struggling with the world 161related on one side to a view of what time is and on the other side to an
acknowledgement of time’s connection with mind. (In Th e Singular
Universe and the Reality of Time, I argue that such an approach to time
is not only compatible with what science has discovered about the
workings of nature and the history of the universe but also required by
any cosmology that can do justice to these discoveries.)
Time would not be inclusively real if everything in nature, including
the ways in which change changes, failed to change sooner or later. For
there would then be laws, symmetries, or constants exempt from the
reach of time. Th e change of change is more than an ornament of the
power of time; it is an expression of its character: time, which could not
be detected or mea sured if change failed to occur unevenly and discon-
tinuously, may be defi ned as the susceptibility to such change and as
the transformation of transformation.
More obscure, but no less important, is the intimate bond between
time and consciousness. In a universe, our singular universe, in which
everything changes sooner or later, the really new— the new that is
not simply an enactment of possible states of aff airs defi ned from all
eternity— can happen. Mind or consciousness, as it has evolved and
been expressed in us, as well in other animals, amounts to more than
an outcome or an instance of such real novelty; it represents a master
tool for making the new, as was life, with less power and haste, before
mind. So to conceive mind, however, is still to defi ne it only function-
ally: to view it from outside the experience of consciousness.
Intrinsic to the experience of consciousness is understanding. To
understand a state of aff airs is to grasp what it might turn into, espe-
cially what it might next become, under diff erent provocations or inter-
ventions. Th e mind shadows our transformative engagement in the
world, and only gradually and fi tfully gains the power to overshoot our
activity. Readiness for change in the types of things that there are as
well as in the ways in which they change prefi gures, in not yet mindful
nature, openness to the new. Life is, in this sense, a prophecy of mind.
Susceptibility to transformation of everything, including of transfor-
mation itself, is a prophecy of life. Th e inclusive reality of time serves
these prophecies as a premise.
Th e reinterpreted doctrine of the one regime, combined with the
dismissal of classical ontology, is the only metaphysical conception that