A Metaphysics of Selective Chance
PART 1 AGAINST BEING
Memory has been circling and dispersing before we caged it between the sweep of a clock hand’s length. Which comes first though, memory or uncertainty?
Hegel posits a truly speculative metaphysics starts in the immediacy of pure being, abstraction as a category detached from any entity to be an abstraction of. Hegel ascends then from the immediacy of being to becoming through the unstable purity of being’s content into nothingness and takes this collapse into contentless void to mark a reciprocal vanishing movement where pure presence as immediacy collapses into itself and becomes pure absence which when thought, itself becomes a presence so unto forever. When we reflect on the movement itself, the reciprocal vanishing; then for Hegel a new category: becoming, arises from the uncertainty of being’s own collapse preserving both being and the speculative uncertainty for becoming’s own development into existence. What does this whole move Hegel undergoes say about memory then, as well as uncertainty?
Being in its immediacy can from one perspective be seen to be a product of pure memory, a content preserved by nothing but the act of recollection itself as the will to fixate on an abstraction continuously. Memory is thus the continuous condition of pure being. But when this content of pure being is seen for itself, in its pure texture in immanent thought, uncertainty and contradiction break through in memory’s purest clinging to itself. There is also another important aspect to consider in regard to Hegel’s use of pure being as the start of metaphysics, that it is selective. We are not looking at a being that “has being” but forgetting all such beings in order to hold fast to being in its purity. The transcendental condition of speculative thought from our perspective on being’s unfolding is a capacity of what Nietzsche would call the active force of forgetting. This forgetting is in a sense the inverse of Hegel’s sublation as sublation in the stage of becoming for example, maintains the memory of previous stages in order to ascend to a higher perspective that reconciles them; forgetting by contrast as an active force eliminates memories as associations and content, to bring a new experience into presence.
Forgetting is thus entwined with memory as a selective procedure even for pure being, even if only from our mortal perspective of humanity. In fact in order to treat the unfolding of being’s dialectic as a pure immanent realization of logic, one must forget one’s self as a human working with linguistic and abstract constructs externally imposing our faculty of selective memory on how being unfolds. But if we don’t forget that for a moment we find that pure being when focused on can leap non-logically from whichever memory I happen to select as the next stage if I do not embrace the speculative perspective of gazing at memory’s pure content for itself. From the standpoint of abstract silence, as intrusive thought might contest; the disinterested observer’s field of thought can excite into many specific thoughts besides nothingness. In order to engage in the speculative method at all requires a certain mode of attention to memory as in fact to even asses being’s content and uncertainty in itself as a content to be observed that can be meaningfully be said to be empty, I have to remember the emptiness in my assessment which bring it back to presence; but that memory of emptiness must be selected by forgetting. This seems to imply that the precondition of the dialectic of being Hegel engages in is a certain fidelity to an evaluation of the character of memory for the telos of speculation.
This is the burden of systems, as despite their claims to immanence in the case of Hegel; the transcendent predetermined telos of working a system out of immanence already colors the trajectory of the movement of immanence to a presupposed value which will pulsate and unravel immanence in its own image. The stages of the dialectic in this become colonies to the imperialism of moralism. Thus a truly immanent model of becoming cannot presuppose the moralism of selective forgetting but rather must be a recollection of the forgetting that constitutes immanence as such in its structure on its own terms rather than the terms of the content that gives its fidelity to the destination of morality or reason.
We can start by mapping the structure of an experience I will recollect just now after immediately doing it:
I sip water from a metal bottle to my right, put it down, become confused for a moment and start typing after misspelling some phrase while doing so, pausing deliberately once, and then a second time half deliberately while typing and now I end this sentence I am typing to continue typing though not literally now…
Let us deconstruct what occurred step by step as best memory can do as a reaction to the content selected for nothing but my thirst and its convenience. Let us stop there actually, this body of mine thirsts, it strives for an associated memory with the feeling; water, liquid, signs of taste and form… Or rather my mind and body react to the thirst simultaneously without either being a center of experience. We see here communicating heterogeneous excitations of presence that seem to be able to drive other excitable presences (my hand) forward Or is the hand communicating with my simultaneous thirst, and my mind identification of the nearness of the metal bottle? What does this initial simple drive show about memory and forgetting?
Forgetting here is entwined with remembering in the enacting of corporeal power, as in order to forget how my hand was previously placed on the keyboard a memory must select or be selected, in this case it seems to be both. This thirst which phenomenologically enacts an excitation comes from the fact that my thirst can select me at a distance; that as an organism and enactor of certain relations to environmental stimuli like water, the memory of thirst as a sign can select and excite itself up AT ME rather than me choosing my thirst from ex nihilo stand point of value in the present, or from the action that directly precedes the moment (my typing), thirst arises AT A DISTANCE from a retained memory of association of previous habits which perpetuated the present hitherto now by engraving themselves into my organism. The excitations of the present from the standpoint of my organism when released into the values of my body rather than selective forgetting of reason then does not unwrap in a linear unfolding out of the pure content of the present, but the way the present communicates at a distance both in time with the case of thirst, and in space with the case of my decision to grab the bottle between my head and my hand that seems starkly different to the trajectory of being’s unfolding in The Logic.
Returning to Hegel’s being dialectic for a second, could nothingness or void be grasped as the content of being, without communicating AT A DISTANCE with consciousness as an evaluator already familiar with what signifies nothing and the capacity to select for that signification given a certain fidelity to the truth and focus of content. Let me ask, does conceiving of being as an organism displace the body into nothingness as well, or does heat and itching continue? It seems to me only a certain content selected by a habituated value of reason can select forth being to observe its purity for itself but this habit must also communicate at a distance with a sign system of an abstraction structure to make this absence meaningful when focused on to develop the dialectic further. If we are not to assume the unfolding of an excitation of thought or feeling like being is destined to unfold to the telos of reason’s selection then it seems that the ontological structure established by the selection of being in forgetting is only result of a certain fidelity to structures and values already established at a non-linear distance JUST LIKE MY THIRST.
But I am perfectly capable of resisting such evaluative structures spontaneously, I can think of the abstraction pure being, and then arbitrarily jump to the image of the anime character Goku in my mind almost spontaneously and the only thing that stops me from doing this is a certain fidelity aforementioned to reason. Thus the only jurisdiction that Hegel’s dialectic can make over having a more pure metaphysical primacy than other modes of fidelity is one based on an external criteria. Whence this criteria itself though? Are we saying that an ontology that starts from the dialectic of being has a higher explanatory power, ethical power, or aesthetic power? All of the above? What makes Hegel’s fidelity to reason a fidelity to anything valuable or even necessarily true?
Hegel begins speculative philosophy with a combination of the Telos of Reason utilizing the active faculty of forgetting to arrive at a conceptual beginning that complexifies in a rational “internal” trajectory. But what if we began speculative philosophy from the standpoint not of reason’s selection but forgetting itself detached from entity? As much as Hegel wishes to divorce being from entity-ness for lack of a better term, it still has the stink of actuality and selection in it; being is a remembered actual immediate, and also being’s purity is recollected in terms of a particular value structure of reason determined in opposition to others. What is an alternate starting point from the standpoint of forgetting? I suggest the result would resemble more a non-linear, non-local enmeshing of values in a non strictly determinately separated field of pure potential. A fuzzy, gunky, priority of a non-teleological whole over any of its internal manifestations. Instead of beginning speculative philosophy from the bottom up (a single foundation of being complexifying in reason), I will begin mine from the top down or rather “top-out” as we are not presupposing a hierarchy between the base and its results; an enmeshed sort of non-foundational or centered “space” diversified non-rationally from within itself. What is prima facie worse about the latter as a beginning? I will leave those questions for you to answer dear reader, as I will now move from a critique of Hegel to my own metaphysical elaboration.
PART 2 CHANCE FOR ITSELF
Does it begin? End? Or simply is? Or is is-ing? No ground for time here yet to say which came “first” or “last”. There is simply an enmeshed wellspring without determinacies; as separation or border presupposes we select a beginning, a priority. But this is beginning without beginning. Non-linear, non-selected beginning. To determine is to select. To constitute a whole. Any selection is a determination. Determination cannot be presupposed by forgetting. What can be given in forgetting?. Nothingness? Stillness? This supposes a thing to not be, a law to obey to the fidelity of absence. Absence itself requires a telos; the telos and remembering of its absence in perdurance. Does absence then forget itself? We do not presuppose an absence to forget any more than a presence. Both are equally determinacies. Selections. Forgetting is the unselected. Selection is ironically stillness, it has to select to hold fast to a determinacy, thus to forget without determinacies would be infinite movement without determinacy. I call this movement without mover: CHANCE. Is this an unmoved mover? Mover implies selection, and selection unmoved implies remembering its lack of movement in eternity. This is if anything the opposite of an unmoved mover; it is a moverless movement.
Chance is thus the infinite movement of indeterminate energy one might say; no categories or EVEN DIRECTIONS. Any such determinacy like direction or category must emerge organically from the soup of chance. Chance must be in movement as it has forgotten the determinacy of still remembering, but it moves nowhere and arrives everywhere; and what is it moving? Not nothing, not an object; but potentiality itself without determination. Directions as potentialities are in the soup of potential, but they are not determined as separate possibilities from each other. Every space is the same. Every time is the same. Thus if potentiality is moving, then so are directions, so are spaces, so is time; but not any such direction, space, or time IN PARTICULAR. Every point contains the whole, yet as an unselected movement, disperses from that point. This soup of potentiality instantly becomes through its lack of direction, a direction ceasing and beginning at every point through other directions. I call this infinite movement in all directions OMNIPRESENT EXCITATION, the absolute joy of forgetting for itself; endlessly and begininglessly forgetting without any determinacy here or there. Excitations of potential at every point in every possible direction. Excitation has no space and no time, but also every space and every time. Every potentiality then is excited but not in a determinate mode of taking a “place”. Any “place” in fact could be where a determinacy is actualized but this does not happen immediately as this requires the faculty or memory which has not yet emerged from chance. The world as chance here then becomes an infinitely excited malleability in all directions, a creative self transforming wellspring.
Because excitation occurs in all directions without presupposing a space or time to take place in, excitations in chance that are inherently fleeting and fragile are immediately eliminated in all directions as they have no time or space to endure. However potentialities that require large amounts of space and time to endure also cannot immediately actualize in all directions (even though such space and time is present at all angles) because every other large time enduring potentiality is enacting itself into chance at the same points as well (for they have not determined any particular point for themselves for one and cannot presuppose they have determined themselves with the other determinacies necessary in other points to realize their actuality either); so these large actualization cancel each other out as every long or large excitation takes another excitation’s place so unto infinity. Thus chance will only have throughout its omnipresent movement, excitations that are neither infinitely fleeting as they never get an ability to actualize on their own terms or infinitely enduring as they never get an ability to actualize on other’s terms. This only allows excitations that persist immediately but do not in such a way to overtake the space or time of other potentialities to endure. This creates common times and common spaces only for those potentialities which leave a future and space open to themselves or other potentialities. Potentialities thus only are selected by chance through their capacity to be hospitable to other futures (indeterminate potentiality) and determinate potentialities while enduring across multiple spaces and times for themselves.
Chance thus becomes in those potentialities with the power to perdure a SELECTION. A perduring excitations is both constituted by an utterly positive asserting force of movement and also a fidelity to this assertion in one; I call this union of assertion and fidelity VALUE. Thus from the sea of chance emerges a selection of values. As values can only perdure independently through giving space to other values, part of what makes a value endure is its ability to give fidelity to other values. But this is not necessarily stable, as values may perdure through their fidelity to other values, but other values also may not give that fidelity in kind and may assimilate said values into its own perdurance (which as long as enough other values perdure in their evaluation of said consuming values to not terminate said value in kind). In addition while a value may be able to endure in a point of space or time through its fidelity to other values, it cannot disperse past this point without either bridging itself into indeterminate future, which can bring conflict in values between it and values it is holding fidelity to; or it cannot move from its point at all which may allow it to be displaced or consumed by the movement of another value. The power of perdurance of a value is not essential, it is contingent on what it is evaluating and what is evaluating it, and the entire system of generation and commingling that emerges from this complex.
Values produce perdurance through a common commingling with other values which each emerge from the selection of chance. There are three means of perdurance in chance; a common time, a common point(s) of space, or a common point of both. Time through its perdurance does not occupy points locally but is a dispersion of the rule of a potentialities’ movement A HABIT, times are universal in a certain sense then, as they are not grounded in any particular point but can be manifested across many simultaneously and non-locally. By contrast the perdurance of spaces is an individual actualization held fast to as an EVENT of chance. The co-determining of a potentiality of a habit of time and an event of space is a HISTORY, a flow of individual events in a common habit of time. The same habit can exist across multiple determinacies relatively unconnected by history (convergent evolution), while the same event can be sustained by different habits of time (two models of physics or value placed on the same event). The power to perdure of an event comes thus from the indeterminacy of its own values mixed with its overall magnitude in space capacity to survive the shifting values of chance; while the power to perdure or rather re-perdure of a habit comes from the convergence of external value upon it in their re-enacting the habit. The source of perdurance for habit and event is also distinct, as habit as a universal can spontaneously re-perdure from the field of determination-less potential of chance, while events are fixed in the field of memory which has stabilized across chance already. Epistemologically speaking, then events give forth the mark of being on becoming and a sense of what might be called “truth” as long as their network or associations maintain; by contrast habit is a pragmatic of endurance in the present. The epistemological import of habits would be to how they can be mapped onto events without destroying either (if truth as the fidelity is valued) or transvaluation of the truth by putting an event against new habits.
A history as a co-fidelity of habit and event does not require a local fidelity or becoming, but rather if a habit is to be codetermined with an event to such a fidelity that it maintains this fidelity in other manifestations of itself in chance, then this fidelity communicates at a distance as a memory between the gap of the event and the current manifestation of the habit. Now the habit is grounded in its own spontaneous emergence in chance, but can create a coherent retrocausality to itself in the event by its fidelity to the event; this fidelity is not grounded linearly in the necessity of the event but retroactively in the communication at a distance between the event’s habit and the reiteration of the habit in other spaces and histories. Thus the effect generates the seeming of a cause rather than the other way around. History as the co-perdurance of event and habit cannot expand its domain of chance through the event, as events by their very nature are static spaces in chance but rather through the progression of the habits’ fidelity. This commingling appears as direct linear causation when a history’s habit is enacted directly into formless uncertainty or as coherent reason based causation when the habit is enacted across multiple pre-established events at a distance. One may be called the epistemological illusion of effectuation, and the other the ethical illusion of reason. In truth, it might be argued that in the spontaneity of chance nothing has in an affirmative sense grounded itself in another as its cause, but rather causality is the fiction made by the spontaneous communication of values.
PERSPECTIVE exists as the co-excitation of multiple habits in a single (though non-local or essential) history on the borders of pure potentiality or uncertainty as its co-determining horizon. Habits when enacted in a commingling pattern create the rhythm of a stable perspective that “feels” the events it per say “surfs across”. If these patterns value each other in co-fidelity then their dispersed actions into chance become a common action. This horizon of chance uniting disperse say “rhythms” of habit is the constitutive unity of perspectival uncertainty one might call “agency”. Agency, as an assemblage of habits in a perspective can retroactively communicate with events in its history at a distance through the re-enactment of habits being enacted by the event, this communication then feeds the event into the current acts of the perspective The co-determination of a perspective in both its historical events and present uncertainty paints the world the perspective enact itself into and evaluates in either fidelity or resistance, with the cumulative horizon of determinate possibilities which emerge from the fusion of events with uncertainties in a flow of habituated time. This horizon of possible intelligibility does not exhaust the power of action or development of a perspective, but rather situates it in a concurrent mode of intelligibility.
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ADDENDUM CORRESPONDENCES, APPLICATIONS, AND CORRELATIONS
For now the pieces aforementioned in this write up will be a rough outline of my metaphysics, I will now crudely list some possible explanatory correlations and powers of my metaphysical model in terms of particular scientific and ethical registers. Bear with me as my knowledge of these fields are very limited and my correlations will be likely based on osmosis at best for now.
1 Physics
It is observed in contemporary physics that there seems to be a divide between the observation of macro-scale physical models which seem to operate on fixed relativistic time, and micro-scale physical models in quantum mechanics which in many elaborations has an indeterminacy as its major element. My metaphysics of chance may bridge these models ontologically as the macro scale physical models can be read as histories or events of chance that held enough fidelity to create the retroactive seeming of fixed “laws” reversible in both directions; while micro scale physics can be seen to be expressing chance’s immediate determinations unfixed to history. In a certain sense then macro-scale physics observes memory structures that have endured in chance while micro-scale physics demonstrates chance in its indeterminate and immediate form.
The arrow of time may also be explained in my model of chance and its memory, as the relative irreversibility that comes from chance’s selection out of the fact that every excitation that could of been repeated infinitely (infinitely small and large bits of determination) WAS repeatedly infinitely in chance’s pure form, so the only actualizations that do endure in chance as an emergent structure are those that say MAKE A DIFFERENCE in chance, thus the history direction of time is the capacity to make a difference IN THIS DIFFERENCE without collapsing back into the soup of chance. This make the propagation of the future not necessarily caused by the past structures before it (besides the “present” or point of highest metastable indeterminacy), but only merely NOT PREVENTED by it, thus there remains a directionality to time but not one based on linear causality but selective and eliminative indeterminacy.
2 Biology/Evolution
From my knowledge there is a tendency in contemporary biology to explain the seeming function of traits or parts of the body of an organism from a residual belief and determinate teleology due to a lack of alternative explanatory factors. My metaphysics may give a non-teleological account of function through the connection at a distance between habits and histories that repeat modes of habit in the present, thus giving a seeming “purpose” to an organism’s traits that rather comes from a non-local resonance with memory which emerges only contingently. Instead of saying a heart’s purpose is to “pump blood”, a heart must enact the habit of “hearting” in order to maintain this metastable form in the first place but this “hearting habit” does not come from inner essence but a non local resonance of the habit with past iterations of the habit in the structure of memory. A heart does not tend toward pumping blood, but rather its selection AS A HEART comes from the non-local recollections of other emergent acts of ‘hearting in history” repeated without necessity. This also allows for adaptation, as a habit does not exhaust the functions of what a heart can do when it interacts with an environment or how it emerges in mutations of genes.
3 Magical and Mystical Experience
To go into a final perhaps controversial object of explanation for my ontology of chance, my metaphysics also allows for a relative openness and potential explanation for seemingly magical phenomena like synchronicity for example. In my ontology and experience like this one I had personally:
I was walking into a classroom for a project after 3 days of having an existential crisis and encountered a classmate who was having one too and, both of us ended up having a super in synch conversation about cosmic balance and transcending morality in real time. Then another person toward the end walking in continuing the conversation and then both folks walked out and told me I DIDN'T EVEN HAVE CLASS THAT DAY despite me not knowing that.
There is temptation to explain such powerful confluence with providence, but the non-local nature of habits and systems of recursion in my metaphysics allows for us to perhaps explain this occurrence as me and the other person through our chance existential mode of crisis, repeating that mode into a common habit in the present to such a degree that it fed back into common events of signs and meaning in memory which allowed for us the co-actualize at a distance into a common frame of reference that directed us toward the same location and same issues. This convergence of habits and memory then became a focal point for non-local connection to unite and allow for seemingly serendipitous by meaningful happenings one may call synchronicity. There is more I could go into, but I will live my addendum here for now.