What a universe that becomes changes: The foundational reach of Time-Actualization beyond hard physics

Abstract

Time–Actualization (TA) is a foundational interpretation empirically equivalent to quantum mechanics on a causal-set substrate: it makes no new prediction (a constraint of admissibility, adopted with QM, we label P5). It therefore has, by construction, no purchase in hard physics — no algorithm, no measurement, no experimental gap. This essay raises a distinct question: if one adopts TA as the correct reading of the world, what does this commit one to outside physics? We argue that TA delivers a coherent package of foundational stances — a real objective present, an ontologically open future, an objective chance, a non-classical logic of the contingent, a primary becoming — whose reach is limited exactly to those domains that are themselves theories of the foundation: philosophy of time, of logic, of probability, of mind, process metaphysics, the foundations of statistical mechanics, and the epistemology of the historical sciences — where the asymmetry of overdetermination that historical science postulates receives a ground in becoming, its direction structural and its degree contingent. We delimit this reach without evasion: it is conditional (the premise "the universe is TA" is not establishable against its empirical twins), interpretative (ontological clarity, never a measurable fact), and bounded (nothing in the empirical sciences themselves: of the historical sciences it grounds why their asymmetry holds, never a dating or a stratum). This is the profile of a foundational contribution presented as such.