Changism’s Ontology of Change: why change exists, what it is, and what it does

We’re trained to picture reality as “stuff” sitting in time, while change is something that happens to the stuff.

Changism flips that picture. Reality isn’t arranged inside a temporal container. Reality is change in action—a single field-in-act—and what we call “time” is the ledger we build when we compare changes.

Why does change exist?

Changism begins with a hard constraint: “absolute nothing” isn’t an admissible option. The idea collapses under truthmaking pressure—if there were literally nothing, there would be nothing that could make the claim “there is nothing” true (or false).

So the baseline isn’t “maybe there’s being, maybe not.” The baseline is: necessarily, some reality obtains.

From there, Changism adds an epistemic (and frankly practical) constraint: evidence requires change. Every observation, measurement, memory, inscription—anything that could count as evidence—works by a registration, and registrations are transitions that leave traces.

Put those together and a static “perfectly changeless reality” stops looking like the simplest option. Changism’s claim is that once you take seriously (i) the necessity of some reality and (ii) the fact that clocks and measurements track processes, the cheapest coherent reading is a processual world: one ongoing field of activity in which changes occur, marks are written, and records endure.

Where does change come from?

Not from “Time.”

Changism argues against the “time-as-stage” picture: treating time like an empty arena in which events are placed makes change look like a secondary effect—almost a matter of viewpoint.

Instead, Changism adopts a ledger-of-change orientation: temporal talk earns its meaning from how we produce durable traces, keep standards, and compare processes. Time isn’t a metaphysical medium—it’s bookkeeping grounded in records and procedures.

So “where change comes from” is not a story of a force pushing reality through a time-dimension. It’s a priority claim: change is the mode of being. Reality is “a field-in-act—one ongoing world of differential change.”

What exists, if change is fundamental?

Changism doesn’t deny “things.” It relocates them.

A “thing” is not a static nugget that later gets animated. A thing is a relatively stable pattern of coordinated change—a regime of co-change inside the wider field.

Heraclitus becomes a warning label here: if you want “the same,” you don’t posit an unchanged substrate—you explain how a pattern persists through replacement. Changism takes that literally.

Stability, on this view, is an achievement: a maintained coherence inside ongoing alteration.

Why change matters: truth, facts, and a world you can live in

Change isn’t just motion. It’s what makes anything count.

Changism tightens the link between reality and difference-making: to exist in situ is to be the sort of pattern that can, in principle, enter an admissible interaction and make recordable discriminations.

And “facts” are not free-floating sentences. A fact is what you get when a registration becomes a stabilized record—a robust pattern that encodes an outcome and remains accessible for further checks.

This is also how Changism handles tense without inventing extra realms. Past/present/future aren’t three places in being; they’re roles played by structures inside the field: records, activity, and dispositions.

That’s the significance of change in one sentence: change is what grounds identity, evidence, truth, memory, prediction, and responsibility—because those depend on marks being made and maintained.

Types of change in Changism (and what each type is for)

Changism talks about one world of change, but it distinguishes functions that different kinds of change perform.

1) Differential change (the baseline “world-texture”)

This is change as the underlying activity of the field-in-act—reality as ongoing differentiation, not a frozen inventory.

Function: supplies the ontological “engine room”: without this, nothing happens, no differences arise, and nothing can be registered.

2) Patterning change (how “things” exist)

“Things” are patterns of co-change that stay coherent across an interval and support higher-level descriptions (causal, functional, structural).

Function: produces persistence without substances—stability as maintained organization.

3) Meeting-and-registration change (how the world becomes knowable)

A registration is a transition from one state to another where the new state encodes information about the earlier one.

Function: turns raw interaction into discriminable outcomes—what it takes for “there is evidence that…” to be possible.

4) Record-stabilizing change (how facts become durable)

A stabilized record is a pattern of co-change that encodes an outcome, is robust under perturbation, and remains accessible for later readout.

Function: makes truth and public knowledge possible by letting results persist, travel, and be checked.

5) Dispositional change (how the future is real without being “already there”)

Changism treats the “future-role” as standing dispositions/potentials—constraints and affordances anchored in current structure.

Function: grounds prediction and expectation without a pre-written future region.

6) Transformational change (phases, metamorphosis, and identity-through-change)

Patterns can have phases and pathways: recognizable regimes and admissible transformations that connect one pattern to another.

Function: explains growth, decay, repair, learning, and personal continuity as lawful transformations rather than as “the same substance” wearing new properties.

7) Ledger change (what we call “time”)

Changism treats “time” as a comparison structure over admissible change-processes: cycles, ticks, repeatable transitions, standardized segments.

Function: gives ordering and measure without positing a temporal medium—useful bookkeeping built from real patterns and records.

The payoff: a reality built for change, not threatened by it

A lot of metaphysical anxiety comes from trying to bolt change onto a static picture—then scrambling to explain how truth, identity, and knowledge survive the motion.

Changism starts where the pressure actually is: in practice, we live by marks, standards, records, and constraints. The ontology simply takes those roles seriously, and reads the world as what they already presuppose: one ongoing field of change, where “things” are stable patterns, “facts” are maintained records, and “time” is the ledger we keep when comparing how processes unfold.