{"id":623,"date":"2020-06-06T03:21:07","date_gmt":"2020-06-06T00:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/boyanmanchev.net\/bmtest07052022\/blog\/?p=623"},"modified":"2022-03-29T20:34:35","modified_gmt":"2022-03-29T17:34:35","slug":"reversed-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/boyanmanchev.net\/bmtest07052022\/clinamen-en\/reversed-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Reversed time"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Le jeu des possibles<\/i>, Fran\u00e7ois Jacob describes the emergence of the new as the consequence of chance, which imposes a \u2018bricolage\u2019 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: \u2018It [self-consciousness] enables the human being to break free from actuality, so as to create a possibility\u2019 (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<\/span>. In other words, the French biologist presupposes not only the anthropotechnical, but also the ontological <\/i>function of these human activities, beyond the automatized romantic trope of \u2018building new worlds\u2019. In ontological terms, Jacob\u2019s thesis can be inscribed in the perspective of the principle of ontological individuation. <\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, some of Jacob\u2019s 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\u2019s followers, on the other, Henri Atlan\u2019s Between the Crystal and the Smoke<\/i> 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 \u2018local reduction of entropy<\/i>, leading to a local reversal of time [or a temporal inversion]. [\u2026] 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 \u201ccomplexity from noise\u201d principle operates. The first reversal [\u2026] is the weaker one of them both.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/i> on the same elementary level, which allows imagining irreversibility in the perspective of the theory of dissipative structure, in Atlan\u2019s terms \u2013 the \u2018principle of complexity from noise\u2019 or the \u2018organizing chance\u2019, an agent of self-organizing forces. \u2018Is 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 \u201cto be\u201d [\u00eatre<\/i>] and what is described by the operator L<\/i> as \u201cto become\u201d [devenir<\/i>].\u2019<\/span> Thus, the modern Anaximenes and his like-minded colleague – today\u2019s follower of Gaia – arrive at the idea of a fluctuating <\/i>time \u2013 the time of a dynamic, open and complex nature: \u2018Thermodynamics 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. [\u2026] 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\u2019 (Ibid., p. 282). In conclusion, Prigogine and Stengers will provocatively address the defenders of closed systems and regularities: \u2018Those who think the Earth would be nicer in the form of an immaculate crystal globe \u2013 do they really wish to look into Medusa\u2019s gaze and be transformed into diamond statues, \u201cnicer\u201d than ever before?\u2019 (Ibid., p. 277).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The becoming miracle <\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

In the presently developed perspective, Jacob\u2019s \u2018play of possibilities\u2019 can be described as a metacausal organization that we defined as decision. (\u0422:<\/b>) The decision is an immanent resolve, an \u2018exit\u2019 out of a situation \u2013 a dynamic situation or, in Atlan\u2019s idiom, a destabilized system, whose entrance is the irreducible action of an aleatory element: the organizing chance<\/i>, the conduit of the principle of complexity from noise<\/i>. The resolution of the situation does not entail its renewed stabilization in accordance with Prigogine\u2019s 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. <\/span><\/p>\n

(\u0422:<\/b>) The decision is an ontological reflexivity, an alter-potentiality of the agent that is immanent to the situation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The ontological individuation is ontological reflexivity. <\/span><\/p>\n

The decision is first and foremost a decision of one\u2019s \u2018own\u2019 subject, i.e. a choice or a section<\/i> 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 \u2013 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 \u2018islands\u2019 or transversals of effiricent, pregnant determinacy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hence, the decision is a \u2018miracle\u2019, that is to say a miracle<\/i>. The \u2018miracle\u2019 is namely a miracle<\/i> in the counter-final aim of a situation lacking in the elements that would allow the explication of its own ontological fact<\/span>, 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<\/i> (according to Novalis\u2019 fragment 1258) \u2013 an alter-actualizing, self-flexing force, clinamen<\/i> of that which is<\/i>: i.e. that which is more than that which is<\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n

The decision never emerges in a void or in vain; not only is it not simply chance \u2013 it traverses the axis chance-necessity. The decision is something-more-than-chance; it is a necessary spontaneity<\/i>. Hence, the decision, the scheme of the ontological individuation, is not reproduction, but ontological production: the miracle of the origin of life. <\/span><\/p>\n

Therefore,<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

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. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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