Tag: crealia

More than the subtraction of its parts

We tend to understand processes of emergence as the specific significant reality that is produced by a sum of parts. In this we emulate a homo faber worldview of production, or even of production ex nihilo. According to this web of belief, parts are seen as preexistent to the whole, as the cogs of a machine (although even the parts of the machine come after its architecture) or as the ingredients that make a meal (but here again a recipe is followed).

In growing plants, animals, humans, the whole seems to be prior to the part, like a plan that allows for biological forms and patterns to be specific and reasonably stable. Darwin has shown that these forms evolve, certainly, but gradually, against a stronger tendency towards stability and lawful behaviour. Evolution seems better understood by scientists than stability and repetition of forms in ecosystems.

Crealectics is an attempt, at the moment balbutiating, at understanding the stability of universal forms that we call reality, rather than their change only. The Creal hypothesis presupposes, as in all process philosophies, that change and creation are fundamental and ontologically given. Multiplicity, profusion, metamorphosis, infinite probability are not “mysterious” if primordial. What is more mysterious is the real with its recurrent and regular forms.

Compared to a Creal defined as pure virtuality and infinite probability, the real is not an addition but always a subtraction. One does not produce reality by adding elements, otherwise we would, by a regressio ad absurdum, have to explain how something is created out of nothing (an idea that the pre-socratics found ridiculous). Ex tota materia emergat resolutio; by considering a prime mover that could be defined as infinite probability, infinite virtuality, or infinite multiplicity, we start to foresee that realia, real phenomena, are a partial manifestation, not a +1 but a -1.

Actualisation, from a creal point of view, is not an emergence, but a resorbence. And even the idea of resorption might not be indicated here because if you take an element (a reale) of an infinite virtual set (Creal), the set remains infinite.

 

 

Theory in the making

This blog is a theoretical puzzle in the making, except that the final image is not predetermined by its author. I shall start however with a few elements and intuitions rather than nothing, as arguable hypotheses.

Firstly, a new concept, which I have taken to calling crealectics. This derives from my concept of Creal and the Greek suffix related to the idea of logos, discourse, correspondence, sign exchange, assemblage—by analogy with dialectics.

One intuition is that the universe is composed of realia and crealia, the first being the objets composing reality, the second being the Creal-sourced relationships and interconnections between these objects. I will investigate this line of thought with more precision.

Another speculative intuition is that the crealectical rules that govern complex superstructural interconnections, for example in human institutions, might be homothetic with small scale exchanges between non-human entities. In other words understanding crealectics at the microcosmic level should provide insights to understand macrocosmic systems or anthrobots.

I shall conclude this first post with a question: is there an affinity between crealectics and biosemiotics, the field that studies the universe as a system of sign production? At this stage, we mustn’t eliminate any line of investigation.