At the type level (type: the structural conditions any history must preserve, the invariants Nature cannot fail to instantiate; token: the contingent particular filling that satisfies the type in any given case, the specific events, configurations, and trajectories that occur, the distinction developed in detail at [§7.7.2](<7.7.2 What is Required.md>)), structure is necessary. Time must run, Space must extend, Substance must persist; these are not facts about this universe but conditions on any universe being a universe at all (§[§7.2](<7.2 Time.md>)–7.4). The cycle argument ([§7.6](<7.6 Singularity.md>)) extends the fixing: total compression cannot persist as a stable terminus (strict), and on the abductive layer of [§7.6](<7.6 Singularity.md>) the macro-trajectory of each return is the same kind of macro-trajectory across cycles. But nothing in the structural argument selects which configuration instantiates the type at any given moment. The argument establishes that the type is necessary; it does not establish that the token is. Whether tokens are in fact open is the empirical question, and the experimental record, quantum measurement, Bell violations (experimental confirmations that the statistical correlations between entangled quantum particles exceed any bound consistent with pre-existing, locally specified hidden values, ruling out the most natural deterministic completion of quantum mechanics), cosmological fluctuations, biological contingency, converges in that direction below, though the interpretation remains contested in places. Conservation laws ([§7.4](<7.4 Substance.md>)) constrain what transitions can occur; they do not select which among the permitted transitions does occur. Contingency needs structure; the structure does not fix what happens within it.

The demand is therefore layered: necessity at the level of roles, openness at the level of history. The openness is structural, not merely epistemic: the type alone does not fix the token. Anything that necessarily instantiates T, S, and Φ must carry forward *some* configuration, but which configuration is not a further fact entailed by the necessity. 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 separate question the structural argument does not foreclose; what it establishes is the weaker and more robust claim, that the type alone never selects the token. Where the type does not select the draw, there is no type-level selection, and that, at the structural level, is what contingency consists in.


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← [7.7.2 What is Required](<7.7.2 What is Required.md>) | [7.7.4 What is Confirmed](<7.7.4 What is Confirmed.md>) →
