Individuation in Structured Potential: 3 — Inclination and the Thickening of Potential

1. The Problem of Continuity

If instantiation is a perspectival actualisation of structured potential, a question immediately arises:

How does continuity occur?

If each instance is a narrowing within a field of possibilities, why does the world not dissolve into discontinuous events?

Traditional ontologies answer by appealing to substance. Something persists beneath change.

Within structured potential, that appeal is unavailable.

Continuity must be explained without invoking an underlying thing.

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2. Repeated Narrowing

Actualisation is never arbitrary. Each cut is made within a field already patterned.

Selections occur along pathways of relative ease. Certain configurations are more readily actualised than others.

When similar narrowings occur repeatedly, the field does not remain neutral.

It becomes inclined.

An inclination is not a stored entity.

It is not a trace in a substrate.

It is a patterned bias within structured potential — a relative thickening along certain lines of actualisation.

The field begins to lean.

Not because it has acquired mass, but because certain pathways have become more densely structured through repetition.

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3. Density Without Substance

We may describe this as thickening, but we must be careful.

Density here does not refer to physical compression. It refers to the increased probability of particular actualisations.

Repeated narrowing stabilises certain configurations. What was once one possibility among many becomes a highly available trajectory.

Stability, then, is not persistence of substance.

It is sustained inclination within structured potential.

This allows continuity without reification.

The field does not contain enduring things.

It exhibits enduring leanings.

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4. Toward Individuation

Once inclination is understood, individuation becomes thinkable without substance.

An “individual” would not be an isolated entity. It would be a region where inclination has become especially dense — where patterned narrowing sustains a relatively stable configuration across successive actualisations.

Such stability would not be absolute. The broader field of potential would remain operative.

But neither would it be illusory.

Individuation would be real as inclination.

Not a boundary drawn in space,

but a sustained direction within structured possibility.

We are now in a position to take the next step.

If inclination can thicken, can it thicken sufficiently to form a relatively autonomous region of stability?

And if so, what would such a region be?