Wednesday, 29 October 2025

Potential, Probability, and the Relational Turn: VIII The Evolution of Potential

In the previous post, we examined recursive potential: how readiness evolves through actualisations and systemic feedback.

Now we turn to evolution over time, exploring how fields of readiness shift, stabilise, and generate complex patterns of potential across scales.


1. Time and potential

Readiness is inherently temporal: the capacities and inclinations of a system are not fixed. Each actualisation reshapes the field, producing new tendencies and modifying structural capacities.

  • Temporal evolution is the unfolding of relational potential.

  • Past actualisations constrain and orient future alignments.

  • The field of readiness is history-sensitive: it “remembers” through altered inclinations and capacities.

Unlike probability-based models, this evolution is kinetic and dispositional, not stochastic. Potential evolves because it is real — not because we lack knowledge about it.


2. Patterns of alignment

Fields of potential evolve along coherent patterns:

  1. Stabilisation: repeated actualisations reinforce certain alignments, creating durable structures of readiness.

  2. Emergence: new configurations arise when novel alignments shift inclinations and capacities unexpectedly.

  3. Feedback loops: systemic interactions propagate influence across scales, producing recursive evolution.

These patterns underlie everything from quantum coherence to social norms, neural plasticity, and symbolic systems.


3. Evolution as relational dynamics

The evolution of potential is relational, not intrinsic:

  • Capacities and inclinations are defined by interactions within the field.

  • Actualisations are perspectival cuts, not absolute events.

  • Feedback modifies the field locally and non-locally, producing complex, multiscale dynamics.

Evolution is thus the continuous modulation of readiness, a kinetic unfolding of relational structure.


4. Implications for understanding reality

Viewing potential as evolving readiness transforms our understanding of:

  • Causality: events emerge from alignment, not from probabilistic selection or deterministic laws.

  • Agency: human and symbolic action participates in evolving fields, shaping inclinations and capacities.

  • Quantum mechanics: evolution of wavefunctions encodes evolving readiness; decoherence is the systemic stabilisation of patterns.

Potential is not a static property; it is a living, evolving field, constantly sculpted by its own actualisations.


5. Visualisation of evolutionary dynamics

We can represent evolving readiness as:

  • Nodes: potential alignments (capacity + inclination)

  • Edges: relational influences and constraints

  • Temporal layers: successive actualisations modify node states

  • Feedback pathways: recursive shaping of inclinations and capacities over time

This captures the kinetic, relational, and evolutionary character of potential.


6. Preview of Part IX

In the next post, we will explore coherence in becoming: how evolving potential maintains systemic integrity, produces predictable patterns, and enables emergent order across relational fields.

We will see how evolution is not random, but guided by the topology and vectors of readiness, producing the continuous unfolding of complex systems.

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