A number of familiar positions about history are foreclosed by the structural claim. These are structural preclusions, not empirical ones: they depend on the modal claims of §[§7.2](<7.2 Time.md>)–7.6. If those claims fail, the preclusions fail with them.

*Superdeterminism foreclosed.* The view that the statistical independence presupposed by experimental inquiry is itself an illusion, and that what looks like quantum indeterminism is a correlation between detector settings and hidden variables arranged by the initial conditions, survives only at the cost of abandoning the statistical independence experimental inquiry itself presupposes. The price is the intelligibility of the inquiry that motivates the position.

*Strong Laplacean determinism foreclosed.* The strong form at issue is token-selection determinism: the claim that the type alone, a complete specification of the present at the type level, fixes which token the future delivers. That is what stands in tension with the composition argument and the empirical record; the composition does not permit the type to fix the token. The foreclosure is narrower than it may sound, and deliberately so: it does not target wavefunction-level determinism. It is neutral between interpretations on which the token is settled by a parameter beyond the type (deterministic hidden variables) or by branch indexicality within a unitarily evolving state (Everett) and those on which it is irreducibly probabilistic (Copenhagen, GRW). What every empirically adequate interpretation shares, and what alone is foreclosed, is a readout of the token from the type alone. Weaker determinisms that acknowledge this while preserving type necessity remain available; they are what the composition delivers.

*Block-universe fatalism blocked.* The inference from eternalism (all times equally real) to fatalism (all events fixed from the standpoint of eternity) is blocked by the A/B composition in [§7.2](<7.2 Time.md>) (the combination of B-series eternalism, all times equally real, with A-series directional passage). Eternalism names the reality of the dimension; fatalism requires, additionally, that the passage through the dimension be illusory. [§7.2](<7.2 Time.md>) preserves the passage as a genuinely directional flow, not a projection onto a pre-settled readout.

*Fine-tuning at the type level undercut.* The demand at the structural level (the view that the type itself calls for an external selector) is undercut by the Conditions-as-Nature and Triconditionality of Nature sequence (§[§2.6.1](<2.6.1 Three Conditions, One Nature.md>)–2.6.12). The contrast class that would make the demand intelligible (a universe that might have failed to instantiate T, S, Φ: Temporality, Spatiality, and Physicality, the three structural conditions) is absolute nothingness, which is not a state ([§2.8](<2.8 The Whole Line.md>)). Fine-tuning at the token level (the contingent values of specific constants, the specific initial conditions of this cosmological epoch) is a legitimate question for physics. Fine-tuning at the type level is a demand for an explanation of what cannot coherently be otherwise. The leading physics-level treatments of the token question, an inflationary multiverse populating a string-theoretic landscape of constant-values, with anthropic selection recovering the life-permitting ones (Steven Weinberg, 1987); (Leonard Susskind, 2005), are addressed to precisely that register, and the structural argument neither needs nor contests them: they are candidate accounts of why *these* token values obtain, within the room the type leaves open, not rivals to the claim that some instantiation of T, S, Φ had to obtain. Whether the landscape is real is for cosmology to settle; the structural result is neutral on it.

*Eternal recurrence foreclosed.* The strict Nietzschean sense (every atom in every place, every choice made the same way, every instant recurring exactly) is foreclosed by the composition. Token contingency means each draw is a fresh draw from the distribution the type licenses, not a cycle through a fixed sequence. The Cycle ([§7.6](<7.6 Singularity.md>), the macro-scale recurrence of compression and expansion across cosmic epochs) mandates macro-structural return; it does not mandate token-level return.

*Agency as readout ruled out.* The view that what agents do is a mere readout of the type — an outcome the type settles in advance, before the agent existed — is ruled out by the same composition argument. That the act may be further fixed by a parameter beyond the type (as on the deterministic interpretations [§7.7.4](<7.7.4 What is Confirmed.md>) keeps open) is untouched: what is denied is only that the type alone fixes it. A self-modeling configuration embedded in Nature is a locus at which token-level contributions to causal history are made. Those contributions are not fixed by the type, because nothing at the token level is. Responsibility, blame, praise, regret, and planning all refer to real features of Nature because the token they track is a real contribution to its causal history.

*What obtains.* History is what Nature does while being Nature. The type is necessary and the token is open, and neither feature is reducible to the other. What unfolds within Temporality, Spatiality, and Physicality is a sequence of contingent configurations constrained by invariant structure, each configuration a fresh draw from the distribution the structure licenses, each one a genuine contribution to the causal record rather than a readout of the type alone. The universe has a history because its type makes room for one, and because its tokens are not pre-settled by the type.

The exact coupling between the licensing structure (the quantum state and its Born distribution) and the definite configuration (the drawn outcome, the metric) at the seam where both are simultaneously load-bearing (the measurement problem, black hole interiors, the moment of the bounce) remains the central open problem in foundations of physics. The composition this section develops names the open question rather than solving it; whether the unification ultimately reduces one register to the other (Maudlin, Tim, 2007); (Maudlin, Tim, 2019); (Wallace, D., 2012) or treats them as effective theories beneath which a fuller unification awaits (Richard Healey, 2017) is contested.

The free-will dispute is sharpened in the same way but not finally resolved. The composition agrees with compatibilism that token-level agency does not require breaking the type, and with the libertarian that what the agent does at the token level is not fixed in advance by the type alone, but it does not by itself adjudicate between specific compatibilist accounts (Frankfurt-style reasons-responsiveness, Fischer–Ravizza mesh, Dennett's intentional-stance).

The specific extent of token-level openness across scales (quantum, neural, cognitive, agential) is an open empirical question. Whether each scale carries the same kind of token contingency, or whether contingency at one scale is screened off by coarse-graining at the next, is contested in the philosophy-of-mind and philosophy-of-physics literatures and is not settled here.

And the question of how much of cosmic and biological history is determined by the type at the macro-scale versus contingent at the token scale is the boundary the evolutionary trajectory of [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) presses against: the cosmic-evolutionary trajectory is type-necessary at the arrangement-kinds level, but the specific lineages, species, and individual agents are token-contingent in a way the structural argument names but does not eliminate.


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← [7.7.4 What is Confirmed](<7.7.4 What is Confirmed.md>) | [7.8 Life](<7.8 Life.md>) →
