Something happens.
Then it is over.
Or so we normally imagine.
But sometimes what happened does not simply disappear into the past. It changes what exists now.
A molecule reacts, altering the conditions for subsequent reactions.
An organism encounters its environment, changing its own organisation.
A population undergoes selection, leaving inherited differences in later generations.
A model is trained, changing the organisation through which it subsequently produces responses.
In each case, something that happened earlier has become part of something that exists later.
The past has acquired a present.
But this is not because the past has been transported intact into the future. The event itself is gone. What remains is an alteration.
A changed pathway.
A changed structure.
A changed disposition.
A changed set of possibilities.
This suggests that history need not be thought of as a sequence of events stored somewhere.
History can become organisation.
The crucial transition occurs when what happened changes the conditions under which something else can happen.
A previous event becomes consequential not because it is remembered, but because it has altered the system's future possibilities.
This gives us a simple formulation:
event → alteration → organisation → possibility.
The event belongs to the past.
The organisation belongs to the present.
But the organisation carries the consequences of the past into the future.
That is why a scar, a genome, a learned behaviour, a metabolic pathway or a trained model can all be understood as historical in a deeper sense than merely having a story behind them.
Their history is inside their organisation.
And once history becomes organisation, the distinction between past and present becomes less absolute.
The past is no longer merely what happened.
It is part of what can happen next.
So our question becomes more precise:
What kinds of changes are capable of carrying a history forward?
That is where the real adventure begins.
No comments:
Post a Comment