The Principle of Change Without Time as a Causal Agent

In many scientific explanations, time is implicitly treated as a causal factor responsible for change. This white paper introduces a methodological principle that relocates explanatory weight from time to change itself. Change is understood as the structural mechanism through which systems transition between states, while time functions exclusively as a human framework for ordering, indexing, and comparing sequences of change. The analysis shows that ordering does not require an independent temporal dimension but follows from the existence of successive transformations. However, not all change gives rise to persistent or identifiable sequences. For a sequence to exist as a structured succession of states,…