In Le jeu des possibles, François Jacob describes the emergence of the new as the consequence of chance, which imposes a ‘bricolage’ and therefore a retroactive selection, thus ensuring a possibility for the counter-final organization of finality, as well as the creation of a metacausal situation as a proto-form of decision: ‘It [self-consciousness] enables the human being to break free from actuality, so as to create a possibility’ (p. 116). Jacob goes so far as to draw an analogy, in relation to the construction of realities, between the process of encefalization and the role of the myths, the arts and the sciences. In other words, the French biologist presupposes not only the anthropotechnical, but also the ontological function of these human activities, beyond the automatized romantic trope of ‘building new worlds’. In ontological terms, Jacob’s thesis can be inscribed in the perspective of the principle of ontological individuation.
Indeed, some of Jacob’s major examples point to the fact that the break of reversisbility is a direct effect of the principle of ontological individuation, i.e. the whole is irreducible to the sum of its elements, just as the affective function is irreducible to the energetic accumulation of forces. In this respect, moving further than the clash between the views of Monod and Jacob, on the one hand, and those of Prigogine’s followers, on the other, Henri Atlan’s Between the Crystal and the Smoke explicitly opposes the taken-for-granted idea of irreversibility of biological time. Following the proposals of Olivier Costa de Beauregard, he presupposes the possibility of a ‘local reduction of entropy, leading to a local reversal of time [or a temporal inversion]. […] Thus, we run into two types of time reversal: the one occurs along the conscious volitional actions of humans, provided there is a will; the other operates on the level of inconscious physico-chemical processes of auto-organization, where the “complexity from noise” principle operates. The first reversal […] is the weaker one of them both.’
Although Atlan criticizes the attempt of Prigogine and his group to define the irreversibility at the elementary level (p. 160), Prigogine himself in fact tries to propose the operator time on the same elementary level, which allows imagining irreversibility in the perspective of the theory of dissipative structure, in Atlan’s terms – the ‘principle of complexity from noise’ or the ‘organizing chance’, an agent of self-organizing forces. ‘Is it not possible to come up with an operator that is related to time itself? The introduction of such an operator would allow considering anew the connections between what is described by time as “to be” [être] and what is described by the operator L as “to become” [devenir].’ Thus, the modern Anaximenes and his like-minded colleague – today’s follower of Gaia – arrive at the idea of a fluctuating time – the time of a dynamic, open and complex nature: ‘Thermodynamics of irreversible processes has discovered that the currents traversing certain physico-chemical systems, moving them off balance, can sustain processes of spontaneous self-organization, of violation of the symmetries, of development towards increasing complexity and diversity. […] The role of chance with their choice is not a minor one, but much more crucial than Aristotle ever supposed. Bifurcating nature is one, in which the small differences, the insignificant fluctuations can (if occurring in the appropriate conditions) overtake the whole system and establish a new order upon its existence’ (Ibid., p. 282). In conclusion, Prigogine and Stengers will provocatively address the defenders of closed systems and regularities: ‘Those who think the Earth would be nicer in the form of an immaculate crystal globe – do they really wish to look into Medusa’s gaze and be transformed into diamond statues, “nicer” than ever before?’ (Ibid., p. 277).
The becoming miracle
In the presently developed perspective, Jacob’s ‘play of possibilities’ can be described as a metacausal organization that we defined as decision. (Т:) The decision is an immanent resolve, an ‘exit’ out of a situation – a dynamic situation or, in Atlan’s idiom, a destabilized system, whose entrance is the irreducible action of an aleatory element: the organizing chance, the conduit of the principle of complexity from noise. The resolution of the situation does not entail its renewed stabilization in accordance with Prigogine’s theorem about the orientation of off-balance systems towards a state of stability, but effectuates its qualitative transformation, and even though this transformation performs a random (or rather, aleatorily initiated) selection of elements, it effectively mobilizes them with respect to a certain order, a new flexion of the multitude, which elevates it to a level of a higher degree of organization and efficiency.
(Т:) The decision is an ontological reflexivity, an alter-potentiality of the agent that is immanent to the situation.
The ontological individuation is ontological reflexivity.
The decision is first and foremost a decision of one’s ‘own’ subject, i.e. a choice or a section of the agent who carries out the alter-actualization of the situation. This is why the decision is the scheme of the ontological individuation. The decision is autopoiesis of the autopoietic agent – not a chance of necessity, but its spontaneity: a spontaneous meta- or even trans-causality; a counter-final transformation of an existing multitude that transfers it on a level of complex indeterminacy and efficient mobilization of ‘islands’ or transversals of effiricent, pregnant determinacy.
Hence, the decision is a ‘miracle’, that is to say a miracle. The ‘miracle’ is namely a miracle in the counter-final aim of a situation lacking in the elements that would allow the explication of its own ontological fact, notwithstanding that the explication through an extra-situational factor would be invalid, inasmuch it regresses along the line of bad infinity. The limit of the situation-cloud is chaos, the cloud of all clouds, the chaos that is at once in and out of itself (according to Novalis’ fragment 1258) – an alter-actualizing, self-flexing force, clinamen of that which is: i.e. that which is more than that which is.
The decision never emerges in a void or in vain; not only is it not simply chance – it traverses the axis chance-necessity. The decision is something-more-than-chance; it is a necessary spontaneity. Hence, the decision, the scheme of the ontological individuation, is not reproduction, but ontological production: the miracle of the origin of life.
Therefore,
Movement, respectively change, must not be understood in terms of mechanistic regularities, i.e in the perspective of a causal and temporal progression; on the contrary, it is in the linear order that we must seek the reflexive potential of a reversal, of a break in the the temporal translation, of a technical advancement: the chaoid gene of the subject.