Why Changism Is Not Presentism
People often hear Changism say “only what’s happening is real” and assume it must be presentism.
It isn’t.
Changism does share a core intuition with presentism: there’s no hidden warehouse of past things still sitting somewhere, and no storeroom of fully-real future things waiting to arrive.
But the similarity ends as soon as we ask: what, exactly, is “the present”?
What presentism usually means
In philosophy of time, presentism is the family of views that say:
Only the present exists.
The past is gone.
The future is not yet anything.
That fits everyday life pretty well. We act now, remember then, and plan for what’s ahead.
But presentism usually comes with a familiar picture (often unspoken):
Time is like a line or stage.
The “present” is a razor-thin slice of that stage.
And that slice somehow “moves” forward, turning future into present into past.
This “moving now” picture creates immediate puzzles:
What moves the slice?
At what rate? In what meta-time?
How can a zero-thickness boundary do any explanatory work?
And it creates another, bigger pressure: relativity. Modern physics gives us no single, observer-independent global “now” that the universe shares all at once.
So presentists often end up adding extra machinery: a hidden preferred frame, a frame-relative “present,” or special truthmakers to patch things up—while keeping the stage picture intact.
What Changism keeps from presentism
Changism happily keeps what presentism was reaching for at its best:
1) Reality is genuinely in act.
Not a finished inventory. Not a dead tableau. The world is actively happening.
2) The future is genuinely not-yet.
Not “already there” in a completed cosmic book.
3) Past-talk and future-talk need truthmakers.
If we say true things about yesterday or tomorrow, something in the world-as-it-is must underwrite those claims.
Changism agrees with all of that.
The disagreement is about the model of actuality.
Where Changism breaks with presentism: no time-stage
Changism steps back and questions the stage itself.
In physics, “time” is a coordinate we assign to change using clocks and conventions. It’s part of our bookkeeping. But in metaphysics it often gets turned into a container—an arena that events “sit inside.”
Once you treat time like an arena, you’re pushed into the classic fight:
Does only one slice of the arena exist (presentism)?
Or does the whole arena exist (eternalism / block universe)?
Changism refuses that setup.
It keeps the physics, but drops the idea that time is a thing—
not a line, not a block, not a container.
The Changist alternative: one ongoing field, “thick” roles
Changism says: there is one world actually happening—a global field of ongoing interactions.
But “present” does not mean a razor-thin instant.
Instead, the ongoing world is structured in at least three intertwined ways:
Ongoing activity
Interactions in act—meetings, couplings, registrations happening now.
Maintained records
Stabilized traces carried forward—memories, fossils, logs, scars, archives, downstream encodings.
Standing dispositions (potentials)
Real constraints and tendencies—stored tensions, capacities, gradients, laws-and-conditions that shape what can happen next.
So when Changism talks about “past” and “future,” it’s not pointing to extra realms.
“Past” = the records in the current field (what has been written and is still carried).
“Future” = the potentials in the current field (what the current configuration makes likely or possible).
This is why Changism can sound presentism-friendly—but it is not presentism.
Because Changism is not saying: “only this infinitesimal moment exists.”
It’s saying: the ongoing process exists, and it already includes records and dispositions as real features of the world in motion.
Many ledgers, not one cosmic “now”
Changism also avoids the presentist temptation to insist on one universal synchronized present.
Instead: one world, many ledgers.
Clocks tick along worldlines.
Memories update locally.
Detectors log data where they are.
Synchronization at a distance is a procedure, not a metaphysical fact.
Relativity becomes a feature, not a threat:
There is no master “now” line singled out by the equations.
Different observers legitimately assign different time labels to distant events.
What changes is coordination and access, not what exists.
A helpful contrast:
Presentism often treats simultaneity as a requirement of reality.
Changism treats it as a tool of bookkeeping.
The simplest way to say it
You can keep the slogan “only the present exists” only if you radically change what “present” means.
Not a moving knife-edge on a timeline.
But the whole, ongoing coastline of interactions—
where processes meet, write marks, carry records, and hold real potentials.
Once you make that shift, you’ve left presentism behind.
Because then:
Reality is not a special time among other times.
Reality is the ongoing process itself, and “times” are how we measure and organize change.
Changism begins where presentism was aiming—one living actuality—but it outgrows the picture of time as a stage and “the present” as a sliding spotlight.
Changism is what presentism becomes when it outgrows the idea of time as a thing and returns to the deeper insight that change itself is primordial, that the most fundamental aspect of reality is not the present moment, but change.
Not presentism, but Changism.
