Today I coined the term Complex potential States to designate a shift from thinking in terms of adaptive pressure and escalating complexity, toward a more process philosophical view where systems are not bounded entities with agency that struggle to adapt, but are construed as relational states composed by all agents that strive to advance. Here a theory of change means relational-state “systems” advance from moment to moment by achieving coherence, which has a temporal dimension called a “duration.” Since agents exercise agency across multiple scales and durations, there is not only one single moment in time when everything changes all at once. This is a feature that process philosophy grants only to quantum fluctuations, whose durations are of the smallest scale (plank scale). In living systems, relational-states cohere far from equilibrium, which means that the topology between states is steep, and the space where coherence happens is narrow. It is this feature of “steep and narrow” that accounts for the precarity of being.
implicit processes carry meaning forward, even when they fail to cross a threshold of conscious, symbolic processing
Whitehead coined the term “subsist” as opposed to “exist” to tease out the causal properties of potentials that failed to reach thresholds for becoming actuals.
In this way a theory of Complex Potential States can account for the kind of numinous causality in complexity science — that causes are simultaneously nowhere and everywhere
Such a theory would posit that only actual effects exist, while causes “merely” subsist, and that is why they are not detectable.
Unlike the logic of complex adaptive systems which asks “what do we do now?” the logic of complex potential states asks “what is possible from here?”
Is it possible, then, to reframe the big questions of climate change, existential risk, institutional crisis, and the breakdown of meaning, from one of adaptive pressure on a global scale to a theory of complex potential states on a human scale?