What an additional flow would have to explain

9. Objective-passage alternatives

9.1 A flow that changes organization

A rival theory can introduce a variable $F$ with a physical role, for example

$$\frac{dx}{d\tau}=f(x,i,F).$$

If $F$ changes dynamics, access, calibration or bodily organization, it is a physical hypothesis requiring a law and independent evidence. It is not a counterexample at fixed enactment: it changes the organization constituting the experience. A successful coupling could improve the mechanism without showing that experiencing succession itself requires additional flow.

9.2 An experiential gate or a different character

Another rival accepts all enacted conditions in equation (1) but requires a further presentness gate. If that gate can fail while complete qualification remains, it rejects the sufficient direction of the adopted admission identity. It does not identify an unnamed operation still needed by the present constitution.

A rival can instead preserve admission while assigning different felt character at fixed complete enactment. That rejects Constitutive premise 1. A difference at fixed partial projection is weaker: if $\mathcal T$ omits attention, bodily state or affect, including that variable improves the model within the account. It does not establish an experiential ingredient beyond a complete organization already preserved by the comparison.

9.3 Primitive becoming and actuality

A stronger rival makes becoming the condition that renders an admissible organization actual. It locates the addition within actuality itself, rather than adding consciousness after processing. The distinction between an actual process and its description is already accepted here. A further ingredient beyond actual operations and their embedding is an additional ontological commitment that must establish both warrant and explanatory contribution.

Once qualifying organization actually occurs, the present account requires no further actualization event. A rival can disagree with that constitution, but proposing an alternative does not establish an internal deficit. This response does not depend on a universal regress of clocks. Primitive becoming need not use a literal second time; moving-spotlight approaches can use primitive tense and treat supertime as a representational device (Skow, 2009).

Ordinary change and local event occurrence can themselves be called “passage.” Both are preserved. The disputed extra is an advancing present or actualizer beyond those physical relations.

9.4 Explanatory and evidential equivalence

An addition's idleness has to follow from what it preserves, not simply from the absence of its symbol in an equation. Suppose $T_0$ expresses the adopted account and $T_+$ adds $F$ without restricting base facts, with every $T_0$ model admitting a $T_+$ expansion. Then $T_+$ has exactly the same base-language consequences as $T_0$.

Conservative-extension argument. Every countermodel to a base-language consequence of $T_0$ expands to a $T_+$ model while preserving the counterexample. Hence the extension cannot establish a new base-language consequence; the inherited direction is immediate. This comparison does not remove an actual physical field, and it does not cover a rival that restricts which histories occur.

The probabilistic comparison is equally specific. Let $\omega$ include relevant physical and formative history and $d$ observations. If theories share both the distribution of histories and the observation law, then

$$P(d\mid T)=\int P(d\mid\omega,T)\,dP(\omega\mid T) \tag{12}$$

is the same for those theories. These observations do not discriminate them under those premises. Mere compatibility would not establish equal likelihoods or evidential support (Skow, 2011).

Constitutive sufficiency supplies a different result: within the adopted framework it excludes a required extra experiential gate. It does not infer its metaphysical conclusion from observational equality alone.

Growing-block alternatives also require the occurrence/ongoingness distinction (Forbes, 2016). An earlier experience's having occurred does not mean it remains ongoing relative to the current stage. The anti-erasure commitment does not refute all growing-block views by conflating those claims.