A slight tweak to the at-at theory of change

The at-at theory of change says:

1. Change is things being one way at one time and another way at another time.

McTaggart complained that this was like saying a poker changes because it’s hot at one and end cold at the other. It seems that (1) just fails to capture the “dynamism” in change.

A slight modification to (1) takes care of these, and some other, problems.

2. Change is things being one way at one time and another way at a later time.

You might think there is no real difference, because if there are two times, one must be later than the other. First, that’s not obvious, actually. In a Minkowski space-time, a time from one reference frame will be neither earlier nor later than a time from another reference frame.

But in any case, even if it were true that one time must be later than another, putting it in the definition makes a difference. First, McTaggart’s poker: one end isn’t earlier than the other! Second, dynamism: you can put all the dynamism you like in the “later”. You can say that t₂ is later than t₁ just in case at t₁, t₂ is future, is impending, is approaching, is a time of the actualization of a potential found at t₁, etc. The dynamism all goes into the “later”.