The standing determinism-indeterminism dispute ([§7.7.1](<7.7.1 What is Disputed.md>)) never settles because both are correct and neither is complete. This is not a neutral dissolution: in holding token openness to be structural rather than merely epistemic, the account takes a substantive side against the view that the openness is merely our ignorance of the governing structure: the type genuinely underdetermines the token, whatever further parameter may or may not then fix it. What the structural argument establishes is that the type alone never selects the token; whether some sub-type parameter beyond the type fixes the draw (hidden variables, in the deterministic interpretations [§7.7.4](<7.7.4 What is Confirmed.md>) keeps open) is a further question it does not foreclose. The superdeterminist is contradicted, not absorbed, but on the independent ground that superdeterminism abandons the statistical independence inquiry itself presupposes ([§7.7.5](<7.7.5 What is Concluded.md>)), not on any prior claim that the openness is mind-independent. What is composed is that type-necessity and token-openness are both real; the contested premise the chapter defends on its own merits is that the openness is structural rather than merely epistemic — the type alone does not fix the token. As with tensed and tenseless for Temporality ([§7.2](<7.2 Time.md>)), absolute and relational for Spatiality ([§7.3](<7.3 Space.md>)), and matter and energy for Substance ([§7.4](<7.4 Substance.md>)), the two positions name different features, both of which history requires. Type names the structural conditions any history must preserve. Token names the contingent filling: the particular configuration those invariants are preserved across. Type without token would be a frozen description with nothing it describes, not a history, because nothing unfolds. Token without type would be undifferentiated flux, not a history either, because nothing is preserved across the unfolding for there to be a history *of*. History is the type that holds together with the token that fills it; determinism and indeterminism are the two features, not two views of one feature.

Physics supplies a domain where the composition is directly load-bearing. Quantum mechanics and general relativity are not rival descriptions of rival layers of reality. They describe a single Nature, and the type/token distinction operates *within* each theory rather than between them: each carries both a licensing structure (laws, the Born distribution, the field equations) and particular realizations (specific measurement outcomes, specific metrics). The load-bearing point is therefore narrower than a theory-to-register mapping. Quantum measurement already exhibits the seam: it returns a token (the specific outcome) that the type, the Born distribution, does not fix ([§7.7.4](<7.7.4 What is Confirmed.md>)). The hard cases, black hole interiors, the moment of the bounce ([§7.6](<7.6 Singularity.md>)), measurement events involving gravitational degrees of freedom, are the cases where the licensing structure and the definite configuration are simultaneously load-bearing and neither can be frozen. The conflict is not between two ontological levels. It is a missing coupling at the interface between type and token when both are in play at once.

*Two claims, different weights.* That both theories describe one and the same Nature, and that any successful unification preserves T, S, and Φ at every scale, is modal: it follows from the Triconditional Necessity ([§2.5](<2.5 Triconditional Necessity.md>)), the Conditions-as-Nature sequence ([§2.6](<2.6 Triconditionality of Nature.md>)), and the Necessity of Nature ([§2.8.5](<2.8.5 Necessity of Nature.md>)). That the type/token composition is the right frame for the QM–GR interface at all (rather than two ontological levels) is a reading of what the theories do, abductive in the same sense as the macro-trajectory identity claim of [§7.6](<7.6 Singularity.md>): modal result plus current physics, not modal alone. The abductive layer is itself contested in current philosophy of physics. Maudlin -(Maudlin, Tim, 2007); -(Maudlin, Tim, 2019) treats relativistic spacetime structure as the more fundamental layer to which a successful quantum theory must reduce; Wallace -(Wallace, D., 2012) treats Everettian unitary evolution as the more fundamental layer from which spacetime structure must emerge; Healey -(Richard Healey, 2017) treats both as effective theories beneath which a fuller unification has yet to be reached. The composition does not adjudicate between them. It locates the type/token feature each is tracking and identifies the open question (how to couple the two registers in regimes where both are simultaneously load-bearing) at the seam the active literature is already pressing.

The composition sharpens the free-will question rather than settling it in either camp’s favor. The classical dispute between libertarian free will (Robert Kane, 1996); (Timothy O'Connor, 2000) and hard determinism is a dispute about which of the two features is the whole story. Contemporary compatibilism (Frankfurt, Harry G., 1971); (Dennett, Daniel C., 1984); (Fischer, John Martin, and Mark Ravizza, 1998) (the majority position in the current literature) already moves past that polarity by accepting causal closure of the physical and locating freedom in the agent’s responsiveness to reasons rather than in the absence of physical determination. The reading developed here agrees with compatibilism that token-level agency does not require breaking the type, and agrees with the libertarian that what the agent does at the token level is not fixed in advance by the type alone — but this last is a concession about type/token metaphysics, not about the will. Token-openness is not itself libertarian free will: it holds even where a parameter beyond the type fixes the outcome deterministically ([§7.7.4](<7.7.4 What is Confirmed.md>)). On the nature of freedom the reading is compatibilist — agency is reasons-responsiveness within causal closure, requiring no indeterminism to be genuine. What it adds is the diagnosis: the polar dispute persists because each pole takes one feature of history to be the whole story and reads the other side’s evidence as illusion. An agent is a self-modeling configuration (a region of Substance complex enough to carry an internal representation of its own state and to update that representation as the passage sweeps through; the mechanism developed in [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>)) embedded within Nature, making genuine token-level contributions to its own causal history. Freedom is not the absence of constraint (no configuration escapes the type) but the presence of genuine token-level openness within a necessarily instantiated stage.


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← [7.7.1 What is Disputed](<7.7.1 What is Disputed.md>) | [7.7.3 What is Predicted](<7.7.3 What is Predicted.md>) →
