The air above the river shimmered, and Liora looked up. A lattice had formed, suspended in the sky, like a network of countless crystalline threads. Each thread glowed faintly, connecting nodes of impossible light — a lattice of eternal forms, some familiar, some utterly strange.
This was the domain of eternal objects: Whitehead’s “forms of possibility,” influencing events without themselves being events. Liora felt the lattice pulse with potentiality, each node a silent, waiting possibility.
1. Perceiving Patterns, Not Objects
As she floated closer, Liora realised something subtle.
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The nodes did not exist as “things” in the usual sense.
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They did not act; they exerted influence, shaping the river’s currents, nudging ripples, arranging eddies.
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She sensed systemic potential in Halliday’s sense: the lattice constrained what could appear, yet it was not itself instantiated.
She touched a node lightly — it shimmered and receded. Nothing was produced; the node had only suggested, only conditioned, only structured potential.
2. Shifting the Cut
From her vantage, Liora could see the interplay of lattice and river. Each current of the river flowed past the nodes, sometimes aligning with them, sometimes ignoring them.
She realised:
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Each eddy was an instance: a cut through potential.
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Each interaction between lattice and river was a moment of logogenesis: temporal unfolding of the instance.
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The lattice itself, eternal and uninstantiated, remained distinct from the river.
The lattice was not part of the river, yet the river could not exist without it. Possibility shaped actuality, but did not become it.
3. Whitehead Meets Halliday
She understood the duality:
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Whitehead’s eternal objects: metaphysical possibilities that exist and influence events.
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Halliday’s systemic potential: relational possibilities that structure instances, but do not exist ontologically.
The lattice looked similar in both cases, but the subtle difference was crucial: one exists in being; the other exists in relation.
Liora felt the pull of the difference like wind across her skin — impossible to deny, but also exhilarating.
4. The Dance of Possibility
Liora lifted her hands and traced invisible patterns along the lattice. Each movement was a hypothesis, a construal:
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She could follow a thread from node to node.
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She could anticipate the river’s currents, imagine which eddies would conform to which possibilities.
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Yet every path was conditional, never necessary.
The lattice and river danced together: emergence without production, potential without exhaustion, possibility felt but never owned.
5. The Subtle Lesson
She understood that:
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Whitehead’s eternal objects give texture, shading, and weight to the river’s dynamics.
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Halliday’s systemic potential gives structure, direction, and constraint.
The lattice was the interface where process met relational discipline. Liora perceived it, felt it, but never confused it with the river itself. The shimmer of possibility was alive — and yet the river’s currents remained perspectival, not ontologically determined.
Closing
The lattice of eternal objects was a living metaphor: it revealed how potential could shape unfolding events without being events. It showed how possibility could exist independently of actualisation, while leaving the instance free to cut through it, moment by moment.
In the next analytical post, we will step out of mythic imagery and examine realisation versus process, the interstratal dynamics that Whitehead’s philosophy cannot stabilise — and how relational semiotics preserves the asymmetry that process alone cannot capture.
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