Never before has this particular tree-me existed.
In the previous post, I described how action protocols are internal metabolic signatures of the external world, and function to make sense of it for the person. In this article I introduce the notions of action thresholds.
In any given moment, for any given individual, there are trillions upon trillions of action protocols operating at different spatial and temporal scales among the internal relations (habitas) of the entities and beings who are sensing and acting in their local habitat (networks of external relations). In this two-step dance, in which actions at one scale unfold new external relations, while actions at another scale infold new action protocols, sense-making happens. 1
All the actions taken, contribute to the whole, but most contribute to the background potential state, while only the few, stronger and coordinated actions reach above a threshold where the activities at the deeper level become realized as action-taken at the higher scale. This realized action can be merely consciousness of something--- like a shift in mood, or worrisome thought--- or can be a movement that makes a sound or propels the animal. The new awareness, thought, sound making or movement constitutes the new context at the apex of the sense-making up-hierarchy, a context that in turn creates a global update “headed back down.” The organism is no long there but now over here.
Below a certain threshold, the perceptual event is not something the child experiences but susbsists as latent potential in the codex of the action potentials.
The sum total of these action protocols compose complex potential states. We can think of the potential state as “subsisting” on one side of an event horizon, and the actual realized state as existing on the other side of it.
The potential state is a stream brimming with pluripotentiality
In his book Facing the Planetary, William E. Connolly describes Whitehead’s notions around potential states as a “stream brimming with pluripotentiality flowing toward action.” The coherent state that emerges as action taken, enfolds only some of the potentials. Those not selected are in a sense “left behind,” but they are not eliminated. Connolly writes “The open plurality that preceded the selection now simmers in the background of being, available to enter into future vibrations when a new situation arises.”
This pluripotentiality consitutes the numinous causal field. A New Theory of the Body would correctly situate the body within this field of possibility and its role as a causal agent.
Further Resources
Footnotes
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If no sense were being made, the organism would fall apart. I believe that we have a “sense-making crisis” today because we arseparated from our body and nature --- the lving ground and origin of all sense-fullness. ↩