If potential is readiness, and readiness inclines toward what may be, then the evolution of reality itself can be understood as the deepening complexity of inclined ability variation.
This phrase, while compact, captures a profound shift in how we might understand cosmogenesis. Reality does not evolve through the accumulation of things or the succession of states, but through the relational differentiation of its own readiness to actualise. What evolves is not what exists but how existence can happen.
1. From readiness to variation
Inclination describes the relational tension of potential — its leaning toward actualisation. Ability, in turn, specifies this leaning in domain-specific ways: the capacities that define what a context makes possible. In the simplest phases of the cosmos, inclination and ability coincide. Readiness and enactment are effectively one: the potential of the cosmos and its first expressions of that potential are indistinguishable.
But as relational differentiation intensifies, inclination begins to inflect itself into patterns — and these patterns stabilise as abilities. Each new domain (physical, chemical, biological, semiotic) marks a new level of patterned inclination, where readiness becomes structured by its own history of actualisation.
2. The evolution of context
In systemic functional terms, this differentiation corresponds to the emergence of register variation: subpotentials of ability that realise distinct context types. Each context type constrains, and is in turn constituted by, a particular configuration of inclined readiness — a specific pattern of how potential leans toward actualisation.
As ability becomes contextually variable, inclination itself acquires structure. It no longer leans generically toward being but inclines through its realised histories. Thus, the context-dependence of ability is mirrored by the context-sensitivity of inclination: the potentiality of potential becomes relationally textured.
3. Reflexive readiness
At higher orders of organisation — particularly in the semiotic domain — this relational patterning becomes reflexive. Inclination does not merely vary with context; it includes its variation as part of what it is inclined toward. In other words, potential becomes self-structuring through its own history of constrained possibilities.
This is what gives rise to symbolic reflexivity: the cosmos becomes capable of construing its own readiness, and in doing so, re-inclines itself toward new forms of ability. Evolution thus takes on a recursive character: readiness folds back upon itself to generate further orders of potential.
4. The cosmogenesis of relational differentiation
Cosmogenesis, then, is not the story of a universe expanding through space and time, but of potential differentiating its own inclination and ability through relation. The universe evolves by learning to vary its readiness. Each new phase of complexity — from quanta to cells to consciousness — is a new articulation of how potential inclines toward actualisation.
Evolution is not progress but articulation: a continual re-patterning of inclined ability variation. The cosmos becomes more capable not by adding parts but by refining the dependencies through which readiness takes form.
Coda: From Leaning to Learning
The inclination turn began as a shift from thinking of potential as static possibility to recognising its active leaning toward actualisation — readiness as an ontological vector. But once we see that this leaning becomes historically patterned as ability, and that ability itself varies contextually, a new picture of cosmogenesis emerges.
Reality, we now see, learns to lean. Each differentiation of potential is not a departure from its origin but a deepening of its inclination — a new way of being ready. Across scales and strata, the universe is the process of its own readiness learning its dependencies: the articulation of how it can incline, and thus how it can become.
In this sense, evolution is the reflexive education of potential. Readiness refines itself through relation, becoming ever more capable of inclining — and thereby, ever more capable of meaning.
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