern attempt to put process, rather than substance, at the center of ontology is Alfred North Whitehead’s. Process and Reality does not merely add “change” to an inherited metaphysics; it rewires the basic vocabulary so that actuality is something that happens — a becoming, not a static item that later undergoes change.

For Changism, Whitehead is therefore a genuine ally. He rejects the world-as-inventory picture and treats “things” as outcomes of ongoing activity — stabilized patterns rather than metaphysical atoms. Where substance metaphysics begins with persistent objects and then explains change as a modification of them, Whitehead begins with event-like actuality and explains persistence as a special case of patterned repetition and inheritance.

Changism also uses Whitehead as a clean contrast case — not because Whitehead smuggles in Newton’s container-time (he does not), but because his system still treats succession as structurally fundamental. Whitehead’s world is articulated as a genesis: occasions come to completion; later occasions inherit earlier ones; creativity is described as an advance. The metaphysical grammar itself repeatedly leans on “earlier/later” and on the idea that actuality is produced by a series of completed becomings.

Changism aims to go one step further. It keeps everything that matters about process — novelty, inheritance, constraint, the emergence of stable patterns — while refusing to treat temporal succession (and especially a metaphysically weighty “present”) as basic furniture. Instead, it reconstructs “earlier/later,” “succession,” and even “present” as ledger-and-role talk: derivative descriptions drawn from how change-patterns compare, constrain one another, and leave maintainable records. Beneath those descriptions is a more primitive posit: one ongoing field of differential change — a single field-in-act whose articulations can be tracked by ledgers without being constituted by a thing called Time.

8.1 Whitehead’s “creative advance into novelty”

Whitehead compresses the heart of his metaphysical vision into a single refrain: the world is a creative advance into novelty. The force of the slogan lies in the reversal of explanatory direction. On a substance view, novelty is an accident — something happens to a thing, and we then ask why. For Whitehead, novelty is basal: actuality is not first a thing and then an event; it is an event-like act of becoming that culminates in a determinate fact.

Whitehead’s basic units are actual occasions: momentary acts of becoming whose “being” consists in how they become. Each occasion achieves determinacy through concrescence — a process of synthesizing inherited influences into a completed “satisfaction.” Stability is therefore not primordial. It is what you get when patterns of becoming repeat, inherit, and cohere into what Whitehead calls societies: structured continuities produced by coordinated processes.

To secure repeatability without reducing it to any single episode, Whitehead introduces eternal objects: pure potentials or forms that can “ingress” into occasions, allowing patterned definiteness to recur across different acts of becoming. And his epochal approach insists that becoming is not a smooth ooze but a structured act: “the many become one,” and the world is thereby increased by one completed actuality.

From a Changist standpoint, all of this is philosophically powerful — and also diagnostically revealing. Whitehead shows how far you can go by replacing substance with becoming. Changism agrees, but then presses a further question: must the engine of becoming be described in a way that makes completion + inheritance + advance metaphysically basic? Or can those notions be reconstructed as derived bookkeeping over an even simpler posit: one field-in-act whose patterns stabilize, leave records, and generate order through comparability rather than through a primitive temporal sequence?

Table 8.1 — Whitehead’s key terms and a Changist translation

8.2 What Changism takes — and what it changes

Whitehead’s achievement is enormous: he breaks the spell of static substance and shows how a world can be articulated in terms of becoming. Changism accepts that process-first shift. But it adds a stricter discipline — one that functions almost like a rule of method:

Do not let “time” re-enter as metaphysical engine-room vocabulary.
In Changism, change names the activity; time names the accounting we do over that activity.

What Changism gladly takes

• Event-first ontology: reality is fundamentally activity-like rather than thing-like.

• Stability as derivative: “objects” are maintained patterns — coherences that persist through ongoing renewal.

• Novelty as real: the world is not just rearranging a fixed inventory; new configurations arise.

Where Changism tightens the ontology

1) Succession is not denied — but it is not primitive

Whitehead rejects Newtonian container-time, yet his metaphysical grammar remains “genetic”: occasions complete; later occasions inherit earlier ones; creativity is described as an advance. In that idiom, succession does heavy explanatory work.

Changism keeps everything you want from inheritance — constraint, asymmetry, downstream consequences — without installing “earlier/later” as basic furniture. Ontology begins with one ongoing field-in-act: a single global reality articulated into patterns. “Before/after” is recovered as ledger structure: ordering-and-scaling extracted from comparisons among change-processes (counts, ratios, synchronization conventions, and record-dependence). Order is real — but it is derived order: an output of comparison and constraint, not a metaphysical medium.

Two clarifications make the move precise:

• Changism freely uses time-parameters where physics uses them, but treats them as non-ontic indices — coordinate choices and bookkeeping labels that summarize comparative relations rather than constitute reality.

• Changism explicitly blocks the “moving present” picture. “Present/past/future” are not regions of existence, and there is no second-order motion of a privileged Now. They are roles played by structures within the field.

2) Potentiality is not imported; it is internal to the field

Whitehead’s eternal objects secure repeatability by positing a special category of potentials that can ingress into occasions. Changism declines that additional category — not as a dismissal of the problem, but as a preference for an immanent solution.

On the Changist view, repeatability and modality are explained from within the field’s organization: standing dispositions, constraints, affordances, and stable pattern-families that already exist as features of ongoing activity. “The possible” is not housed in a separate realm; it is a role played by how the current configuration constrains admissible continuations. That is also why robust future claims can be grounded without “already-existing future events”: the truthmakers are present dispositions and constraints, not a pre-laid-out temporal region.

3) Tense becomes role-talk with explicit truthmakers

Whitehead has sophisticated resources for inheritance and for the availability of the past as datum for later becomings. Changism preserves the same pressure point — how tensed claims can be true — while refusing to turn tense into ontology.

Past / present / future are not three regions of being. They are roles played by structures inside the field:

• Present-role: ongoing meeting-activity — active couplings/registrations in progress (where interactions update and marks are made).

• Past-role: maintained records and traces — stabilized encodings downstream of prior registrations (what exists now as consequence).

• Future-role: standing dispositions/potentials — persisting constraints and affordances poised to shape admissible next developments.

This delivers a clean payoff: ordinary tensed truth does not force either (i) a privileged moving Now (presentist pressure) or (ii) a block of equally existing times (eternalist pressure). The truthmaking work is done by ongoing truthmakers — activity, maintained records, and standing dispositions instantiated in the one field-in-act.

Before we contrast Whitehead and Changism on time, it helps to name a second fork that shapes everything: discreteness vs continuity. Whitehead’s genius is to make becoming intelligible by giving it a micro-grammar — actual occasions that concresce, achieve satisfaction, and then become available for inheritance. That “epochal” articulation makes process tractable: reality comes in completed acts, and the world advances by the accretion of such acts.

Changism can agree with the motivation — make process intelligible — while rejecting the metaphysical conclusion. The Changist field-in-act is not a sequence of ultimate event-atoms. It is best understood as an analog continuum of differential change: indefinitely divisible activity whose articulations are always description-relative. “Events” are real in the sense that there are real joints — meetings where interactions register, marks are made, and constraints bite — but those joints are not uncuttable beads. They are closure regimes: boundaries we draw because a process stabilizes, a record forms, a measurement updates, or a modeling resolution has been chosen.

This matters immediately for Changism’s time thesis. If there is no smallest unit of change, then there is no smallest unit of time in the ontology either. “Seconds,” “ticks,” even “Planck time” function as standards of bookkeeping — ways of keeping a ledger over a field whose activity does not come pre-packaged into discrete steps. Discreteness remains everywhere in practice — detector clicks, quantized outcomes, stable thresholds — but Changism reads these as quantized modes of organization and registration within a continuous field, not as proof that reality is built from event-quanta.

Table 8.2 summarizes the load-bearing contrast: Whitehead tends to treat epochal units as ontologically central to becoming; Changism treats continuity as ontologically basic and treats “units” as ledger-relative partitions of ongoing activity.

Whitehead makes becoming legible by articulating it into epochal acts; Changism makes becoming legible by treating all articulation as ledger-relative partitions of a continuous field-in-act.

8.3 From process to pure change

Whitehead dissolves substance. Changism dissolves something subtler: the habit of indexing becoming to an intrinsic time-order — treating temporal succession as the form of process rather than as a derivative description of it.

Changism’s ontology can be stated compactly:

• One field-in-act: one ongoing global field of differential change, with “things” as stabilized patterns of co-change (process monism).

• Time as ledger: temporal quantities are bookkeeping over relations among change-processes; any “time function” is a chosen index that summarizes the underlying comparison structure, not an ontic medium.

• Tense as role-talk: “past/ongoing/future” name roles played by structures in the field (records, activity, dispositions), not provinces of being; and there is no privileged Now that “moves.”

So Changism is not “process philosophy plus a new theory of time.” It is process metaphysics with a lexical and conceptual constraint: change is the stage; time is the bookkeeping.

Table 8.3 — The load-bearing contrast (conceptual)

8.4 What Changism brings to the table

In its most compact form, Changism contributes four upgrades beyond classic process metaphysics:

• A stricter demotion of time: not only “no container-time,” but no primitive temporal order doing ontological work; ordering is recovered via ledger comparison rather than installed as a metaphysical layer.

• A unified semantics for tense: past/present/future are grounded in ongoing structures (records/activity/dispositions) with explicit truthmakers, not in temporal regions.

• A measurement-ready interface: time-talk is disciplined into ledger talk — comparisons among change-processes under explicit standards — so the metaphysics naturally matches scientific practice instead of floating above it.

• Relativity resilience as a constraint: no preferred frame, no master clock, no privileged Now — built into the view as a prohibition against “moving-present” leakage and against treating any coordinate as ontic structure.

Bridge to the Physics Interface

Whitehead’s system remains one of the most powerful metaphysics of becoming ever written. But the pressure to demote temporal order becomes unavoidable once physics enters the room. Relativity denies any universal present and treats time readings as path-dependent comparisons among clocks. Quantum theory pushes even harder on what counts as a “fact,” emphasizing registration, record, and constraint.

In other words, modern physics is not a side-topic that can be added after metaphysics is finished. It is a discipline that forces metaphysics to keep its hands clean: if “time” cannot be measured except as comparisons among processes, and if no experiment detects a single global Now, then the safest ontology is one where time is ledger and the world is change.

That is the task of the next chapter: to show how relativity and quantum mechanics do not merely fit inside Changism, but actively motivate its central moves.

9. The Physics Interface: Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

So far the argument has been philosophical: whenever we treat time as a thing — something that flows, contains, or “passes” — we end up mistaking our bookkeeping for the world. Physics is where this diagnosis becomes unavoidable, because physics forces time-talk to cash out in procedures: what is measured, by what device, under what comparison rule. When you follow that discipline all the way down, “time” stops looking like a dimension the universe sits inside, and starts looking like what Changism has been saying all along: a ledger over change.

Relativity and quantum mechanics deliver the same moral from opposite sides:

• Relativity denies a single global “now” and replaces it with local clocks, signals, and translation rules between ledgers.

• Quantum mechanics denies a single universal “state of the world” and replaces it with local records, interaction-defined facts, and reconciliation when systems actually meet.

Changism takes these as constraints on ontology, not as reasons for despair. There is one world in act — one field of change — but no God’s-eye bookkeeping surface stamped onto it.

9.1 Relativity: clocks don’t measure time, they count change

Relativity is often introduced as “time behaving strangely”: time slows down, time dilates, time bends near black holes. Changism treats this as story-flavor. Nothing happens to a substance called time, because there is no such substance. What actually happens is simpler and more physical:

• lawful processes run at condition-dependent rates, and

• when those processes take different routes, their totals differ when compared.

A clock is not a portal into metaphysical time. A clock is a repeating process plus a counter plus an agreed unit rule. Send a clock on a journey and what it brings back is a number: how many cycles occurred along that path. Textbooks call the integrated tally “proper time.” Changism calls it proper count — the path-dependent total of a process’s internal updates.

That shift in vocabulary is not cosmetic. It turns the “paradoxes” into accounting:

• Two identical clocks take different routes through different speeds and gravitational depths.

• They reunite and compare tallies.

• The mismatch is the data: different histories, different totals.

Relativity’s geometry is then read as what it operationally is: a compact rulebook for predicting how ledgers will differ across paths.

Two tempo levers: speed and gravity

Relativity gives two unavoidable knobs on rates:

• Speed: relative motion changes the cadence of all internal processes when ledgers are compared on reunion.

• Gravity: deeper gravitational regions shift local cadences relative to higher regions; signals exchanged across depths exhibit stable frequency offsets (gravitational redshift).

Again: not “time slowing,” but processes running at different rates under different conditions, and then being compared.

The tempo field: a world of uneven cadence, not a stage

Changism’s best summary image for relativity is the tempo field: a mapping from local conditions to the cadence of well-behaved processes. Regions differ in “how much internal update” fits into a given relational story because the mass–energy distribution and motion conditions differ. Spacetime geometry is a compressed encoding of this tempo structure — a way of zipping up ledger behavior into equations that let you predict totals for any proposed route.

This is why the familiar relativistic effects read cleanly in ledger terms:

• Redshift is rhythm mismatch stamped into a signal.

• Delay is the accumulated “beat-cost” of a path through slower-cadence regions.

• Differential aging is simply different proper counts for different paths between the same meetings.

GPS: federated ledgers in your pocket

If this still sounds philosophical, GPS makes it industrial. Satellite and ground clocks run under different speed and gravitational-depth conditions. Their rates diverge predictably; engineers pre-offset and continuously correct those drifts so that the network’s ledgers cohere. Navigation works because the system does not assume a universal master time — it constructs a working time by reconciling many local counts under known comparison rules and signal constraints.

Relativity, then, does not mystify time. It disciplines it. It teaches that “time” is what you get when you compare process-counts along routes — never a cosmic fluid, never a global now-slice.

9.2 Quantum mechanics: the wavefunction is a ledger, not an inventory

Quantum theory confronts us with a parallel temptation: to treat the wavefunction as the literal inventory of reality, a cosmic spreadsheet that exists “out there,” and then mysteriously collapses everywhere at once. Once that reification takes hold, the usual horror stories follow: instantaneous collapse, spooky action, incompatible observer accounts.

The Changist remedy mirrors the relativistic one. In relativity we learned to stop asking for a universal operational present. In quantum mechanics we stop asking for a universal observer-independent state-description.

A quantum state is best treated as a compact record kept by some physical system about another system, summarizing what outcomes are to be expected in future interactions given what interactions have already occurred. In short: a state is a ledger.

This is not “subjectivism.” It is physical realism with operational hygiene:

• different systems can legitimately keep different ledgers before contact, because they stand in different interaction histories and possess different records;

• those ledgers are forced toward reconciliation when relevant systems actually meet and compare marks;

• there is one world, but not one privileged description written from nowhere.

Measurement as meeting: approach → registration → stabilization

Quantum “measurement” stops looking like a magical interruption once it is described in the same ontology used throughout Changism:

• Approach: systems come into a relation where interaction could occur; different ledgers may still differ.

• Registration: coupling produces a definite mark — a correlation physically instantiated in some degrees of freedom.

• Stabilization/propagation: the mark becomes durable (copied, dissipated, carried) so it can function as a public record.

“Collapse,” in this grammar, is not a global shudder in reality. It is a ledger update when a new stable mark exists for a given system.

Entanglement without ghosts

Entanglement is often imagined as a spooky glue. Changism treats it as what it operationally is: a constraint on joint expectations that survives separation because it was created by a shared interaction history. Nothing needs to travel faster than light to enforce correlation structure; what travels are records and signals, and those travel under the same reachability constraints as everything else.

Objectivity as reconciliation

If states are ledgers and facts are marks, then “objectivity” cannot mean a view from nowhere. It means: stable marks plus successful cross-calibration. A fact becomes public to the extent that records can be checked, copied, transported, and reconciled across independent meetings.

Quantum mechanics, read this way, does not dissolve reality. It dissolves a counterfeit demand: that the world must come with a single universal state-description already written.

9.3 The unified moral: no universal Now, no universal State — and no extra metaphysical stage

Relativity and quantum mechanics converge on a single discipline:

• No preferred global simultaneity slice.

• No preferred global state-description.

Those are not mere interpretive quirks. They are warnings about reification: stop turning bookkeeping devices (coordinates, synchronization conventions, wavefunctions) into metaphysical furniture.

Changism takes the next, carefully limited step: it refuses both extremes.

• It refuses the block-universe style move of treating a coordinate surface as the boundary of existence.

• It refuses the anti-realist move of treating physics as “just perspectives.”

Instead it proposes a consistent ontology that fits both theories:

1. One world in act: a single changing reality, not many disconnected “nows,” not many branching worlds.

2. Many ledgers: different subsystems keep different compressed accounts, because access is local and comparison requires contact.

3. Time as ledger: temporal quantities are ratios and orderings abstracted from comparisons among processes.

4. Quantum states as ledgers: state assignments are predictive summaries relative to interaction histories, updated at meetings and stabilized by records.

This is what Changism “brings to the table” at the physics interface: it gives a single, non-mystical way of speaking that makes relativity and quantum theory feel like allies rather than conceptual enemies.

Bridge to Chapter 11: why this is not presentism

At this point it may sound as if Changism is simply crowning “the present” and declaring everything else unreal. That would be a mistake — and it is exactly the mistake that physics is now in a position to prevent. Relativity blocks the idea of a single global present; quantum theory blocks the idea of a single global inventory “right now.” Changism therefore cannot be presentism in the usual sense.

The next chapter makes this explicit. It shows why Changism rejects the metaphysical privilege of a moving Now, while still grounding tense in reality — by treating “past,” “present,” and “future” as roles played by records, ongoing activity, and dispositions within the one changing world.

10 From Presentism to Changism

By now, “time as a container” has lost its grip. Clocks don’t tap into a cosmic substance; they count changes. Relativity denies a frame-independent global “now.” Quantum theory denies a single universal “state of the world” written from nowhere. The temptation, at this stage, is to retreat to presentism: only the present exists.

Presentism is an important waypoint because it refuses the metaphysical warehouse: no fully stocked past “still out there,” no fully real future “already waiting.” Changism agrees with that refusal. Where Changism breaks from presentism is in the picture of what the “present” is supposed to be.

10.1 Why Changism is not presentism

Standard presentism smuggles in a stage. It imagines time as a line (or dimension) of moments, and then loads ontology onto one privileged slice of that line: the present, pictured as a knife-edge that advances, turning future into present into past.

Once you grant that stage-picture, the familiar puzzles flood in:

• What moves the present slice?

• At what rate — and in what meta-time?

• How can a zero-thickness boundary do any explanatory work?

And physics adds a harder constraint: if there is no observer-independent global simultaneity, then a single cosmic “present slice” is not something the world itself hands you.

Changism keeps what presentists want (one actuality, no warehouses) and drops what breaks it (the slice). The fundamental reality is not “a special time called the present.” The fundamental reality is the ongoing activity itself — the global field of change.

10.2 The Changist replacement: field-in-act and role-talk

Changism replaces the “moving present” with a thicker, more concrete notion:

Global field of change = the totality of ongoing interactions and changes.
Past = records written and maintained within that ongoing field.
Future = real but unactualized potentials/dispositions anchored in the current configuration.

This is the key shift in grammar: past / present / future are not regions of being. They are roles played by structures that are already in the one ongoing world:

• Past-role: stabilized records under maintenance (memories, fossils, files, scars, correlations).

• Present-role: ongoing registration and interaction (where marks are being written).

• Future-role: standing dispositions and constraints (loaded springs, unstable equilibria, reliable tendencies).

So Changism isn’t saying “only the present exists” in the presentist sense. It’s saying: only the ongoing world exists — and within it you find records and dispositions that make tense-talk true without turning tense into cosmic geography.

10.3 McTaggart, disarmed: tenses aren’t properties that migrate

McTaggart’s famous trap bites only if you treat “past,” “present,” and “future” as real properties that an event acquires and loses — as if “presentness” were a spotlight sliding over a fixed script. Then the same event seems forced to be future, present, and past, and the attempt to explain that change smuggles in a second time-order (regress).

Changism dissolves the trap by changing what tense-words are doing.

On the Changist picture, an event-description can stand in three different relations to the field-in-act:

• Future-role: not-yet-written but genuinely possible, given the field’s current constraints.

• Present-role: being written now — registered in ongoing interaction.

• Past-role: already written — available as a maintained record that can be consulted, copied, and used.

Nothing “becomes present” by acquiring a metaphysical sticker. What changes is the field itself: new registrations occur, new records stabilize, and dispositions shift as interactions unfold. Order-talk (earlier/later) remains perfectly usable as ledger structure over records; it simply stops pretending to be a frozen substitute for becoming.

10.4 The truthmaker payoff: past and future without warehouses

Presentism struggles with a blunt question: if past events don’t exist, what makes past-tense truths true (e.g., “there were dinosaurs”)? Eternalism answers: the past event exists tenselessly in the block. Presentists often reach for traces, abstractions, or primitive tensed facts.

Changism takes the trace intuition and strengthens it into an ontology:

• Past truths are grounded in records under ongoing maintenance (structures that encode earlier registrations).

• Ongoing truths are grounded in ongoing activity/configuration.

• Robust future truths (where applicable) are grounded in standing dispositions/potentials — constraints that support or force certain continuations.

No extra “past realm,” no pre-existing “future realm,” and no privileged moving “now” are required — only the field-in-act and its role-structures.

10.5 Changism among the usual options

If you keep the time-stage, philosophy forces a pick:

• Presentism: only one slice exists.

• Eternalism/block: all slices exist.

Changism refuses the stage. It keeps one world in act, plus the ledger machinery we use to compare changes. In that sense it preserves the presentist motivation (no warehouses) while respecting the relativistic constraint (no global moving edge), and it preserves the block’s structural virtues (the geometry captures real constraints) without freezing ontology into a completed slab.

So the slogan is simple: Changism is what presentism becomes when “the present” stops being a slice of time and becomes the ongoing field of change itself — and when “past” and “future” are treated as roles grounded in records and dispositions, not as extra regions of being.

11 Conclusion: Living in Change, Counting What We Can

This essay began with a familiar metaphysical reflex: to picture reality as something arranged in time. Whether we crown the present (presentism) or lay out past and future as equally real (the block), the shared assumption is that time is the stage and change is what happens on it.

Changism rejects that stage.

Across the historical arc — Heraclitus and Parmenides, Aristotle and the Stoics, Augustine’s triune present, Taoist rhythm and Buddhist conditionality, Bergson’s critique of spatialized succession, Husserl’s thick “living present,” Whitehead’s event-ontology, and finally the hard constraints of relativity and quantum mechanics — the same pattern kept reappearing: the more carefully we look, the less “time” behaves like an independent ingredient. Clocks do not detect a flowing substance; they count repeatable change. Relativity does not reveal a single cosmic Now; it reveals a web of comparison rules among local processes. Quantum theory does not hand us a universal inventory of reality; it hands us interaction, registration, stabilization, and the reconciliation of records when systems meet.

Changism draws one clean ontological moral from all of this:

Reality is a field-in-act — one ongoing world of differential change.
Time is the ledger we keep when we compare changes.
Past, present, and future are roles within the field: records, activity, dispositions.

That triad is the whole view in miniature. Everything else is a consequence.

What Changism clarifies

Changism is not an attempt to deny time in the sense of denying clocks, durations, or predictions. It is an attempt to stop time from being metaphysically bewitched into a thing.

Once time is treated as ledger, a surprising amount of philosophical baggage drops away:

• The “flow of time” no longer needs explaining as a cosmic phenomenon. Flow is the felt signature of ongoing updating in living systems, and the operational signature of counting in physical systems.

• The “present” no longer needs to be a privileged metaphysical slice. What exists is the ongoing field. “Present” is a role-name for ongoing interaction and registration within it.

• The past is not a ghost realm that must somehow still exist to make history true. Past is the record-role: traces, marks, and stabilized consequences that remain available in the field.

• The future is not a pre-written region. Future is the disposition-role: standing constraints and affordances anchored in current structure.

Changism therefore preserves what ordinary and scientific discourse needs — truth, prediction, memory, responsibility — while refusing the metaphysical stage on which those practices are often (mis)imagined to depend.

What Changism adds to process philosophy

Process metaphysics already teaches that becoming is real and that “things” are patterns. Changism tightens the picture at the load-bearing joints:

• It removes the last temptation to treat temporal sequence as primitive metaphysical scaffolding.

• It replaces “time” with ledger structure: comparisons among changes under explicit standards.

• It replaces “tense” with role-talk grounded in the field’s real structures: records and dispositions.

• It interfaces cleanly with modern physics by refusing to smuggle in a master clock, a preferred foliation, or a universal “state of the world.”

In short: Changism is process philosophy made operationally disciplined and relativity-resilient.

What this means for how we live

There is an ethical quietism sometimes attached to “live in the present.” Changism’s ethical corollary is more precise and, arguably, more realistic:

Don’t cling to temporal pictures — past-as-a-place, future-as-a-place, the present-as-a-knife-edge — because those pictures are abstractions we mistake for reality. What is real is change: ongoing activity, maintained records, standing dispositions. Wisdom is not worship of the present; it is competence in change.

That competence has many cultural names — Stoic clarity about what depends on you, Buddhist non-clinging to impermanent formations, Taoist alignment with the grain of transformation — but the metaphysical backbone is the same: liberation from reified time is liberation into the world as it is — in act.

Changism is a disciplined proposal, not a rhetorical flourish:

• It rejects time as ontological container without denying measurement.

• It rejects a privileged Now without denying actuality.

• It rejects the block-as-inventory without denying structure.

• It grounds tense without inventing extra realms.

Reality is not in time. Reality is in change — and time is what we call the bookkeeping we do when we try to keep track of it.

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Appendix A: Changism’s Ontology

A.1 The baseline: “absolute nothing” is not a live option

Changism starts from a very thin necessity: there must be some reality rather than absolute nothing. The “absolute nothing” on the table here is not an empty space, not a vacuum, not a blank spacetime — no objects, no properties, no relations, no laws, no modality, no framework at all. The technical argument is that, once you try to treat that as a coherent possibility, it defeats the very conditions needed to state it, think it, or compare it to anything else. The upshot is modest but sturdy: being is the baseline.

Crucially, this doesn’t force a “timeless block.” The same baseline is consistent with either a block-style reading or a process-style reading; Changism argues that once you add the further constraints already implicit in measurement and evidence, the process reading is the least ontologically extravagant.

A.2 One field-in-act: process monism, not “things + change”

Changism’s positive wager is simple:

Reality is one ongoing field-in-act.
Not a static inventory that later undergoes change, but ongoing activity all the way down. “Field” here does not mean a silent container under events. It means: the totality of activity hangs together — fine-grained changes are not isolated beads; they form a globally articulated web.

This is why Changism is strict about not smuggling in a privileged metaphysical “present.” There is no second-order motion of a Now sweeping across reality. “Present/past/future” are not ontological regions; they are role-labels for structures inside the one ongoing field.

A.3 Things are patterns of co-change (not substances)

On this ontology, “things” are real, but they are not fundamental building blocks. A stone, a clock, a person, a storm, a galaxy: each is a relatively stable pattern of co-change — a regime of activity that maintains enough coherence to be tracked and re-identified.

This yields three practical consequences:

• No substrate behind the doing. “Substance” talk is allowed only as shorthand for stability properties of patterns.

• Parts are sub-patterns. A part is a sub-regime that can be perturbed without annihilating the larger regime.

• Identity is reconstructed, not assumed. Persistence is not magical sameness through time; it is continuity of a pattern under lawful transformation.

The technical appendices give a cluster of identity conditions (invariants, lineage, error-tolerance/self-correction, role continuity, permitted metamorphosis). In ordinary terms: a “same thing” is what survives by keeping enough of its organizing profile — sometimes by resisting disruption, sometimes by repairing, sometimes by transforming in admissible ways. Identity is therefore practice-sensitive and explanatory, not metaphysically primitive.

A.4 Meetings: how reality earns its predicates

Changism treats interaction as ontologically central. A “meeting” is any admissible coupling between patterns where they can make discriminable differences to one another. Evidence, knowledge, and even ordinary property-ascriptions depend on this meeting structure.

The meeting engine — described in the appendices in a disciplined way — has a recognizable storyline:

1. Approach: conditions align for interaction

2. Coupling: the patterns become dynamically linked

3. Registration: something about one pattern is written into the other

4. Stabilization: the mark becomes robust (redundancy, dissipation, embedding)

5. Propagation: the mark spreads into other systems (memories, logs, traces)

This isn’t just epistemology. It is ontology with teeth: it tells you what “having a property” amounts to, and what “being a fact” amounts to.

A.5 Properties and facts: no free-floating traits

Properties in Changism are not free-floating stickers on objects. They are defined by what can be registered in admissible meetings. Different meters carve reality at different joints, so property talk is inherently meeting-relative and often coarse-grained (many micro-differences can land in the same stable reading).

Facts are not “truths hovering over the world.” Facts are stabilized records of registrations — marks that endure, can be consulted, and can converge across many routes of access. In short: facts are what survives stabilization and propagation in the record-network of the field.

This underwrites Changism’s negative discipline:

• No free-floating properties. If something can never, even in principle, enter admissible meeting-structure and make recordable differences, it is ontologically idle inside this framework.

A.6 Time: not a dimension of being, but a ledger of comparisons

Changism does not add an ingredient called Time. It treats “time” as the ledger structure abstracted from how change-processes compare with one another. Clocks don’t “tap into time”; clocks are processes whose cycles can be compared to other processes. Temporal talk is disciplined bookkeeping: ratios, ordering, coordination rules.

Two consequences matter for the article’s core thesis:

• Relationality: there is no meaningful “time of a single process” in isolation — only comparisons between processes.

• Gauge freedom: choosing a reference clock changes the numbers, not the underlying comparison structure (seconds vs milliseconds is not a metaphysical shift).

When physics uses a time-parameter in equations, Changism reads it as a representational index — useful, often indispensable — but not ontically fundamental.

A.7 Tense: role-talk grounded in records and dispositions

With the ontology above in hand, Changism treats tense as role-language over the field:

• Past-role: records under ongoing maintenance (traces, memories, stored correlations)

• Ongoing-role: active meeting/registration (what is in play)

• Future-role: standing dispositions/constraints (what is poised to happen next, with varying modal strength)

So Changism is neither “only the present exists” (presentism) nor “all times exist equally” (block eternalism). It keeps one reality in act and grounds tensed truths in present structures: records and dispositions embedded in the ongoing field.

A.8 Constraint: empirical parity with relativity (no preferred frame)

Changism is ontologically ambitious but empirically conservative at this layer: it must not smuggle in a preferred frame, foliation, or master clock. Relativity’s lesson, translated into ledger language, is that comparisons between processes are context-sensitive (motion, gravity, histories), and there is no globally privileged reference process that everything else “really” tracks.

A.9 One-page summary

There is one field-in-act. “Things” are patterns of co-change. What counts as real is what can, in principle, enter meeting-structure and make recordable differences. Properties and facts come from registration → stabilization → propagation. “Time” is ledger structure over comparisons among change-processes, not an extra ingredient. Tense is role-talk grounded in records, activity, and dispositions — and none of this introduces a preferred cosmic Now or a master clock.