The works below approach Changism from different directions. Some develop its central commitments; others examine specific problems or explore possible applications. The descriptions distinguish the contribution of each work from the questions it leaves unresolved.
Productive actuality and explanation
Productive activity as a starting point
Act Without a Subject: Productive Actuality, Representation, and the Cost of Static Fundamentality
What would it mean to treat activity as basic, without first introducing an independently existing thing that performs it? This paper separates productive activity from causal efficacy, explanatory grounding, and representation. It asks whether an account that begins with activity can explain concrete reality more satisfactorily than its alternatives.
The argument defends a philosophical starting point. It does not derive that starting point from neutral premises or establish that every rival ontology is incoherent.
How interactions become usable records
The Surface of Interaction
A detector response, an instrument log, and a document become available to later inquiry through physical processes of registration, stabilization, and transmission. This paper examines that transition and the local or distributed processes through which it happens.
Its central distinction is between a record that influences later activity and the truth of what that record represents. A misleading record can have real effects. The proposal is an account of record formation and use, with further work needed on its relation to quantum measurement.
Different kinds of dependence
Dependence Across Registers: Productive Dependency and the Limits of Big-G Grounding
A scar raises several questions: what produced it, what makes it a scar, how it affects movement, and what it justifies us in believing about an earlier wound. These questions call for different answers.
This paper distinguishes causal production, constitution, constraint, truth conditions, evidential warrant, and formal consequence. It asks what would justify moving from one kind of explanation to another. The proposed classification remains open to criticism and does not dismiss unified theories of grounding by definition.
Time and historical truth
Order and measurement
Before and After Without Time: Immanent Order, Metric Comparison, and the Ledger
Does a process depend on another because a clock places it later, or does its productive relation require a different explanation? This paper separates productive order from metric comparison and coordinate assignment. It preserves clocks, duration, and the objective relations studied by physics while questioning the explanatory role of an independent temporal container.
One major task remains: explaining the relation between process structure and metric scale. Distinguishing them does not amount to deriving one from the other.
Occurrences whose traces have disappeared
What Happened Without a Surviving Trace? Occurrence, Historical Grounding, and Retrospective Truth
Suppose a footprint is erased and every usable trace of its formation disappears. Does that make it cease to be true that the footprint occurred?
This paper develops the Changist answer: the occurrence grounds the historical claim, while surviving traces bear on our access to it. Erasure can remove evidence without turning occurrence into non-occurrence. The account raises further questions about how we refer to lost events, distinguish overlapping occurrences, and justify historical assertions when evidence is absent.
A formal account for restricted historical claims
Truth Without a Surviving Ground: Historical Semantics for Wholly Dissipated Occurrences
This paper develops a formal candidate for assessing specified historical claims when their occurrences leave no surviving evidence. It distinguishes a fixed claim from an expression whose reference or content remains insufficiently determined, and examines how completed occurrence-content is preserved across admissible continuations.
The construction addresses a restricted class of cases under stated assumptions. It does not supply a complete semantics for historical language or settle every problem of event identity, negative truth, and retrospective reference.
Local activity and future possibilities
Ongoing processes without a universal present
Local Activity Without a Cosmic Present: Locus Semantics, Indexed Roles, and Their Composition in Changism
How can we describe a process as ongoing without declaring that the entire universe shares its present? This paper supplies a finite formal construction for activity attributed to specified process-contexts. It examines when compatible local descriptions can be combined, including a bounded treatment of distributed organization.
Its results depend on declared physical and mathematical assumptions. Their generalization and physical adequacy remain open. The construction does not establish Changism’s superiority over an eternalist interpretation using the same resources.
Prediction and an unsettled future
An Unsettled Future Without Future Objects: Locus-Indexed Semantics, Robust Support, and Retrospective Resolution in Changism
A prediction may be strongly supported when made, remain unsettled, and later come true. This paper gives those differences a precise treatment within a finite framework of complete admissible continuations.
Settlement requires agreement across every continuation in a nonempty admissible set. Support is assessed separately; high probability is not the same as settlement. Later fulfilment does not make an originally open claim have been settled all along. The framework’s application depends on defensible physical models and does not establish fundamental indeterminism.
Physics and consciousness
Relational tempo and cosmology
This programme examines how local physical processes, clock comparisons, and cosmological averaging are related. It asks whether an account attentive to differing environments can contribute to our interpretation and modelling of large-scale observations.
The book and supporting proposals distinguish established physical background from interpretation and hypotheses requiring tests. Their empirical value depends on explicit models, independent comparisons, and observational performance. The philosophical argument for Changism does not establish that dark energy is unnecessary or that the hot early universe should be rejected. See Books for the volume and its supporting materials.
Consciousness as organized activity
A Changist Theory of Consciousness: Internal Ledgers, Process-Stability, and the Structure of Lived Experience
This proposal examines experience through the organization of memory, attention, bodily regulation, and anticipation. Its concept of an internal ledger concerns the integration of activity into a lived perspective, rather than a separate observer inside the organism.
The research question is whether this account explains distinctive features of consciousness and supports useful distinctions between systems. It does not close the problem of why organized activity is experienced, establish a universal threshold for consciousness, or supply a validated test for conscious artificial intelligence.
Philosophical comparison
Comparative work examines Changism alongside process philosophy, accounts of metaphysical grounding, temporal ontologies, and theological arguments about dependence. The purpose is to identify substantive agreements and disagreements while allowing each alternative its strongest formulation.
A central research task is comparison with productive eternalism: an eternalist account that recognizes real causal activity and record formation. The current programme asks what independently specified problem could distinguish the accounts, under fair and explicit conditions. A research agenda for that comparison is not yet a comparative verdict.