Why Does Anything Exist?

Living things interpret their environment to survive. Computation requires an interpreter. I argue the interpreter problem and the origins of life are the same problem, but the interpreter is not a primitive. Change is the primitive. Each change is contentless. It is a state defined only by its difference from the other changes. An aspect of reality is a set of changes. A timeline is a sequence of changes. As a timeline progresses, it preserves some aspects of reality and destroys others. That preservation is already a value judgement, before any organism exists. I define a persistence ordering for each trajectory and prove different trajectories induce different orderings. Every timeline is an opinion about what ought to persist. Persistence favours self-producing systems, because they recover from perturbations that destroy rigid structures. Autopoiesis is usually assumed. I show it is implied by change, and I prove that adding any representational commitment beyond viability strictly reduces persistence. This is a novel, bottom-up proof of the Psychophysical Principle of Causality. Prior work derived it top-down, assuming an organism and minimising free energy. Here it follows from the persistence ordering alone. The only safe primitive is valence. Objects and properties are patterns in attraction and repulsion. Change cannot fail to exist, because its negation presupposes it. That is why anything exists. The minimal ontology therefore implies all possible timelines. Each is a different physics. Every timeline is an opinion about what ought to exist, and change implies only the complete set of all timelines.