Why Actuality Is Not Something That Happens Over Time
In the previous post, we argued that the cut is not temporal, causal, or epistemic. That negative work now allows a more difficult positive claim to come into focus: instantiation is not a process. Nothing happens that turns possibility into actuality. There is no transition unfolding in time, no mechanism at work behind the scenes. And yet, becoming is real.
This sounds paradoxical only if we assume, without examination, that actuality must be achieved by temporal change. That assumption is precisely what must be abandoned.
1. The Process Temptation
The temptation to treat instantiation as a process is strong. We imagine possibility evolving, collapsing, or crystallising into actuality. We reach for metaphors of flow, transition, or emergence. But every such metaphor imports a hidden premise: that time is already actual, already there as a medium in which something further can occur.
If instantiation were a process, it would require a temporal stage on which to play out. That stage would itself have to be fully actual. Possibility would then be nested within an already completed temporal structure — precisely the picture presupposed by the block universe.
In other words, the process view smuggles totality back in.
It treats time as a container rather than as a dimension of phenomena, and it thereby evacuates the cut of its ontological role.
2. Time Belongs to Phenomena, Not to Instantiation
To break this impasse, we must reverse a deeply ingrained habit of thought: we must stop treating time as a precondition for actuality.
Time — as succession, duration, before-and-after — is always encountered within phenomena. It is a feature of what is actual, not a scaffolding that supports actuality from the outside. The world does not first exist in time and then produce events; events are what make time manifest in the first place.
This is why instantiation cannot be temporal. Temporality presupposes instantiation. The cut is what allows a phenomenon to appear as temporally extended, ordered, or located at all.
Once this is seen, the apparent paradox dissolves. Becoming does not require a process that unfolds in time; it requires a condition under which time can appear.
3. Instantiation as Change of Ontological Status
What, then, does instantiation amount to, if not a process?
Instantiation is a change of ontological status: a shift from structured potential to phenomenon. This shift is not something that occurs gradually or incrementally. It is not mediated by intermediate stages. Either something is actual as a phenomenon, or it is not.
This does not mean that phenomena are static or frozen. On the contrary, change, motion, and development are all perfectly real — but they are changes within an instantiated world, not changes that bring a world into being.
The cut does not explain why one event follows another. It explains how there can be events at all.
4. Becoming Without Evolution
At this point, a familiar objection arises: if instantiation is not a process, does becoming disappear? Is reality reduced to a sequence of static snapshots, each mysteriously appearing?
No. This objection mistakes the rejection of process for a rejection of change.
Becoming, on this account, is not the evolution of possibility into actuality. It is the ongoing actuality of phenomena that are temporally articulated from within a cut. Change is real, but it is always local, internal, and perspectival.
There is no global narrative in which possibility steadily drains away as actuality accumulates. Possibility does not diminish. It is reconfigured.
This is why the block universe’s promise of completeness is so seductive — and so destructive. By treating all events as already actual, it replaces becoming with a static totality and then reintroduces motion as an illusion. The price of completeness is the loss of actuality itself.
5. Why the Block Universe Needs Process — and Why It Fails
The block universe tacitly relies on a process it officially denies. It tells us that all times are equally real, but it cannot explain why anything happens without appealing to our passage through the block — an implicitly temporal, experiential process.
This is not an accident. Once instantiation is denied, process must be smuggled back in through the subject.
By contrast, recognising instantiation as a non-temporal condition allows us to take experience seriously without granting it metaphysical privilege. We do not move through time; time appears through instantiated phenomena. The sense of passage is not an illusion layered on top of a static block, but an internal feature of actuality.
6. The Discipline of Non-Process
Treating instantiation as non-process is not a denial of physics, change, or dynamics. It is a discipline imposed on ontology. It prevents us from explaining actuality by appealing to something that already presupposes it.
Once this discipline is adopted, several consequences follow immediately:
No system can generate its own actuality.
No temporal model can explain instantiation.
No total description can exhaust what is real.
Actuality is not accumulated. It is always enacted.
7. Looking Ahead
If instantiation is neither temporal nor processual, then it must be perspectival in a stronger sense than is usually acknowledged. The next task, therefore, is to clarify what perspective amounts to once it is stripped of subjectivity and privilege.
In the next post, we will argue that perspective is unavoidable but never total — and that this, rather than any metaphysics of time, is the deepest lesson of relativity.
For now, the essential point is this:
Becoming does not happen to reality over time.Becoming is what reality is like once it is instantiated.
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