A Rational Cosmology: The Existence of Change and the Necessity of Time

Essay XVIII

This is Essay XVIII of Mr. Stolyarov's series, "A Rational Cosmology," which seeks to present objective, absolute, rationally grounded views of terms such as universe, matter, volume, space, time, motion, sound, light, forces, fields, and even the higher-order concepts of life, consciousness, and volition. See the index of all the essays in "A Rational Cosmology" here.

The three spatial dimensions suffice in describing the constituents of a universe that are, in their entirety, absolutely static, and have not even a potentiality of being altered in their qualities.

A universe of entities exhibiting only mass, volume, length, width, and height would be a universe that subsumes only entities, qualities, and static relationships of position, which would remain constant in perpetuity and admit no effect of any entity upon any other.

Ubiquitous observation, however, informs us that, in the actual universe, such effects are made manifest unceasingly. The vast majority of actual relationships, the reader will recall, are interactions between two or more entities that affect some change in those entities' qualities.

We note that A=A, and a certain magnitude equals that magnitude, and no other. Then, how do we account for the fact that the same dog, for example, may have mass X, and, upon eating a dog treat, increase its mass to X+1? The fact that things are what they are cannot be denied or disproved. Thus, we must search for the answer within the framework of the axioms of existence and identity.

By the axiom of identity, it becomes self-evident that no entity can exhibit simultaneously different magnitudes of the same quality. Yet it is also self-evident, through ubiquitous observation, that a given entity can and most often does exhibit different magnitudes of the same quality. Thus, we are left to conclude that these magnitudes, to be mutually inclusive within an entity, must be non-simultaneous. To be non-simultaneous, they must be separated in some manner. This manner in which non-simultaneous measurements of the same quality in the same entity are separated is change.