Causality is the alignment of inclining abilities, not the chain of efficient causes.
When potential is understood as readiness, causality can no longer be conceived as a sequence of pushes and pulls. The very grammar of cause and effect dissolves. What we call a “cause” is simply a stable pattern of inclination — a coordination of readinesses that have found a coherent orientation toward one another.
Traditional metaphysics imagines causality as a vertical structure: higher-level laws governing lower-level events, or fundamental particles determining emergent wholes. But in a world of readiness, this hierarchy collapses into a field of relational gradients. Every entity inclines — not downward or upward, but outward into relation. What binds the cosmos is not a chain of necessity but a topology of coordination.
In such a topology, cause and effect are perspectival distinctions within a single act of alignment. The inclination of one readiness modulates another; each construes the other’s leaning as the condition of its own articulation. The apparent direction of causality (from A to B) is a construal within this mutual gradient — one moment of a more general relational becoming.
This redistribution of causality reframes emergence. A new pattern does not arise from the aggregation of smaller causes; it arises when multiple inclinations find a common mode of coordination. What emerges is not produced but composed. Reality is not a causal machine but a continuously re-phrasing ensemble — a symphony of readiness aligning across scales.
To speak of law in this ontology, then, is to describe a habit of inclination — a reproducible orientation that has stabilised through recursive alignment. Regularity is readiness finding rhythm.
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