Philosophy has spent a great deal of time asking what reality is ultimately made of.
The answers vary considerably. Matter, mind, information, mathematical structure and various forms of spirit have all been proposed as fundamental, with everything else explained as derivative in one way or another.
I've never been particularly satisfied by my own attempts to enter that argument.
It isn't because I know the answer. The problem is almost the opposite: I'm not sure I have access to the kind of evidence that would let me distinguish confidently among some of the answers.
What I can observe more directly is change.
Things persist for a while and then disappear. Other things change continuously while remaining recognizable. People learn. Institutions develop habits. Languages mutate while retaining enough continuity that one generation can still communicate with another. Living things maintain themselves through an astonishing amount of material turnover.
That led me toward a somewhat different question.
Instead of beginning with what is everything made of?, what happens if I ask how anything remains recognizable while changing?
I've been calling the resulting framework Tone Process Monism.
The name probably sounds more ambitious than the idea needs to be.
By tone, I don't mean sound. I'm using the word for a recognizable pattern that can appear through changing forms without requiring those forms to remain identical.
A melody provides an easy example.
Play it on another instrument and much of the physical event changes. Transpose it into another key and every individual pitch may change. Alter the tempo slightly and it can still remain recognizable.
Something persisted.
Exactly what persisted becomes an interesting question.
We can describe relationships among notes, timing, expectation and repetition. We can examine the physical sound waves and the nervous system recognizing them. None of that requires us to propose a mysterious substance called melody floating independently of the performance.
The pattern exists through enactment.
That's roughly the territory I'm interested in.
The same question can be asked about a person. I'm physically different from the child I once was. My beliefs have changed, memories have accumulated and disappeared, relationships have altered me, and there are things an earlier version of me would probably find surprising.
Calling both of us Rob remains useful.
Again, something persists without everything persisting.
I don't think that observation proves patterned process is the fundamental substance of the universe. In fact, substance may already be the wrong category for what I'm trying to describe.
Tone Process Monism is more useful to me as a way of examining continuity through change.
That puts it somewhere near several existing philosophical traditions, including process philosophy and forms of neutral monism, although I wouldn't want the resemblance to imply equivalence. Those traditions contain arguments and distinctions far beyond what I'm attempting here.
My narrower interest is in what happens when we stop assuming that identity requires static form.
A newspaper provides a mundane example.
The people change. Its technology changes. The physical edition changes every week. Its coverage changes as the communities around it change. Eventually even the meaning of newspaper stretches considerably.
At what point is it no longer the same newspaper?
There probably isn't a single variable that answers the question.
The name isn't enough. Someone could buy the name and publish something completely unrelated beneath it. The staff isn't enough because staff members can leave without destroying the institution. The printing press certainly isn't enough.
Continuity appears to be distributed across several relationships: practices, memory, audience, place, purpose, accumulated expectations and the ways those things keep affecting one another.
Change enough of them quickly enou