An Ageless Adjacent Possible
Synthesising past views on interconnection with the emergence of novel possibility spaces
“It has long been recognised that the emergence of novelty is a core aspect of evolutionary processes, propelling language, ecological, social, technological and economic systems towards new constellations.”
- Taalbi, 2023
Stereotypically thinking in terms of “interconnection” gets a pretty bad wrap: somewhat relegated to the realms of long-haired, peace-sign toting hippy-lore. But hey—don’t misunderstand me: I like a campfire sing-along with sweet instrumental melodies as much as the next.
Thinking about the Earth, moreover both our collective and individual reality (atleast from an ontological perspective) as one giant, complex interconnected system has, for quite some time, been found in the back of the tree line, amongst some floral yet pungent aromas.
Material reductionism, which undeniably has had some pretty worthy scientific merits,1 is largely to thank for this. Say your thanks quickly, because the continental plateau of paradigms are, as they often do, shifting right beneath our feet. About to slide down a steep slope, we can rejoice in knowing whatever space we slide into will probably resemble the familiar yet hallowed grounds of spatial interconnection.2
Alright, whilst spatial interconnection may be kind of intuitive, it may not be fully familiar. Let me rewind a little; I am talking about a very niche way of thinking about the things around us: spaces—perhaps better distinguished in this context of hippy-meets-quantum fields, as “planes of reality”. Every minute of everyday you move through some plane of reality or another, whether that be experiential, observational or even for (hopefully) 7+ hours of your day when you close your eyes and count sheep. There is a wide spectrum of existence, but exist we do.
It works like this: biological systems like us humans, or perhaps, to borrow a bit from the waning reductionist approach, complex and adaptive systems (thus including emergent “cognisant organisations” like ant colonies or AI) all inhabit a space at the present, just the same as they have inhabited spaces in the past and will continue to do so (if all goes well) into the future. That is the intuitive bit. What is less intuitive, atleast until you start to look around and spot the evidence yourself, is that higher order complex and adaptive systems (e.g. biological forms: humans, general Life, the biosphere etc and artificial forms: e.g. in AI through neural networks, reinforcement learning, LLMs etc), appear, over time, to maximise for “novelty”.3
Of course, it is not only complex systems that have inhabited a multitude of spaces across time–simple systems share the spaces too. Whilst I have just written an entire article on why “simple” causal chains might not be that simple, I guess it is fair to ask: why the focus on the complex and the adaptive?
Well, for one, it is only complex systems that exhibit cognition4—who interact with and manipulate the environment around them. Cognition, across whatever scale, denotes complexity to some degree in the system exhibiting it. We do not need to relegate the system to simplicity, we just need to adjust our comprehension of complexity. So why do complex systems (e.g. us humans, distinctly including our cells) search possibility spaces maximising for novelty?
Returning, if we may, to thinking about the world around us in terms of “planes of reality”, well novelty can only be looked for within each contextual “time slice”.5 Like an old school carousel projector—the “plane” that you occupy whilst you drift on through reality is akin to a “slide” loaded into the Tommy Gun drum of the projector, and whilst you cannot see the slide itself from where you the oberver sits, you can sure as hell see the projection. Just like light projects reality into our retinas, the flat “plane” present in the centre of the Minkowski space-time diagram—the slide, loaded into the projector drum—projects observable reality, appearing on the wall in front of us. If we then swap Minkowski for Levin, we can use the revolutionary biologists “cognitive lightcone” framework as a more viable way of understanding this:
“The cognitive boundary of an Individual [a “Center of Concern”…] is the most distant (in time and space) set of events that this system can measure and attempts to regulate in its goal-directed activity. It is a surface indicating what things this system can possibly care about (conversely, it defines preferences as the spatio-temporal domain of states that serve as inputs and outputs to the system). In advanced agents, it is also the boundary of the self-model.” From Levin, 2019.
Each system's “cognitive light cone” extends only so far. The bounds of these fields of experience and cognition can overlap, extend, but are only present for a thin slither of time, before they change, new ones appear, old ones disappear. These fields are where some forms of interesting novelty emerges. Hence the soft spot for Levin’s remodelling of Minkowski under such a cognitive lens: it captures the distinct immediacy, yet space-time-contextual interconnection between the spaces of which novelty can emerge.
A next logical step would be to think about the fundamental ways in which we (complex systems) navigate the various planes of reality we inevitably encounter along our span and spectrum of existence.
Starting with another analogy: imagine yourself standing in a room with many doors: this room represents your current plain of reality—the space you currently inhabit with all its possibilities, limitations, and characteristics. Each door leads to another room that you could potentially enter more alternative planes of reality. There is one catch: you cannot teleport into a room that isn't connected by a door to your current position; you must move through connected doors until you enter that space.6
Moving further into this analogy, the doors themselves aren't fixed, nor your choices predetermined; your actions in each room—how you interact with objects, for example, what you build or dismantle—can create new doors or seal existing ones (e.g. perhaps you find materials to build a ladder, allowing you to access a trapdoor in the ceiling that was always there but previously unreachable, or perhaps in the process you fall from that ladder, hurt yourself, and now can never access that room again).
Complex adaptive systems like humans, ant colonies, and AI, are constantly moving through interconnected rooms, like contestants from Takeshi’s Castle, looking for a safe space to occupy, a way towards novelty, a place where no weirdly painted men are trying to manhandle you into a lake.
An ant colony doesn't plan its entire journey through all possible spaces; it simply explores the those available from its current position. Neither the human brain nor AI form an entire neural network immediately; the links between the nodes grow over time, plasticity changing as new challenges are faced, new skills are acquired, memesis works it magic, and new possibilities emerge. Histories of complex systems can be traced as winding paths through interconnected rooms—planes of reality— each choice of door shaping which future doors become available. And, because reality is cute like that: while you can remember the rooms you've visited before, you can never fully return to them unchanged—oh no, both you and the planes of reality continue to evolve and thus change from one plane to the next. Time, in this sense, is kinetic: it pushes you (the object) onwards, from plane to plane, slide to slide.7
Now we have a base for thinking about spatial interconnection, we can start with a surface-level scouring of a related concept, and one of the driving forces behind this article: Stuart Kauffman's “Theory of the Adjacent Possible" (TAP). If we think of innovation and specifically emergent novelty within biological and technological evolution as a snaking arrow, then Kauffman does not imagine it proceeding randomly through all theoretical possibilities—through all doors—but instead imagines it following explorable pathways out from the present state, using feedback mechanisms based on experiences and observations in both present and the previous states to inform its onward path through the space of the adjacent possible. In this sense, each step—each newly inhabited space—creates new possibilities for the system.
Applied to the problem space of innovation, for example, we can view innovation as:
those that have been discovered (adjacent possible)
those that can currently be discovered from (recombining) those that have already been discovered (future adjacent possible)
innovations “out of reach” but possible to discover in the future (not yet adjacent)8
Defined more formally as “the set of possibilities available to individuals, communities, institutions, organisms, productive processes… at a given point in time during their evolution”, the TAP’s ultimate goal, then, is to think deeper about the “interplay between what is actual and what is possible for specific entities in specific settings.” Whilst the adjacent possible and the “not yet possible” both form part of a systems emerging possibility space9 (the range of all the adjacent possible states a system can possibly inhabit), Kauffman’s TAP insists that complex, adaptive systems deliberately navigate possibility spaces in such a way as to maximise for more possibilities once a new space is reached. New possibilities mean novelty.
Structurally, possibility spaces are not limitless, neither are they limited in the conventional sense. One way to think about this is to incorporate David Bohm’s take on “interconnection” with Kauffman’s TAP. A brilliant theoretical physicist inspired by contemporary developments in quantum mechanics, Bohm proposed that the universe consists of an "implicate order": the enfolded, hidden potential, and an "explicate order": the unfolded, manifest reality we see around us and interact with on a daily basis.
Reality, according to this ontological framework, is an “undivided wholeness” (there’s the “interconnection” element we were looking for), produced through a sort of flowing movement (which Bohm labelled holomovement), apparently inspired from the classic “returning ink drop” experiment demonstrated above: once the cylinder is spun, the single droplets enfold into a wave-like formations, unified yet dispersed throughout the liquid until the spinning completes n-amount of rotations so that the ink particles retrace their steps, returning once more into an individual droplets and and their unique individual forms from the start of the experiment. Similarly, the TAP interprets processes like evolution as continuous multilateral flows, where each step opens new doorways, feeds back to the last, evokes novel possibility spaces and manifests through various types of complex and adaptive systems.
To think about this most simply, picture standing at a crossroads, three paths stretching out ahead, vanishing into the horizon line. You choose the right-hand path based on your past experiences (long term)—maybe you went left before and got lost, or you remember seeing a right-hand path on the map—and based on what you observe around you (near term)—perhaps a welcoming signpost or an intriguing vista.
After a while of walking down this path you discover a small dirt track that wasn't visible earlier. This new option couldn't have appeared without first taking the right-hand path. The choices available to you right now depend entirely on your current position, which itself is the result of all your previous choices. And each choice you make now will reveal unique future possibilities that couldn't be anticipated before; a constantly evolving landscape of opportunities where what becomes possible next depends on where you stand right now. Following a set of physical rules and conditions, another heuristic way of picturing this is Wolfram’s “Ruliad Space”:
Taken from Wolfram, The Concept of the Ruliad, 2021.
Both Kauffman, Bohm and to some extents Wolfram, reject standard reductionism in favor of seeing the spaces composing reality as fundamentally interconnected (there's the spatial interconnection) where the entire system determines what possibilities emerge, not just the individual parts.
Whilst some may think this undermines emergent agency from individual components of the entire system (e.g. human determinism vs free will), I would argue that in Bohm’s case agency is an emergent property of the entire system, and in Kauffman’s case, whilst adjacent possibles seem to impose a limit on future possibility spaces, the agency lies with the system doing the selecting in the present plain of reality. Anyway, agency, whilst important, is not the subject of this article.
Though articulated in contemporary scientific discourse, along a long and dispersed cross-domain space, you may have noticed how these principles collectively labelled as spatial interconnection echoes profoundly through something else quite important to us: time. But we are not necessarily thinking about the specific role of time in either theory. No—we are thinking about time in a historical, contextual and contingent way. Just have a quick think about ancient metaphysical traditions across dispersed cultures, then, with any luck, you might get a hint at the direction I am about to take.
As it turns out, somewhat unsurprisingly, ancient thinkers intuitively grasped a picture of reality not unsimilar to everything we have just covered. Yes, that’s right: without modern computation, without cutting-edge observational tools, “new” scientific discoveries and paradigms, great minds, long-since passed yet continuing to generate wisdom to the present day, implicitly recognised and embedded their own version of the TAP and fundamental spatial interconnection into mythologies, philosophies, and metaphysics, all the while demonstrating a longstanding human awareness of something deeper than what appears on the surface. Come, as we wade into the mystical depths.
Emergence from Nun to Structured Universe
Let’s wind it right back. Back in ancient Egypt, as the pyramids were being assembled stone by giant stone under the scorching Sinai sun, creation itself was also being conceived.
“Pyramid Text inscribed on the wall of a subterranean room in Teti's pyramid” (Wikimedia Commons, CC 3.0)
Carved directly into the walls of subterranean chambers, or straight into the sarcophagi themselves, primary source material like the Pyramid Texts10 (c. 2400–2300 BCE) encoded wisdom (what modern frameworks have labelled funerary spells and incantations) reserved strictly for the Pharaohs eyes only, intended to function as a guide for their metaphysical journey through the afterlife.11
Details emerge from the hieroglyphics about the foundations of reality: the first primordial waters, a boundless, dark, inert, and formless expanse, embodied as Nun—a beginning state space symbolising infinite creative potential—from which Nu—the primordial waters—emerged from.
The pyramidion: the symbolic “capstone” at the top of each pyramid—otherwise known as the benben stone—represents the primordial mound from which everything else emerged (Wikimedia Commons CC0 1.0)
Self-will is a powerful driver, and whilst it would be foolish to anthropomorphise primordial soup, from Nun emerged Atum: a self-generated, seemingly autopoetic deity whose self-realisation initiated no mean feat: the unfolding structure of the cosmos. I mean, pretty self-willed if you ask me. From here, it was told complex systems emerged, including Ma'at—the cosmic order. Now we have an “entity”—Atum—and a manifest order—Ma’at—created by said entity. Sounds like we have a complex and adaptive system working its way through the possibility space to me. Only, in this ancient instance, the possibility space is cosmic in scale. Now we can begin mapping the associated adjacent possibles of the pyramidal Egyptian ontology.
Atum, through various bodily functions, and Ma’at, through the emerging order, produced Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture), foundational elements necessary for the subsequent emergence of Geb (earth) and Nut (sky). From the new possibility space these four elements provided what in modern terms would be three key planetary systems: atmosphere (air, sky), hydrosphere (moisture), and geosphere (earth). Together they aided in the emergence of the fourth planetary system: the biosphere - a system composed of the complexity which is Life.12
Such a sequence symbolises an orderly progression from potential to realised structure, with each step enabling subsequent possibilities spaces to be fulfilled or actualised. Atum—an entity with obvious featural comparison to biological systems—is seen as a maximiser of adjacent possibles: from its own systemic functioning, it seeks out and accomplishes new states within the possibility space, so much so it generates major structures present in our reality: the initial cosmological spring, then further downstream planetary systems, and finally, at the mouth, Life. Egyptian metaphysics suggests the pyramid builders—clearly a group of people who harnessed collective wisdom to maximise novelty across the possibility space—were very aware of processes akin to emergent complexity in modern systems thinking.
In such a sense the Egyptian cosmological narrative, as expressed within the Pyramid Texts, reflects fundamental elements of the spatial interconnection, especially when symbolising how complexity arises directly and sequentially from previous simpler states into future states. Interconnected as these planetary systems are with the unfolding of Life, Nun became to Atum what the foundational planetary systems became to Life. Each space of possibility intertwined with the previous; each emergent complex system causally interacting with the whole. Unfolding into manifest systems, enfolding as an entire unified whole.
It is interesting to note, however, that in the Egyptian case, Atum—a self-organising, divine system—is a prerequisite for the emergence of a future where complexity can rear its multifaceted head. But even Atum needed something from the preceding nothing: the Benben stone used to represent the “primordial mound”—a base structure—from which Atum first arose from. Whilst Nun in the conventional sense does not appear structured, it must have had some underlying substance in order to form the primordial base, to produce the mound.
Pattern matching perhaps too much, Kauffman’s work on “autocatalytic sets” fits into this primordial picture. Indeed, “networks of components with no central control” very much sounds like Nun/Nu, “and simple rules of operation giving rise to complex collective behavior (self-sustainability, self-reproduction)” sounds very much like Atum, “and adaptation via evolution”13 sounds very much like the emergence of Ma’at, Geb, Tefnut, Nut and Shu.
Whatever the case: structure is needed to start. While the old trope goes: something from nothing, perhaps the Pyramid Texts, similarly to Kauffman and Bohm, suggest there is some fundamental truth to the inverse: nothing from something.
Laozi’s Incremental Unfolding
In classical Chinese philosophy, the “Dao De Jing” (produced around the “Warring States Period” circa 4th century BCE) resembles, remarkably closely, the framework provided by modern systems thinkers as well as those mysterious pyramid builders.
Section of Taoist script, from the 2nd Century BCE (Wikimedia Commons)
Laozi, an author as revered as he is mysterious, poetically professed in Chapter 42:14
"Dao gives birth to the One;
the One gives birth to the two,
the Two gives birth to the three,
and the three gives birth to all the myriad of things."
Beyond seeing this as the surface level process of unfolding through incremental stages, the progression from the “Dao” to "all the myriad of things” can be seen as an emergence map—each stage creating the conditions necessary for the next level of complexity to manifest. This parallels how in TAP, possibilities cascade and multiply through emergent processes, and in Bohm’s ideas, the cascading is happening implicitly, in the underlying, hidden causal process.
It is fair to say Laozi expresses the universe's unfolding complexity as a logical progression from initial unity into multiplicity. Here, the Dao may represent xu (emptiness) or wu/wei (nothing or nonbeing), but like the Nun this “nothing” does not represent actual nothingness: it is a space for infinite potential—the primordial state from which all subsequent states logically unfold into the adjacent possible.
Following this line of reasoning the proceeding One may be loosely pattern matched to the Egyptian Atum—an actualised structure—something that has arisen from non-actualised structure. Indeed, in Chapter 40 Laozi writes:15
“All below Heaven arise out of being,
but being arises from Emptiness!”
Not the only time the foundational role of emptiness is emphasised, earlier in Chapter 11 Laozi also writes one of my favorite set of lines:16
“Thirty spokes unite on a hub
and yet it’s the hole at the center that makes a wheel usable.
Clay is fashioned into vessel
and its inner emptiness makes the vessel useful.
Doors and windows are cut into a house
and empty spaces make a house livable.
Sure, tangible things mark gain,
but emptiness is the essential.”
Thus, just as Atum (being) arises from Nun (non-being), Laozi similarly imagines One (being) arising from the Dao (non-being). While it states that being emerges from non-being, it also emphasises that emptiness (xu) has functional value (as in the empty space inside a wheel, vessel or home). As such, the Dao, like the Nun, operates through "non-action" (wu/wei), further suggesting a multilateral, recursive relationship between something and nothing rather than a unidirectional emergence of something from nothing.
Continuing this line of reasoning, the subsequent transition to Two (interpreted traditionally as yin yang) suggests “duality presupposes unity” and here, just like how Atum, once whole, ablated parts of himself to create the rest of the cosmos, planetary systems and Life, the One has now subdivided into the Two, unfolding into more easily observable fragments.
Thus, in modern vernacular, the chapter can be interpreted as describing recursive feedback loops where each level of manifestation creates conditions for the next (Dao to the One, the One to the Two, etc) and each set of conditions at each new or adjacent possible state becomes akin to autocatalytic sets: systems that do not require an external driving force to initiate necessary change (e.g. any systems present in One can catalyse their own production, even if split across two dispersed spaces).
When Two unfolds to three - the most classically debated transition of the chapter - some interpret this third stage as “life breath” (qi/ch’i), namely that which must precede “all the myriad of things”. Whilst Beaulac, citing the Ho-shang Kung commentary, interprets three like “an organism… a mixture of the clear heaven qi (life-force, breath) and the denser, turbid earth qi”,17 we also find that the concept of qi as “life breath” aligns itself to a reinterpretation of the transition from Two to three as the transition from proto-planetary systems to the planetary systems existing today: water-Tefnut-hydrosphere, earth-Geb-geosphere and sky-Shu-air-Nut-atmosphere. Without these components of “life breath” we would not exist.
Following such a pivotal transition, each planetary system works together in such as way that the emergent properties of the “whole” becomes the necessary structural support for the next incrementally logical step: the rise of “all the myriad of things” or, again in modern vernacular: the biosphere, and more specifically: Life.
The emergence of “all the myriad of things” is only made possible because of all that came before: the “three”, the “Two”, the “One” and at the base, the “Dao”—movement from pure potentiality to actuality. In Daoist thought, then, emptiness (xu) and non-being (wu) is not mere absence but potential fullness—in fact, the source of all potentiality. Similarly, the TAP suggests that "nothing" is actually a rich state of possibilities, reflecting circular causality where "nothing" and "something" mutually create each other and in fact "something" can become a limit on the boundless potential of "nothing”. Who would have thought ancient wisdom so wise?
Statue of Laozi, believed by some to be the famed author of the Dao De Jing (with others believing he was more of a composer of multiple strands of wisdom both collected and added to) (Wikimedia Commons CCA 2.0)
Back to (Sacred) Geometry
Geometry is everything; space-time makes it so. Unique as they are fundamental, topological structures—the torus, tesseract, and Venns, are three solid examples—serve as profound visual metaphors across diverse philosophical traditions. Geometry becomes a through-line between then and now, and with similarities emerging between the ontological philosophies of then and now too, geometric structures might be a good place to close this loop.
Whatsmore, pattern-matching these structures to ancient philosophical frameworks is not unfounded: these geometric patterns were indeed well-known even in the deeper ends of our antiquity. That is well established, not hippy—you got that?
A horned toroidal structure, taken from Wolfram Mathworld
More contemporaneously, toroidal structures embody Bohm's theory of implicate and explicate order, where information flows continuously between inner and outer domains, the unique structure of the torus representing what must be the unique structure of reality in this ontological model. Enabling continuous movement from inside to outside without crossing boundaries, the torus visually expresses Bohm’s view that seemingly separate elements are connected within a deeper underlying order, the interconnection of this order over time being exactly what Chapter 42 of the Dao De Jing hints to.
In Kauffman's TAP framework, systems evolve through adjacent possibilities while maintaining their fundamental structure; horned tori, created in microbubble experiments, exhibit this exact property. Not only this, but the hollow center exemplifies the Daoist principle expressed in Chapter 11 that emptiness creates utility, while its circular flow mirrors how form emerges from and returns to void in Egyptian cosmology.
The "nothing from something" inversion, underlying (at least in my own interpretation) all the aforementioned theories, represents a profound shift backwards in traditionalist thinking, but paradoxically forward in movements within modern physics (e.g. quantum vacuum fluctuations & quantum vacuum polarisation), complexity theory (e.g. emergence & novelty), and information theory (e.g. Shannon entropy & theoretical scalar wave-based communication).
“A diagram showing how to create a tesseract from a point” (Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)
Stereographic projection of a tesseract (Wikimedia Commons)
Bohm's concept of three-dimensional (explicate) reality unfolding from higher-dimensional (implicate) orders can be visualised through the movement of a tesseract through n-amount of planes, and demonstrates Kauffman's exponential expansion of possibilities through spatial interconnection (where the space both expands and grows, contracts and shrinks). Kauffman's perspective of the adjacent possible suggests the unrealised space of possibilities (a form of "nothing") emerges from already actualised states (a form of "something"). Each actual state creates its own distinctive void of unactualised potential.
Running adjacent to this, Bohm's perspective that "nothingness" is merely an appearance within the explicate order emerging from the fullness of the implicate order, suggests emptiness is a particular manifestation of underlying wholeness.18 Its nested structure of the tesseract reflects the Daoist progressive perspective of emptiness (wu) derives its utility from being (you),19 and when layered with the Pyramid Texts: namely “non-being” is a state that emerges within the cosmic cycle and the pharaoh's journey through death (a form of "nothing") emerges from life ("something") and returns to life’s something again, the suggestion becomes: emptiness, void, and "nothing" are not mere primordial states but emergent properties—spaces created by the differentiation and structuring of "something", even within the earliest “nothing”.
“Stained-glass window with Venn diagram in Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge” (Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.5)
“3D Image of Borromean Rings” (Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)
Venn diagrams, especially related topologically interesting structures like “Borromean Rings”, depict Bohm's "undivided wholeness" where apparently separate phenomena reveal deeper connections in the overlap but cannot explain the whole. At the intersections we can map novelty emerging at boundaries, doorways, pathways, between existing domains. Like one of those shifty robot cleaners you see gliding around airports these days, complex and adaptive systems search the possibility space, looking for the next piece of actionable information, the next scrap to add to the collection, until we move on, exploring new spaces in search of new pieces.
Like a suped-up, algorithm-driven Henry The Hoover, we search the boundaries of domains, looking for anything to vacuum, looking for a gap in the fence, a way to advance and evolve, to maximise for novelty. Just like progression in the Daoist tradition, the triple Venn manifests how "three generates the myriad of things", while the progression from empty circles to meaningful overlaps also mirrors Egyptian cosmology's emergence of differentiated forms from primordial uniformity. If the TAP holds merit, and “the biosphere constitutes a non-physical domain qualitatively distinct from the physical domain”,20 then could it be possible ancient thinkers also saw this quality, and expressed it in ways much more poetic than we could hope to do now?
Through these forms, across the shape of space, riding the waves of time, we glimpse a shared understanding across traditions: reality emerges through the interplay of emptiness and form, structure and possibility, separation and profound interconnection. Novelty, is achieved—you reading this is a testament to that—but how long will we go on before turn our heads, look back and give a big old wink to those that came, saw and experienced it all before.
For example, finding out about DNA, or describing electrons in solids by reducing matter to its quantum mechanical properties, from: elements → atoms → protons/neutrons/electrons → quarks/lepton, or how atoms can be manipulated to form the transistor, the backbone of the semiconductor industry, or how we have successfully reduced molecular mechanism down helped to develop statin inhibitors and insulin.
During past attempts to bridge the differences between “ontic structural realism” (The belief that most fundamentally there only exists the relationship between objects and entities) and “object-oriented ontology” (the counter-belief that most fundamentally objects do exist and deserve an objective distinction), I created the ontological notion of “spatial realism”: how, at the base level of reality, is a “space” which gives rise to structure which gives rise to strong-objectiveness. Whilst I do not wish to continue where I left off, nor turn this into an ontological debate, the idea of what is most fundamental to existence will be a recurring theme throughout the following comparative analysis. As such, if spatial realism crops up in the coming context, I will try to explain myself both within and past the bounds of previous explanation. For now, however, we have other theories to deal with.
I mean this in the sense that we scan the possibility space, ascertaining the next move, so that a compounding set of our next moves will hopefully result in the outcome of emergent (surprise) novelty (new action/outcome/possibility space etc) which can be benefit most survival-based evolutionary scenarios (e.g. banging multiple types of rocks against eachother, watching which types spark, then selecting for those rocks, creating an emergent novel energy source/resource for action—fire).
Defined simply by Levin (who himself quotes William James) as the ability to “take independent action” and “orientate oneself towards a certain goal”.
Borrowing this phrase in the style of Roger Penrose, whilst the mathematics and physics go way over my head, I am a sucker for drawing, and the sketches in his book “Road To Reality” are exactly the kind of heuristic visual I am imagining these “time slices” with.
Depending on your belief systems and priors, not conventionally, anyway…
Similar to how it is fitted into Cronin and Walker’s Assembly Theory equation.
Emergence relating to the “surprise value” of an output, outcome, behaviour, property or some other value.
Yes, sometimes I like to capitalise “Life” because it (and thus we) are so very special.
Dao De Jing, translated by Beaulac, 2017.
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Moeller, 2006