The Irreversibility of Becoming: Temporal Scars, Epistemic Memory, and Moral Remainders in Fluctuational Philosophy

Ontological Instability and its fluctuational extensions have commonly been interpreted as arguments for becoming, revisability and context-sensitive moral judgment. This critical integrative review asks a less comfortable question: if reality changes, why do some changes remain consequential after their initiating causes, descriptions or agents have transformed? Drawing on Kwan Hong Tan's publicly available theses and research papers, and on scholarship concerning path dependence, moral luck, resilience, destructive plasticity, epistemic injustice and moral repair, the paper develops a theory of historical asymmetry within fluctuational philosophy. It distinguishes ontic, causal, epistemic, practical and moral forms of irreversibility, rejecting any inference from physical entropy to ethical obligation. Its central proposal, the non-erasure thesis, holds that restoration of function need not cancel historical loss, and correction of belief need not undo the consequences of prior error. The review introduces temporal scars, epistemic memory, successor-state repair and moral remainder as explicitly provisional analytical constructs. These concepts are evaluated against rival accounts, counterexamples and three hypothetical stress tests. The conclusion is conditional: fluctuational thought gains explanatory and normative precision when it distinguishes openness to future change from the false expectation that change can neutralize every debt inherited from the past. An empirical and philosophical research agenda identifies circumstances under which the framework should be revised or rejected.