We have arrived at a peculiar question.
If actualisation can change the relations from which possibilities arise, then something rather strange can happen.
A possibility can become available that was not previously available.
But what could that mean?
Surely, if something is now possible, it must have been possible all along. The event itself existed as a possibility before it occurred. We simply did not know about it.
This is certainly true of some kinds of possibility.
But perhaps not all.
The distinction matters.
Discovery is not generation
Suppose there is a chemical reaction we have never observed.
The reaction may nevertheless have been possible under the conditions that existed before we discovered it. Our ignorance did not make it impossible.
In that case, we have discovered a possibility.
Nothing about the field of possibilities has changed.
But suppose the conditions themselves change.
A new catalyst appears. A new compound forms. A new temperature range becomes available. A new relation among existing components makes a reaction pathway possible that was not previously available under the relevant conditions.
Now something different has happened.
The possibility has not merely been discovered.
The conditions that made it possible have come into existence.
This is the distinction we need.
A possibility can be unknown without being new.
But a possibility can also be new because the relations that constitute it are new.
The new relation changes the possible
Consider two species that have never interacted.
Perhaps one species begins to consume the other.
At first this looks like a new event: one organism has acquired a new food source.
But the consequences may be much larger.
The predator now exerts a new pressure on the prey. The prey population changes. Other organisms respond. Resources are redistributed. New ecological relationships emerge.
The original interaction has transformed the field.
What was possible for the participants has changed.
And this is not because some previously existing possibility has been selected from a cosmic catalogue.
The catalogue itself was never there.
There was simply a set of relations within which certain things could happen.
Then the relations changed.
And with them, the possibilities changed.
This is emergence without magic
The phrase “new possibility” can make the process sound mysterious.
It need not be.
Nothing has appeared from nowhere.
The new possibility is generated by a new configuration of relations.
A molecule does not need to contain a future chemical reaction inside itself.
An organism does not need to contain its future ecological niche.
A language does not need to contain every future use of every word.
A conceptual system does not need to contain every distinction that might someday be made.
What is required is that the relations among the participants can change in ways that make new forms of participation possible.
The novelty lies in the configuration.
This is why a relational account of becoming can accommodate emergence without treating emergence as the appearance of something from nothing.
What is new is not necessarily a new substance.
It can be a new way in which things can matter to one another.
Language gives us the clearest example
Consider a word acquiring a new meaning.
The word itself may already exist. The sounds may already exist. The grammatical resources may already exist.
Yet a new use can transform what speakers can do with the word.
Once that use becomes established, it can enter into further relations. It can support new expressions, distinctions and arguments. Other words may acquire related meanings. A new conceptual field can emerge around it.
The new possibility was not simply hiding inside the word.
Nor did it come from nowhere.
It arose through a transformation of the relations in which the word participated.
This is conceptual evolution in miniature.
A new way of using a linguistic resource can alter the potential of the language, which can make further distinctions available, which can support further innovations.
The system generates possibilities through its own history.
Biology does the same thing
Biological evolution provides a more familiar example.
A new form does not merely appear within an ecosystem and then occupy a vacant slot.
Its existence changes the relations among organisms.
A new predator creates new possibilities for prey behaviour. A new pollinator changes the reproductive possibilities of a plant. A symbiotic relationship makes possible forms of organisation that neither participant could sustain in isolation.
And here the notion of a fixed possibility space becomes particularly awkward.
Before the relation existed, should we say that the new form of participation was possible?
In one sense, perhaps.
But in the more important relational sense, it was not yet available.
The relation that would constitute that possibility did not yet exist.
Once it does, the field has changed.
The possibility becomes real as a possibility.
This helps clarify the problem with “selection”
We can now return briefly to the evolutionary language that led us here.
Variation and selection are often described as though evolution were a process of choosing among alternatives already present in a possibility space.
But the history of evolution suggests something more complicated.
The alternatives themselves can change.
A new form changes the environment in which subsequent forms arise. A new ecological relation creates new selective pressures. A new developmental pathway opens further possibilities for variation.
Selection therefore operates within a field that is itself historically transformed.
There is no permanent menu from which evolution chooses.
There is an evolving relationship between what can occur and what has occurred.
That may be why attempts to generalise biological evolution to chemistry, geology or other systems can be both illuminating and misleading.
The illuminating part is the recognition that systems can generate variation, differentiate possibilities and preserve some outcomes rather than others.
The misleading part is the assumption that the biological mechanism itself is the fundamental pattern.
Perhaps the deeper pattern is simpler:
what becomes can change what can become.
Possibility is therefore historical
We can now give a more precise meaning to the idea that possibility has a history.
At any moment, a relational field makes some forms of becoming available and others unavailable.
What happens can transform that field.
The transformed field makes different possibilities available.
So possibility at one moment is not necessarily identical to possibility at another.
The difference is not merely epistemic.
We may know more about the later possibilities.
Rather, there may actually be more—or different—things that can happen because the relations have changed.
This is what makes history generative.
History does not simply record the passage from one actuality to another.
It records the transformation of the conditions under which actualisation can occur.
But is the new possibility really new?
We should still be careful.
There is a danger here of confusing a genuinely new possibility with a new description of an old one.
If a previously unknown species is discovered, the species was presumably possible before anyone found it.
If a new mathematical theorem is proved, we may reasonably say that the theorem was true before its proof was written.
If a new arrangement of familiar objects becomes possible merely because someone notices it, nothing ontologically new has necessarily occurred.
So the claim that possibilities can be generated should not become a licence for saying that every novelty creates a new possibility.
The stronger claim requires a change in the relations that constitute the relevant field.
The new possibility must depend upon something having become different.
That difference may be physical, biological, social, or semiotic.
But it must be a difference in the conditions of participation.
This gives us a useful distinction
We can therefore distinguish three things.
These processes can overlap.
The actualisation of one possibility may generate another. The discovery of a possibility may lead us to actualise it. The actualisation may then transform the field again.
But they are not the same process.
And once we see this, becoming becomes more interesting.
Becoming is not simply the passage from possibility to actuality.
It can be part of the production of the conditions for further possibility.
The future is therefore not waiting for us
We began this series with the image of possibility as a space.
We can now see why that image was inadequate.
If the future were simply a space of possibilities, then becoming would amount to travelling through a landscape that already existed.
But if relations generate possibilities, and actualisations transform relations, then the landscape itself changes.
The future is not simply waiting.
Nor is it completely undetermined.
It is historically generated.
What can happen next depends partly upon what has already happened, because what has already happened may have changed the relations that constitute the field.
This gives us neither a predetermined future nor an arbitrary one.
It gives us a future whose openness has a history.
And perhaps this is the deepest sense of becoming
We can now return to the simple formula that has accompanied us throughout:
relation → possibility → potential → actualisation → transformed relation → new possibility
It is not a mechanical sequence.
It is a recursive pattern.
Relations make possibilities available.
Participants take some possibilities up.
Actualisations occur.
Some actualisations transform the relations.
The transformed relations make new possibilities available.
And those possibilities provide the conditions for further becoming.
The world does not merely contain things that change.
It contains relations through which what can change can itself change.
That is why the generation of possibility matters.
It means that novelty does not require the world to create something from nothing.
Novelty can arise when existing participants enter into relations that alter what participation can mean.
A new possibility is therefore not necessarily a new object waiting to be found.
It can be a new way for something to become.
And perhaps that is the most interesting thing we have discovered.
The world does not merely become.
Through becoming, the world changes what becoming can be.
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