The New Materiality Corrected.pages

A richer conception of causality linked to the notion of the structure of a possibility space, gives us the means to start thinking about matter as possessing morphogenetic powers of its own.

To conclude, linear causality and its necessary and unique outcomes, gives us a picture of matter as something incapable of giving birth to form by itself.

But the fact that underneath these mechanisms there is the same tendency to minimize some quantity (or to cycle through the same set of states over and over) shows that the singularities themselves are mechanism-independent.

The latter involve specific mechanisms that produce specific effects, and these mechanisms vary from one type of process to another.

The fact that the same singularity (a point, a loop) can structure the possibility spaces of physical processes that are so different in detail implies that the explanatory role of singularities is different from that of causes.

The tendencies towards different types of stability (steady, cyclic, turbulent) predicted to exist by this mathematical approach have indeed been confirmed in laboratory experiments.

each degree of freedom becomes one dimension of a possibility space, the space of possible states for the system, while the differential relations between them determine a certain distribution of singularities.

The degrees of freedom, in turn, must be related to one another using the differential calculus, that is, the branch of mathematics dealing with rates of change, or to put it differently, dealing with the rapidity or slowness with which properties can change.

These "degrees of freedom", as they are cal ed, must be picked careful y: they must be the most significant ways of changing, since any material system can change in an infinite number of trivial ways.

In this case, the first thing that needs to be done is to figure out the number of different ways in which the material system to be modeled is free to change.