A changeless ground is not by itself a denial of □◇C. If it grounds actual changes, the world containing it is change-permitting, so ◇C holds there. The pressure instead targets the stronger structural claim that any ground of change must itself instantiate the relevant ordering, differentiation, and bearing roles. The line below tests whether a source can stand outside every transition while remaining determinate enough to ground transitions. Its conclusion is therefore about unstructured grounding, not a direct counterexample to Necessary Possibility.

> [!argument]
> **The Changeless-Ground Dilemma** · *from unstructured source to role-level structure*
>
> 1. Suppose a *changeless* ground, a being or principle on which changes depend but which does not itself undergo transition.
>
> 1. Its changelessness does not imply ¬◇C: if grounded changes occur or are possible, they themselves witness ◇C.
>
> 1. The live question is whether the ground can perform a grounding office while lacking every structural role involved in that office.
>
> 1. If the candidate has no determinate character and stands in no directed, differentiating, or obtaining relation to what it grounds, it supplies no grounding fact. If it has such determinate relational character, it instantiates the thin roles of order, difference, and bearing, though that does not yet establish full temporal succession, spatial extension, or causal persistence in the ground itself.
>
> 1. ∴ A wholly unstructured changeless ground cannot ground change. A structured but non-changing ground remains a live type-level proposal for later engagement. The dilemma therefore reinforces role-level structure; it does not independently establish □◇C.

The dilemma holds across every form the changeless ground actually takes in the literature. A *Maximal-Ground Being*, with no relational extension, has no Spatiality and collapses toward ∅; with no persistence it cannot carry anything across the transitions it is meant to ground. *Non-temporal priority* fares no better: formal or final priority is still asymmetric ordering — the Time-side requirement of Chapter 1, formalized in Chapter 2 as Temporality. The *Boethian eternal present* offers a timeless survey of all that is grounded, but that is B-series access, not response; genuine response to the grounded reintroduces an ordered before-and-after. *ET-simultaneity* (Stump–Kretzmann) trades Temporality for a maximally extended Spatiality, relocating the structure rather than escaping it. And *Platonia* cannot even be stated: the very description of a changeless realm of abstracta presupposes succession, distinction, and exchange in order to be surveyed or referred to at all.

In each form, the relevant question is whether the proposed ground has enough determinate relational structure to perform grounding work. The conclusion is correspondingly local. A changeless ground that produces or permits changes never supplied a counterexample to □◇C in the first place, while a capacityless world with no grounding claim is not closed by this dilemma. The two forms that resist the quickest dispatch (ET-simultaneity's trade of Temporality for a maximally extended Spatiality, and the Boethian eternal present's reply that timeless survey already counts as response) are engaged at their most formidable in [§4.2.1](<4.2.1 The Changeless Ground.md>), with the simplicity construction behind them at [§5.2](<5.2 Doctrines of the Divine Nature.md>). Here they are caught, with the rest, by the exhaustive fork of step 4: either horn concedes the role-level structure the dilemma targets.

*The dilemma iterates.* A last rejoinder grants all this of any ground *outside* the order of transitions, yet insists that persistence *within* it still needs a changeless core, some frozen bearer that stays put beneath the succession so that one thing, and not merely a series, survives it. But that core faces the very same fork one level up: either it is the bare internal negation "no change here," and then it is no bearer and carries nothing across the transitions; or it has determinate features, and then it is itself a further stretch of the order rather than an exemption from it. Ask what stays fixed beneath a persisting thing and the answer recurses without ever terminating in anything frozen: the anchor is a Ship of Theseus one level up ([§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>)). What makes the succession one thing is not a preserved core but the *continuity* of the ordering itself, identity as continuity of change, not exemption from it. This reflexive reading is offered as illustration, not as a further road to □◇C: the lived case that makes it vivid, a self that persists with no changeless substrate at any level, imports more than the [§1.3](<1.3 Change.md>) definition and is not counted in the overdetermination accounting.

> [!info]
> **Natural worry.** Grant that no ground outside change works. Still, doesn't persistence within time need a changeless core—some frozen bearer that stays put beneath the succession, so that one thing survives rather than just a series? Ask what stays fixed in that core and the same fork returns one level up: either it's the bare no change here, and then it bears nothing across time, or it has features, and then it too could have been otherwise—another stretch of the changing order, not an exemption from it. What makes a succession one thing isn't a preserved frozen part; it's the continuity of the ordering itself. Identity is continuity of change, not a rest beneath it.

*Dependency.* The line uses [§1.3](<1.3 Change.md>)'s analysis of change together with the thin role-requirements of grounding. It does not use S5 or the Parasitic Negation lemma. *Structure:* a dilemma about whether a proposed source has determinate relational structure. *Scope:* role-level objection-closure, not a standalone derivation of □◇C and not yet a type-level refutation of every atemporal ground.

> [!info]
> **Core concept.** The most direct way to deny that change is always possible is to posit a changeless ground: something outside the order of transitions on which everything changing depends, but which never changes itself. The reply is a fork. Changeless only says no change here—it negates succession without naming any positive way of being outside it. So either the ground is nothing more than that bare negation, in which case it's no substrate and grounds nothing; or it has real features of its own, in which case it already instantiates time, space, and persistence—the very order it was meant to escape. Every classic version, from a maximal ground to the timeless eternal present, lands on one horn or the other.


---

← [3.1 Necessary Possibility of Change](<3.1 Necessary Possibility of Change.md>) | [3.1.2 The Unswitchable Capacity](<3.1.2 The Unswitchable Capacity.md>) →
