Eternity Tells No Tales

Over the last few weeks, I have been trying to work out the relationship between possibility and actuality. Hard hats are not required on this construction site, but I ask your forgiveness for the mess of ideas below. I am chiseling away at a rather large block of marble. Sometimes I accidentally knock off large chunks of material whose potencies defied my own. I am also doing my best to respond in real time to the parrhesia of faithful critics. I sense a shape beginning to show itself, even if what follows is an example of how exemplification may be very far from perfection!

I have been writing about res potentiae, as Stuart Kauffman, Timothy Eastman, Ruth Kastner, and others refer to them, drawing upon Werner Heisenberg’s retrieval of the Aristotelian notion of potentia. Below is my co-authored paper with Eastman and Kastner:

On the Possibility of Cosmology

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Jul 3

The following coauthored paper is a draft to be presented at the International Whitehead Conference in Zhuhai, China in a few weeks, shared here for preliminary feedback!

It is important to make clear that I do not think of the actual and the possible as two separate worlds. There is one actual world. Or, as a process philosopher, I am perhaps obnoxiously obliged to say: there is one actual worlding. We never apprehend the same world twice.

Our task is to think a one-world cosmology, which may be synonymous with accepting a pluriverse. Ironically, this paradox provides the path toward a coherent metaphysics. This one world is also a pluriverse because it is a creative advance: an open, ontogenetic worlding haunted, lured, by unrealized possibilities. How are we to think being when being is not merely “what is,” as Parmenides insisted, but also becomes, as Heraclitus insisted? Plato helps by thinking becoming and even non-being as themselves kinds of being. In the Sophist, in an effort to make room for motion alongside rest, non-being becomes one γένος among the greatest kinds: not sheer nothingness, but determinate difference, being-other-than what is.

Whitehead’s cosmology is an attempt to describe, or descriptively generalize, a constellation of cosmological categories: a categoreal scheme more than a closed world-system. “System” is a bit too highfalutin for Whitehead. He claimed, more modestly, to practice a method of imaginative generalization and assemblage, attending carefully to the diverse domains of experience so as not to leave any form of feeling out. He is a radical empiricist, but he is also a rationalist, though in the peculiar sense of rationalism as an “experimental adventure,” never final, always tentative. There is no hope of discovering some set of propositions that might deduce the world and thereafter be repeated dogmatically. Whitehead’s rationalism is an adventure of thought in which even partial success is significant.

I have been applying Whitehead’s ideas to Kauffman’s work in biology and to Kastner’s and Eastman’s work in physics. Part of this effort is an attempt to historicize physics, which would require developing a metaphysics adequate to evolution and ontogenesis. What would natural science mean if even physics were historical—not merely in the trivial sense that physicists have discovered nature’s laws gradually (ie, in the sense that science itself has a history), but in the ontological sense that the universe’s modes of order are themselves generated historically?

This depends, in part, on what we take biology to be. If biology is reducible in principle to a timeless mechanistic physics, then historicizing physics becomes unintelligible. Contingent historical becoming would be demoted to an epiphenomenon of necessary, eternal, preformed physical law. The apparent creativity of evolution would become only our ignorance of an already constituted state space and its deterministic or stochastic trajectories.

Biology can be understood, in part, as the study of patterns of variation, inheritance, development, and speciation emerging over geological time on the surface of this planet. But biology is also concerned with organization: with the ways living systems constitute, maintain, repair, reproduce, and transform themselves as selves/cells.

Variational approaches tend to explain biological organization as the contingent historical outcome of variation, selection, drift, inheritance, and ecological interactions. Organizational approaches do not deny variation. They insist, however, that variation always occurs within already organized systems possessing characteristic constraints, competencies, and norms of viability. Living beings approach what theorists call “organizational closure”: a circular dependence or community of causality among processes that mutually produce and sustain the conditions of their own continuation.

Such closure should not be imagined as absolute self-sufficiency. Nothing makes itself. Organisms are thermodynamically, materially, and semiotically open. Closure names the recursive organization of constraints, not the closure of a substance within itself. Even where it is only precariously or approximately realized, life exhibits an orientation toward the maintenance, repair, and possible transformation of its own organization.

Biological order is not an additional formal or material ingredient laid on top of physics. The difference life makes is not explainable simply by reference to aperiodic crystals or dissipative heat flows. It consists in the organization of absences, exclusions, and unrealized alternatives: in constraints that channel energetic processes while being recursively regenerated by those very processes. What is absent can make a causal difference, not as a ghostly efficient cause, but as a limitation that opens a space of directed activity. Teleology reappears not as an externally imposed design but as what Terrence Deacon calls teleodynamics: the immanent tendency of recursively organized processes to preserve the conditions of their own continuation.

Michael Levin’s work adds that organisms are not merely products of genes or passive points of intersection among external forces. They are multiscale agential systems. Cells, tissues, organs, organisms, and perhaps ecological collectives can exhibit degrees and kinds of competency, solving problems within differently scaled physiological, morphological, behavioral, and cognitive spaces. Agency is not an all-or-nothing possession mysteriously appearing in conscious human minds. It is graded, distributed, nested, and reorganizable.

Yet neither organizational closure nor multiscale agency should tempt us into treating organisms or lineages as simple substances. This is where Whitehead’s categoreal distinctions can help clarify the dialectic between variation and organization in biology.

I find his threefold distinction among occurrences, recurrences, and endurances especially useful. There are actual occasions: occurrences. There are eternal objects: recurrences. And there are societies, nexūs, organisms, lineages, and historical routes: endurances. In other words, there are events, forms, and the more or less enduring social orders generated when events inherit, modify, and reenact forms with sufficient reliability.

These are not three separate realms. They are distinguishable factors within one creative advance. An actual occasion arises out of its settled world, including that world’s might-have-beens, and it aims for what might-yet-be. Eternal objects recur as forms of definiteness available for renewed or revised ingression. Societies endure because successive occasions inherit a common form of order. Occurrence, recurrence, and endurance are therefore mutually implicated without being reducible to one another.

In everyday experience, we perceive enduring societies and societies of societies. We ourselves are nested societies whose conditions reach back toward the earliest epochs of the cosmos: the canalization of energy into electromagnetic activities, then into atomic, molecular, and chemical activities. Meanwhile, stellar and galactic societies canalize energy gravitationally, nuclearly, elementally, and otherwise. On the surface of this particular planet, the chemistry generated through these nested achievements of social order gives rise, along the thermodynamic gradient between warm watery rock, radiant sunlight, and cold space, to life. Life takes form, feeds on gradients, becomes sensitive to light, eventually learns to see, and finally begins to reflect upon its own existence.

But how does this happen? We can approach a coherent account only by maintaining a clear-eyed capacity to distinguish, without dissociating, occurrences, recurrences, and endurances.

At the level of a biological lineage or enduring society, no organism and no species confronts naked pure potentials as though surveying a warehouse of possible forms. No lineage scans the realm of eternal objects. A lineage is not a single concrescing subject. It is a historical route composed of many actual occasions and environmental relations. Its unity is real, but it is the inherited coarse-grained generality of a social order, not the indivisible unity of one actual occasion.

A lineage is not itself an individual actual entity in Whitehead’s sense. It is a historically extended pattern of inheritance, constraint, reproduction, and transformation. A human body is likewise a society of societies, composed of coordinated cellular and organ-level processes and, during waking life, partially oriented around more dominant modes of conscious experience. We are a patterned transmission of formative constraints across generations upon generations of cells and organisms, awake to our precarious agency only perishing moment by perishing moment.

Our living bodies canalize, constrain, amplify, and sometimes redirect modes of relevance that have mattered in the past. Developmental systems inherit not only genes but bioelectric patterns, cellular competencies, tissue-level attractors, ecological affordances, symbiotic relations, and susceptibilities to learned behaviors. Levin is right to insist that these agential materials can navigate spaces of possible form. But these spaces should not automatically be interpreted as eternally prestated biological phase spaces. A morphospace can be real for a particular organized system without being an exhaustive catalogue of every possible organism that could ever evolve.

We must therefore avoid saying too simply that “the organism” either does or does not prehend eternal objects. Strictly speaking, prehension belongs to actual occasions. But the coordinated occasions composing an enduring organism can generate organism-level capacities, aims, memories, and fields of relevance. In animals with sufficiently centralized organization, a dominant or regnant living nexus may integrate many subordinate processes into a comparatively unified subjectivity. In other cellular collectives, agency may remain more distributed.

The crucial point is not that enduring organisms are less real or experientially inert in comparison to actual occasions. It is that organismic agency is socially composed. Actual occasions are the ultimate subjects of experience, but they do not act in isolation. They arise within societies whose inherited constraints shape what they can feel, value, and achieve. The organism is neither an autopoietic atom nor a mere aggregate. It is an organized ecology of occasions whose partial autonomy depends upon their ongoing coordination.

Every actual occasion includes, in some degree, a physical pole and a mental pole. It inherits the settled actuality of the physical past and entertains conceptual possibilities for future becoming. This conceptual pole should not be imagined as reflective cognition or self-consciousness. But even the most elementary occasion exhibits some valuation of possibility, however negligible. Through its initial aim, each occasion receives a graded relevance of potentiality for that concrete situation.

Whitehead names God as the primordial valuation of eternal objects and as the source of the initial aim. But the initial aim is not a command sent from outside the world. It is the immanent availability, for this occasion, of a relevant form of definiteness capable of integrating its inherited many into some attainable intensity of experience. Because the initial aim is relevant to a particular settled world, it cannot be understood apart from God’s consequent feeling of actual occasions. The primordial and consequent natures are analytically distinguishable, but the Life of God is found only in their triune unity with the creative advance of the world.

Eastman’s emphasis on the triadic relation among actuality, possibility, and context is helpful here. Possibility never becomes efficacious in abstraction from a context of realization. Actuality is not produced by possibility alone, and the context is not a passive container. The context helps determine which possibilities can become relevant, while actualization transforms the context inherited by subsequent events.

Kastner’s transactional interpretation of quantum theory offers a physical analogue. Quantum possibilities are not merely subjective ignorance about already actual spacetime events. They are physically real possibilities for transaction. But neither are they already actual objects situated in a coordinate grid. Spacetime emerges through the accumulation of completed transactions. Potentiae are real without being actual. Their reality is disclosed in their capacity to contribute to actualization.

A Whiteheadian appropriation of this physics should resist turning potentiae into a second, separately existing world. Possibility and actuality are distinguishable modes within one creative process. Physical potentiae are not necessarily identical to Whitehead’s eternal objects: they are already relationally and historically conditioned possibilities of actualization. They belong more closely to what Whitehead calls real potentiality, that is, the concrete availability of a settled world for further becoming.

Pure potentiality and real potentiality must therefore be distinguished. Pure potentiality concerns forms of definiteness considered apart from any particular actual ingression (but not from actuality generally). Real potentiality concerns how the already actual world conditions the possibilities available to a new becoming. Again, this is a distinction within one world, not a metaphysical divorce between two realms.

If all of this is the case—if occasions, eternal objects, propositions, and societies must be distinguished in this way—then when we say that biological evolution “discovers” a new use for feathers, jaws, swim bladders, limbs, or tails, we should not imagine organisms scanning a modal warehouse of possible functions. The organism or lineage does not look into a timeless inventory of eternal objects and select from a menu.

Rather, finite occasions of experience compose organisms’ moment-by-moment patterns of endurance. Occasions inherit a settled world, including the constraints and competencies of the organism to which they belong, and they entertain possibilities relevant to that situation. Novelty arises in the present. Eternity is efficacious only through the present. A contrast that was previously negligible, unavailable, or simply nonexistent as a concrete proposition becomes relevant within a changed actual situation. That is when eternity becomes present: not as a blueprint descending from heaven, but as fresh alternatives entering into novel contrast with the settled world.

I am therefore defending pure potentiality, but not as a prestated phase space. It is not a metrical coordinate domain containing all possible organisms, functions, and behaviors. I still want to distinguish pure potentiality from real potentiality, the abstract availability of as yet unactualized definiteness from the historically conditioned potential of the actual world. But this is a distinction, not a division.

From the perspective of organisms alive in any given moment of biospheric history, eternal objects are not free floating evolutionary options arbitrarily available for selection. They are not latent adaptations awaiting expression. Eternal objects, as pure forms of definiteness, are indifferent to their particular ingressions. Whitehead says that eternal objects “tell no tales” of their ingressions. Eternal objects do not announce their possible functions. The forms ingredient in feathers do not say, “I am for insulation,” “I am for display,” or “I am for flight.” The forms ingredient in tails do not say, “I am for balance” or “I am for propulsion.”

Functions are not inscribed in worldless forms in advance. Functions appear only within the concrete relations among organisms and their environments.

To say “feathers are for flight” already implicates particular organisms, atmospheres, gravitational conditions, skeletal structures, patterns of muscular coordination, metabolic pathways, sensorimotor competencies, predation pressures, mating displays, thermoregulation, and countless other ecological conditions. The proposition is thinkable, feelable, and actionable only when the world has already evolved to a point at which such a lure becomes relevant.

Organisms do not first exist and subsequently encounter an external environment. Organisms and their environments arise already reciprocally determined. A trait’s affordances depend upon an ecological field; organismic activity is always modifying that field in turn. Niche construction, symbiosis, developmental plasticity, and behavioral innovation alter the conditions under which further variations become relevant. The adjacent possible is therefore not adjacent to an isolated organism but is generated within an evolving organism-environment context.

My proposal grows out of conversations with people on many sides of these issues. I am trying to move beyond both mechanistic preformationism, on the one hand, and a naïve Platonism of biological possibility, on the other.

Mechanistic preformationism appears in at least two apparently opposed forms: reductive neo-Darwinism and intelligent design theory. They are waging a war in which I do not really have a stake. They can have at it. One side treats evolutionary novelty as the result of blind variation filtered by selection within a fundamentally prestated physical possibility space. The other side infers that complex organization must have been prestated in the intentions of an external designer. Both place the form of the outcome outside and before the historical process that produces it.

I am more interested in speaking with those who play on a different court entirely: namely, OG ontogenetic Darwinians like Timothy Jackson, as well as those you could call naïve Platonists—though who am I to call anyone else naïve? I am trying to maintain a childlike state of imaginative openness myself! So by “naïve” I simply mean those who are returning with child-like wonder to the idea that Ideas are not mere names.

Turning to Plato to understand biological form is not simply a wrong turn. Or, if it is, “error is the price we pay for progress” (Whitehead). Biology has never been free of archetypal intuitions. Goethe’s morphology disclosed recurrent patterns of transformation without reducing organisms to static types. His work on the intermaxillary bone undermined the supposed anatomical exception separating humanity from the rest of animal life. His archetypes were not fixed templates imposed upon passive matter but generative patterns apprehended through disciplined imaginal participation in their metamorphosis.

The question is therefore not whether Plato or Darwin is right. The question, for me, is how we might seek a balance, perhaps even a truce, between Darwin and Plato, between historical variation and intelligible form, such that descent with modification came to include the decisions of minds, and the creativity of evolution the recurrent definiteness without which no difference could be felt.

I agree with Stuart Kauffman that evolution does not actualize prelisted functions. Evolution produces new organisms, new environments, and new actual worlds within which new affordances and propositions can arise. There is no pregiven biological phase space. God’s primordial valuation of eternal objects is not a biological phase space. There is no divine spreadsheet containing every possible adaptation, ecological role, or organismic function.

The primordial valuation is an aesthetic ordering of pure definiteness according to its potential contribution to experiential intensity. But the concrete relevance of any possibility depends upon an actual world. God’s lure is not imposed from above upon organisms or lineages, as though God were a demiurge stamping gears onto the chōra and the chōra passively receiving form. God enters the world as an initial aim within each concrescing occasion.

This formulation must be handled with care. God does not first stand outside the world and then enter it. God is always already implicated in and initiatory of every act of becoming, while every act of becoming is preserved in God’s consequent life. The divine lure is neither an efficient compulsion nor a detailed instruction manual. It is the provision of an attainable possibility for integrating inherited conditions into a novel unity of feeling.

God does not whisper propositions to a species. God does not design laws of nature. God’s relation to enduring societies is mediated by the actual occasions composing them. The species is the historical accumulation of innumerable creaturely acts: successful and unsuccessful, coordinated and conflicting, conservative and adventurous.

But this does not mean that evolution is a sequence of isolated microdecisions. Organisms inherit organized fields of memory and constraint, akin to Rupert Sheldrake’s resonant morphic fields.

A cell’s decision is conditioned by tissue-level bioelectric patterns. An organism’s behavior is conditioned by developmental and ecological histories. A lineage’s future is conditioned by the accumulated consequences of prior organisms. Agency occurs at multiple scales because actual occasions can become organized into higher-order nexūs capable of coordinating lower-level activities.

Levin’s concept of cognitive light cones is suggestive here. Different agents care about, remember, and act upon differently scaled regions of space, time, and possible state. Evolution does not merely optimize fixed traits. It can expand or contract the scale of an agent’s concern, binding formerly independent subunits into a larger self. The transition from unicellular to multicellular life is therefore not simply an increase in mechanical complexity. It is a reorganization of agency, memory, and goal-directedness.

Whitehead’s philosophy supplies an ontology for this nesting. The many become one and are increased by one. The new one does not abolish the many. It coordinates them into a fresh unity whose achievement becomes available to subsequent becomings. Multiscale agency is possible because unity is repeatedly achieved without erasing plurality.

As is evident from the astonishing order achieved in this universe, creaturely responses have often produced beauty, complexity, and novel forms of coordination. But there are also failures, extinctions, parasitic simplifications, cancers, developmental catastrophes, and mass death. The history of the universe and the biosphere is a field of ruins as well as wonders. Whitehead’s God does not prevent tragedy by overruling creaturely mistakes. God saves what can be saved by feeling every creaturely achievement and suffering every creaturely loss.

We look up at the night sky, measure the cosmic microwave background radiation, and imagine we are seeing the origin of the universe. But who is to say we are not also seeing its end? Some cosmologists tell a story in which all processes culminate in heat death. Heat birth and heat death: cradle to grave, the same entropic epic. But there is another way to read the fact that we are bathed in a womb of warmth. It may be read not only as expenditure but as inheritance, not only as decay but as gift, not only as thermodynamic gradient but as divine embrace.

We need to distinguish not only individuals from species—Darwin already troubles the notion of species as a fixed essence—but also actual occasion from organism, organism from lineage, occurrence from endurance, and both from recurrence. Eternal objects may sound like static self-identical essences, but they are precisely what allows definite differences to recur. Actual occasions feel and decide by selecting finite constellations of them. Societies inherit, constrain, coordinate, and transmit these definite characteristics. We must hold all three together—occurrences, recurrences, endurances—not to dissociate them, but to guide inquiry away from category mistakes and toward the most coherent vision of the universe available to us.

A biological organism is a society, a society of societies, a highly coordinated lineage of lineages. But where is its agency? It is not located in “the lineage” as though the lineage were an individual substance. Nor is it located in pure forms themselves, which also should not be imagined as a separable substance. Neither is agency confined to isolated microscopic actual occasions in a way that would render organismic decisions unreal.

Agency happens through the organization of occasions. In some organisms it is more or less centralized, in others it is more widely distributed. It can occur at cellular, tissue, organ, organismic, and perhaps ecological and even Gaian scales, insofar as these systems achieve sufficient integration to pursue and revise goals. Every such agency remains composite and precarious. No agent creates itself or its goals from nothing.

The lineages we inherit are sedimentations of decisions made by prior actual occasions and organized agents. We inherit their karma, if you want. We inherit the consequences of their deeds as stubborn facts. Acts become facts for the next acts. Agential decisions happen again and again, always conditioned by prior decisions and canalizing further decisions, but never simply deducible from what came before, because what we inherit is always an accumulation of prior agency.

We are therefore responsible to prior agents not because they mechanically determine us but because their unfinished achievements and sufferings compose the world from which we become. Responsibility is neither a function of our absolute autonomy nor our causal bondage. It is response-ability, the capacity to answer creatively to the demands of an inherited world.

There is, then, an experiential, experimental, anticipatory, and imaginative capacity active in higher animals, and attenuated in more elementary organisms, that factors into the trajectory of biospheric evolution. There is a creativity that cannot be reduced without remainder to chemistry. This is not to put down chemistry. It is to say that chemistry shelters the emergence of more integrated forms of agency. Chemistry makes possible dynamically self-maintaining organizations whose constraints redirect chemical processes toward organismic norms. Once chemistry is organized so as to repair, reproduce, anticipate, and pursue goals, we have crossed into biology. When such organization supports learning, memory, affect, and flexible behavior, we begin to speak of psychology. These sciences do not cancel physics and chemistry. They disclose forms of organization that remain illegible to the abstractions of physics and chemistry.

Lineages do not survey pure potentials. There is no frozen freezer section of ideas that organisms can go shopping in whenever they need novel adaptations. Organisms inherit the consequences of ancestral activity and transform what they receive, moment by moment, into new forms of relevance. Every once in a while, a novel proposition becomes available within a changed ecological and developmental context. An organism does not merely think otherwise. It acts otherwise. If the action alters the organism, its environment, or the developmental conditions of its descendants, the innovation may catch on.

We should nevertheless be cautious about saying that a lineage itself is “allured” or “decides.” That may be a useful shorthand, but the concrete decisions occur in the actualities composing organisms. The lineage changes when the consequences of these decisions become inherited constraints and affordances.

Consider an animal using its tail to balance in a new way in an arboreal environment. One organism improvises a new behavior. Others may learn through imitation. Developmental plasticities stabilize the behavior across the lineage. Environmental modifications make similar behaviors more likely. Selection favors anatomical and sensorimotor changes that support it. Genetic and bioelectric assimilation eventually helps physiologically canalize what began as an improvised decision. There may also be parallel convergent innovations across diverse lineages. The same proposition can become relevant to several species, not because it is transmitted directly from one to another, but because similar actual worlds can support similar lures.

There is thus a valid intuition behind saying that novel biological propositions or functions are “in the air,” so to speak. Their availability can exceed any single chain of genetic or epigenetic transmission, or behavioral imitation. There may also be something like morphic resonance going on, but we need not necessarily posit a nonlocal field merely on the basis of the hybrid status of propositions. Similar forms of organization, similar histories, and overlapping environments can render analogous propositions relevant to multiple organic occasions in multiple locales. Genuine quantum nonlocality may belong to the physical conditions of the world, as Kastner argues, but this does not by itself establish a biological mechanism for the nonlocal transmission of learned form. It may be that “transmission” is the wrong metaphor for thinking about the propagation of propositions, which do not travel through spacetime but rather ingress from an intensively graded plenum of possiblity. Thus Sheldrake’s morphic resonance, on this reading, may be something more like a ripening of real potentiality across multiple convergent contexts simultaneously than an actual field.

The world lives, to paraphrase Whitehead, by its incarnation of God in itself. God’s primordial nature is the inexhaustible valuation of pure forms. God’s consequent nature feels the world as it becomes, creature by creature. The initial aim offers each occasion a possible unity of its inherited many, a unity made singularly in each occasion’s unique becoming.

The aim is not a finished universal handed intact to a passive creature. It is an indeterminate lure that the creature must decide how to actualize. No occasion can contain divine perfection. It can only actualize some finite satisfaction from its concrete conditions. It suffers and enjoys the values realized in those limited conditions. And God suffers with it.

Through this reciprocal relation, the world enters God and God enters the world. The lure is eternally grounded and evolutionarily renewed. The world is recreated moment by moment, not from nothing, but from what has become and from what may yet become relevant.

God creates the world through creatures, and creatures create God’s consequent actuality through what they become. Creatures always work with inherited conditions. God always receives the consequent experience of those conditions. There is no divine blueprint standing before the world that God consults in order to design it. Reality is an ever-renewed aesthetic experiment, a Creality.

We always find ourselves in the middle of this experiment, given what has become in all its glory and all its gore. Our task is not to escape history into a timeless inventory of perfect possibilities, nor to submit to the supposed necessity of stubborn fact and entropic decay. It is to discern what intensity may yet be won from extensity, what new unities might be composed from the many differences we inherit, and what forms of beauty might still become relevant within an unfinished world-in-process.