Many metaphysical and scientific frameworks presuppose actuality as a given: a domainof determinate states, a background temporal order, or a fully actualised world in whichevents occur. While such assumptions enable explanation, they leave unexamined a morefundamental question: what must be the case for anything to count as actual at all. Thispaper develops a minimal, conditional ontology that targets this structural gap.Starting from the single assumption that difference is necessary for anything to appearor have effect, the framework articulates the least organisation required for local actualityto be intelligible without presupposing time, a global observer, or a globally actualiseddomain. It introduces a small set of structural distinctions—tension as organised unresolvedpossibility, tendency as the boundary-relative non-equivalence required for difference toregister at all, loci of sensitivity as boundary-forms of registration, and fixation as the factthat a contrast can be closed relative to a boundary at all. These notions are not proposedas entities, mechanisms, or processes, but as structural necessary conditions implicit intaking difference as fundamental.Taking difference as fundamental it becomes clear that actuality is intrinsically localand boundary-relative; temporal order is not primitive but identifiable with the ordering ofclosed differences; and shared reality arises through partial structural alignment rather thanglobal closure. The framework does not compete with scientific or metaphysical theories atthe level of explanation. Instead, it specifies the minimal structural conditions under whichanything can count as actual at all. Rejecting these conditions amounts not to adopting analternative account, but to abandoning the intelligibility of actuality itself.
Kasper Nova (Mon,) studied this question.