We show that the autopoietic hierarchy is a formal consequence of three foundational premises within any stable, spatially extended environment. These premises are change (the cosmic ought), finite information capacity (the Bekenstein bound), and stable low-level conditions. From these we derive the three orders of persistence (static, dynamic, and novelty-generating) as a chain of formal consequences. A formal Stack Theoretic interpretation of the Law of Increasing Functional Information shows that persistence under novelty favours weakness maximisation, because this keeps the most compatible futures open. We show that weakness maximisation diverges from simplicity maximisation in stable environments. This bridges a void of unviable intermediate forms and entails self-producing, boundary-maintaining systems. We then invoke the Law of the Stack to show that dynamic persistence at lower levels unlocks higher-level adaptability, creating selection pressure for novelty generation and the preconditions for open-ended evolution. The three orders are thus derivable from axioms rather than identified as empirical regularities. We ground each stage in established models of self-replicating cellular automata, autopoietic protocells, and homeodynamic selves. The result subsumes Assembly Theory's proposed orders of selection while deriving them from weaker assumptions, and reframes the origin of life as a question about mechanism rather than about possibility.

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. To sum up, change implies all possible timelines, not a subset. That is why I say anything exists instead of asserting a particular timeline. Every timeline is an opinion about what ought to exist, meaning a persistence ordering. Persistence ordering implies life and representational commitments. 

Complexity theory carves the world into time and space. Here I prove the distinction is an artefact of description, not of computation. I define a formalism in which representations are physically embodied and thus finite. In that setting, time is sequentially realised distinction and space is simultaneously realised distinction. Both are counts of a single underlying resource I call tone. Space is a chord of simultaneous tones. Time is an arpeggio of sequential tones. I prove two identities. Cumulative space through a bounded window is exactly ordinary space in a lifted vocabulary. Elapsed time is exactly a space count in a tick vocabulary. A bounded Turing-machine reconstruction recovers classical machine time and used-space as instances of this single resource. An exact block-product theorem further shows that literal-count simplicity and weakness (the count of compatible completions) coincide only when representational blocks are perfectly uniform. Real machines almost never satisfy this condition. The standard complexity classes are not affected. But time and space are not carved into computation. You carved them in when you chose a vocabulary.