Beyond Self-Reference: Persistence Accessibility and Open-Ended Change in Living Systems

Living systems do not merely change through time. They change the conditions under which future change becomes possible. This paper develops a persistence-geometric response to Abramsky et al.’s 2026 account of time, self-reference, and self-modification in living systems. Their central insight—that natural time transforms self-reference from a static logical loop into an unfolding developmental spiral—creates a further question: what makes each turn of that spiral encounter a different future landscape? The proposed answer is historically reconstructed accessibility. The paper distinguishes possibility from reachability, time from history, historical influence from historical representation, and transformation from loss of identity. It argues that prior interaction can leave persistent residue that modifies constraint relations and transition structure, thereby changing which viable futures remain accessible. On this account, self-modification is not limited to literal rule rewriting: a living system can modify the physical and relational organization governing how it will be able to change next. Morphogenesis provides the central biological case. Development is treated not simply as navigation through a pre-existing landscape, but as navigation that continually reconstructs that landscape. The same logic is extended to biological identity, open-ended evolution, and systems whose novelty may eventually exceed the ontologies used to describe them. The paper introduces persistence-equivalence as a criterion for reconstructive continuity across transformation and viable future-generative capacity as a candidate constraint on sustained open-endedness. It also proposes relational measurement strategies and explicit falsification criteria for testing whether history, accessibility, recoverability, and reconstructed transition structure add explanatory value beyond present-state descriptions. The resulting claim is deliberately narrow and empirically vulnerable: How a living system became what it is can remain part of what it is capable of becoming. Living systems do not merely move through possibility spaces. Through their own histories, they continually reconstruct the conditions of what can happen next. They make history into the architecture of the possible.