Finalism's Family Feud

Broadly speaking, Ruyer's goal in the next two chapters (18 and 19) is to distinguish his theory of finalism from related theories that today go under the names of vitalism and panpsychism.  For this reason he surveys a number of authors who represent each of these schools of thought.  Since I'm not familiar with most of these thinkers, it makes little sense to go into the details.  However, I do think it's clarifying to understand some of the subtleties involved in why Ruyer's theory differs from these other, better known, alternatives to reductionist materialism.

Let's define vitalism as the idea that there is a specifically vital force that exists outside the realm of the physical.  This is obviously not a single theory, but a broad category of theories that Ruyer actually calls "organicism".  What all of these theories have in common is positing at least two types of order in the universe -- a deterministic step-by-step casual 'order' of physical particles, and a separate holistic order of sense, meaning, and purpose which constitutes the vital.  There can be significant differences in how these theories think the two type of order relate -- Kant saw the physical world evolving deterministically, but still "as if" it followed a divine plan, so that both sides were real but never touched (NF, 192), others thought the vital force could directly influence the physical in some magical fashion, and still others, like Merleau-Ponty, that the physical was effectively a subset of the vital, in the sense that to be is to be perceived by a living being (NF, 199).  But they all think of the vital order as categorically distinct from the physical.

For Ruyer, none of these alternatives are quite right because for him the vital isn't really separate. Earlier we called him an monist idealist.  And this is still a fine description as long as we keep in mind that for Ruyer, Ideas are independent real entities that don't need to be inside the mind of hairless chimps or any other living thing.  Indeed, they are the only real entities, and as a result they cannot be parallel to or in interaction with or even contain within themselves a physical world which, for Ruyer, does not have a separate real existence.  Everything is Ideas -- domains of absolute survey that exist as "autosubjects".

As a domain of absolute survey, an organic form is altogether different from a physical Gestalt, and yet it is not a "perceived form." It is an abuse of language to say that the organic form is "perceived by itself," as though it had to present its own image to itself, like a man who looks at himself in a mirror instead of looking at others. It is an abuse of language to consider the autopossession of self, the "for-itself," the autosubjectivity of every being as self-knowledge or self-perception. This "texture-knowledge," this primary consciousness, is not knowledge; it is being. Perception's mise-en-scène must not be transported into the absolute survey of form-being and of activity-being. (NF, 199)

As a result, while Ruyer can often sound superficially like a vitialist because of his emphasis on the efficacy of transspatial entities, and his constant appeal to the centrality of the organism, his theory goes much further than vitalism's attempt to put life or consciousness back into contact with matter.  In fact, there's no need to do this as matter and consciousness are both already life.  Ruyer illustrates this with a wonderful image that he assumes everyone has seen.

Let us imagine three humans A, B, and C on the model of Ripolin's famous poster. The first, A, is just an automaton but very sophisticated, made up of metallic cogs and dynamic systems of equilibrium. B is a living man but is deaf and blind and even temporarily deprived of every psychological life in the ordinary sense. The third, C, observes the first two. The first is certainly not a true form. Its "form" is constituted as a whole only in C's perception. It does not maintain its structure on its own, and it requires external maintenance and repairs. But B, an organism without psychological and sensory consciousness, is indeed a true form, because he is living and can be distinguished from a corpse, and be- cause his organism actively maintains its structure (e.g., the stomach does not digest itself and the neural cells do not chemically degrade). This form does not depend on C's perceptive image of B. B's brain has a proper form and activity, which are no doubt less "molar" than if B were not temporarily unconscious, but less "molecular" than if he were dead. Our three humans represent three levels: physical, vital, and psychologically conscious. Gestalttheorie as much as mechanism seeks the unity of the three levels by starting from A. Merleau-Ponty as well as idealists seek this unity by starting from C's interpretations. We seek it by starting from B, or from C as living, because B as a living organism is the type of normal and in fact universal being: it is an autosubjective form, an absolute domain, self-surveying, which is synonymous with "self-perceiving." A is merely a step-by-step assemblage of elementary beings. As to C, it is identical to B, with the difference that he perceives A and B through healthy sensory and cerebral assemblages. This perception is secondary relative to C's life: to perceive, to be psychologically conscious, one has to be alive. To have a conscious "image" of another being, one has in the first place to be a "true form." (NF, 199)

This image helps us clarify that Ruyer's Ideas are primary relative to consciousness.  Consciousness is inside Ideas, the vital precedes the cerebral, and not vice versa.  But of course it may still leave us with the impression that the vital is somehow qualitatively distinct from the physical.  This is only true, however, if we conceive the physical on the model of 19th century machines, ie. in the sense of classical physics.  If we instead conceive of the physical as Ruyer does, using the quantum physics appropriate to his era (and still appropriate to ours), we find that "the physical" is already 'vital' on its own. 

The "particles of matter" are domains of action that become, in their interaction, a single domain and share their energy. The modern conception of bonds turns an interacting system into "a kind of organism in the unity of which the elementary constitutive unities are nearly absorbed" and which therefore acts as a systematic unity and not as a sum of elementary actions. So, like the problem of the origin of life, the problem of the origin of so-called vital—it would be better termed "microorganic"— force no longer arises. Macroscopic organisms are progressively formed along the lineage of individuality of the universe, through colonization, dominated division, and hierarchical association of microorganisms, that is, of molecules. "Vital force" does not differ in nature from physical force, from the force of internal bonds of atomic physics's unitary domains of action, whose "force," as it appears in classical physics, is merely a statistical resultant. (NF, 202)

So in reality, the middle character in Ripolin's image is equivalent to all three of them.  Consciousness is a development of vital force and matter is already a vital force.  So not only are the three in continuity with one another, but they all exhibit the same "true form", the same type of absolute survey.  Ruyer's 'vitalism' goes all the way up and all the way down, which is why it merits the new name 'finalism'.

While we could think of Ruyer as a vitalist if we bear in mind certain caveats, we could also call him a panpsychist given other clarifications.  We saw that the problem with panpsychism is right there in the name -- it inevitably ends up modeling all entities on the human psyche (NF, 74).  By contrast, we've seen that finalism models all entities -- including the psyche and matter -- on the organism.  Ruyer has spent a good deal of the book distinguishing the way the organism as a domain of absolute survey is distinct from the step-by-step causality of what we usually call 'the physical' (though which we should perhaps should refer to as the macrophysical to avoid confusion).  Thus we've had lots of discussions about how we cannot reduce the meaningfulness of organic activity to the meaningless interaction of particles.  However, Ruyer has spent much less time distinguishing the organism from its seemingly much closer avatar -- the conscious mind.  We know the vital is primary relative to the psychological, but what exactly distinguishes these two? 

I construe the survey of "Psycho-Lamarkism" in chapter 19 as an attempt to more carefully specify exactly what's wrong with panpsychism.  Why is the psyche a bad model for the organism?  Roughly speaking, the problem is that the psyche is too substantial.  We conceive our psychological continuity as the continuity of a substantial self that exists inherently before it goes out and acts in the world.  Its development then becomes a step-by-step process of the accumulation of experiences -- the psyche learns by accumulating knowledge as a result of its encounters with the outside world.  I think this is why Ruyer is describing it as "Lamarckian".  NeoDarwinism reduces the phenotypic agent to an illusion, a mere byproduct of the true genetic unit that is being reproduced and selected.  But Lamarckism requires a real agent that can possess acquired traits in order to be able to pass those on.  We might imagine a type of Lamarckism where the random mutations accumulated in any cell of the organism would be passed on to its progeny (if we replace "any" with "germ line" we reduce this theory to Darwinism).  But this wouldn't really be a case of the inheritance of acquired traits in a strong sense, and it certainly wouldn't help explain how an organism's learned adaptations to an environment could be passed on.  In short, Lamarckism requires learning, and learning requires a substantial agent called the psyche. 

We can ask as a matter of fact whether every Lamarckism is not psychological. By psycho-Lamarckism, we mean the conception that explains the internal finalist assemblage and the de facto adaptation of organisms to their environment or to their living conditions as the result of an accumulation of direct individual efforts, psychological in nature and similar to the conscious effort. (NF, 210)

By contrast, Ruyer's finalism is built on the idea of an activity without a substantial agent.  His ideal individual is inherently active, and its activity is given all at once, across time as a trans-spatiotemporal unity that only appears as a development when we look at it from the outside.  There's no static continuing substance here that could develop by acquiring properties.  There's no agent that could learn anything by accumulation.  In a sense, all of Ruyer's individuals are born fully formed, though this form actually spans the entire life of what we would think of as the psychological self or organic individual.  And when he speaks of a continuity of fibers, this doesn't result from the development of each individual segment involved, but from the transformation of one individual into another, the 'lighting up' of a new fiber segment that lay darkly hidden in the bundle stretching back to the beginning of the universe.  It's like the continuity of each torch lighting the next by touching a relay that has been waiting all along to meet it.  Obviously, this is not how we normally think of the continuity of our self.  We imagine ourselves as a single continuous flame, and if this consciousness is perhaps passed from moment to moment, this evolution of momentary selves is Lamarkian, not Darwinian.  In short, the psyche is a bad model for the organism because we habitually tend towards a flawed (ie. non-Buddhist) model of our self.  Obviously, this opens the door to thinking of ourselves as much more fundamentally organisms than consciousnesses, a thought I'll try to come back to in a later post.

So if Ruyer's ideal individuals cannot appear as a development -- either through a Darwinian evolution that would reduce them to chance variations, or a Lamarckian evolution that would slowly accumulate them around a central core -- how can they appear?  How are they constructed?  In fact, they aren't constructed at all.  They exist eternally as Platonic types.  And they appear through memory.  They are 'invoked' or 'incarnated' in the world in the same mysterious way that a memory pops into our consciousness.

The critique of psycho-Lamarckism (especially if the loophole of natural selection is rejected) leads us very closely to metaphysics, to the metaphysical element of reality. The type cannot be explained by psycho-Lamarckian action; and because it also cannot be explained by the formula mutations + adaptive selection, it remains only to accept it as a primary fact.

... the finality of the "type" forces us to admit straight away a kind of metaphysical and theological initial emplacement, a primary plan(e). The historical character of the evolution of types and species must not veil their ideal and systemic characters. The types and species invent themselves in time, but this invention is guided, predestined. In some sense, organic memory is a ready-made pseudo-memory. Instinct, which has all the traits of memory, is no doubt a pseudo-memory for the individual. The pace of evolution compels us to go further and to admit that it is even a pseudo-memory for the species. It is a "reminiscence" memory, through the apperception of a "type," a memory with a determined program, a memory that is inseparable from a predestined invention. (NF, 220)

 

The Unfolding Continuity of Embryology

After our in-depth discussion of the fibrous structure of universe, let's step back for a moment and try to pinpoint the crucial difference between viewing the universe as a collection of material particles and viewing it as a collection of ideal fibers.  The chapter on "neomaterialism" (15) indicates that this difference is sometimes more a question of attitude than on of arguing over facts (NF, 156).  For example, Ruyer point out that Schrödinger's famous thesis that the organism is an aperiodic crystal can equally well be read as asserting that an aperiodic crystal is an organism (NF, 154).  In that case, where exactly does the difference between neomaterialism and neofinalism lie?  Ruyer locates it in "the recognition of lines of individual continuity" (NF, 162) but what exactly does this mean? 

From a high level, I think the easiest way to approach this question is through the central metaphor of Neofinalism -- the embryo.  Everyone can see that what begins as an embryo ends up as an adult organism.  The obvious question is where this order comes from.  Ruyer's answer is, in short, that the whole structure of the organism, along with its differentiated parts, is there from the start as an Ideal Individual.  This ideal form is like a continuous virtual thread that links and organizes every stage of development as a means to an end.  By contrast, the neo-materialist and (as we'll see in the next several chapters 16, 17) neo-Darwinist accounts explain this order as nothing more than chance.  These theories banish the notion of Ideas existing from the beginning and operating across time, and reduce everything to the blind mechanism of material particles interacting moment to moment.  Any order, up to and including the mind of the theorizing scientist, which arises from these mechanisms is illusory, epiphenomenal, and just a matter of speaking.  While we can always trace the adult organism back to the embryo through a series of step-by-step chemical reactions that form an actual thread, when we reach this starting point we discover that it is 'just' another collection of molecules.  In a real sense, these theories imply that the embryo 'just happens' to produce an organism, or, if we scratch deeper, we discover random mutations that 'just happen' to produce the viable embryo.  

So with NeoDarwinism and NeoMaterialism, there's always an actual thread of step-wise causal segments that unfold in time, but these events are, by hypothesis, not shaped by a continuous virtual line that operates across time.  This situates the key difference between the ideal and the material in our understanding of time.  Is time an empty space-like container that only exists conceptually as sub-divided into instantaneous moments like so many tiny line segments?  Or does time have an indivisible reality of its own that underlies the integration of these moments into a continuous line (similar to Bergson's duration?).  Ideas are inherently active entities that cannot be reduced to a single moment, things that die or dissolve if you try to hold them still, whereas the essence of material things lies in their static instantaneous substance, though they may later happen to move around.  It's akin to the difference between seeing the real number line as just a collection of points that happen to look continuous, and seeing it as a continuum that can be differentiated into a collection of points.  Notice that each view converts into the other when you take them to their limits.

Precisely because a line is continuous virtually, it can only actualize itself discontinuously.  Despite the fact that it's there as a virtual from the beginning, the adult organism still comes into actual existence through the steps of embryonic development.  An actual organism differs radically from an actual embryo, and yet there is an ideal continuity that stretches between these two.  Similarly, an actual molecule differs from an actual organism, and yet the organism is a form of development of the molecule, something, as Spinoza would have said, that the molecule "can do", just like thinking is in turn something that the body can do.  I think this gets to the root of why Ruyer's description of fibers can be confusing at times -- the continuity of the virtual fiber isn't distinct from the transformation of one actual entity into another.  In short, the cosmic embryo at the heart of Ruyer's scheme never really stops developing.  Which explains why even this far into a book called Neofinalism Ruyer has yet to clearly tell us what end any of his subjects work towards.  Ideal individuals, as absolute surfaces, stretch across time and impose a norm on a certain domain of spatiotemporal forms.  They organize these into something that looks like a development.  But this isn't a development towards the last form in this series -- it isn't a goal directed development towards an equilibrium form defined in advance.  Ruyer repeatedly talks about improvisation and freedom and the fact that the end of the organism isn't simple self-maintenance, but it's still easy to slip into thinking that ideal individuals are effectively just copies of the actual individuals that appear stable to us.  Instead, ideal individuals are like a vector of activity, a tendency that holds together the trajectory of a certain stretch of fiber.  But this stretch is in continuity with sub-individuals which came before it and super-individuals which follow it, just as the formation of our embryonic limb is in continuity with the bilateral differentiation which precedes it and the digital differentiations which will follow it.  Each stage in the process is a separate tendency, a distinct and well defined potential of the initial embryo that contains them all simultaneously, but in an ordered continuity of unfolding.  Thus, each new level is a development of the previous one, and not a new composition (NF, 155), a memory and not a creation or emergence. 

After that abstract rhapsody, let's return to the text.

Another way to approach the importance of Ruyer's theory of fibers is to contrast it in detail with the reductionist tendency of neo-materialism, and this is exactly what he does in chapter 15.  Ruyer chooses Schrödinger's classic What is Life? to represent the neo-materialist position.  Since I happened to have it sitting on the shelf, I was able to quickly read through this justly famous little set of lectures.  It brilliantly drives home the now commonplace but actually rather mind-blowing point that the entire organism develops from a single particular molecule.  And reading it illuminates Ruyer's equally brilliant critique of the way Schrödinger misinterprets his own thesis as a reduction of the organism to a molecule.  In fact, what Schrödinger discovers here fits perfectly with the central idea of the wave mechanics he helped invent -- the molecule is already an 'organism', so it cannot be a question of reduction, but of the continuity of 'organic' development across what we think of as distinct levels.  As we saw last time, the quantum particles that appear to form the simplest unities are nevertheless still domains of absolute survey just like the organisms and consciousnesses that will develop from them.  All these levels are equally real individuals that exist in continuity alongside one another on the same ideal plane, even if when they are unfolded in actuality they appear as separate levels of composition. 

Schrödinger's lectures distinguish two ways that order can appear in the universe, which he calls "order from disorder" and "order from order" respectively.  Most of macroscopic physics, at least insofar as it pertains to biology, is based on the central idea of statistical mechanics -- order can arise from disorder when the number of independent parts becomes large.  This accounts for why we see very precise phenomenon like the equilibrium distribution of positions and speeds of gas molecules in a volume, even though the underlying motion of the molecules is quite random. By contrast, the order we see in an organism is not an order created by thermodynamic equilibrium.  Though the organism is composed of many many molecules, its visible order is a development of the order already present within just a tiny fraction of those molecules -- the well ordered aperiodic crystal we now call DNA.  In some sense, the organism is like a giant molecule, an amplification of the order present in its tiny embryonic molecular seed.  And of course, the structure, stability, and mutability of this seed are all due to quantum effects that hold it together as a unit.  While Schrödinger construes this observation as a reduction of the organism to a "clock-work" system (WL, 81), he uses this term in a sense we don't normally give it now.  He explicitly opposes a clock-work system to a statistical one.  An example of a purely clock-work system would be something like the friction-less pendulum, not the actual mechanical linkages of a watch one has to periodically wind.  That is, a clock-work system is an ideal one, one whose behavior is deducible from first principles as a dynamic mathematical form that continues in perpetuity.  In fact, no real physical system is truly a clock-work until we reach the realm of the quantum, either because we examine such a small form, or because we cool a larger one down to absolute zero (WL, 84).  In either case, we reach a moment when actual things stop behaving like substantial particles and start behaving exactly like mathematical ideas.  Which is to say that Schrödinger's clock-work is precisely the ideal individual that Ruyer characterizes as a domain of absolute survey.  So it turns out that Schrödinger, who explicitly tells us that his conclusion that the organism is a clock-work sounds ridiculous (WL, 82), is a neofinalist without realizing it!  His 'order from order' is exactly the line of developmental continuity of an ideal fiber that Ruyer has been discussing.  And it is exactly opposed to the 'order from disorder' that is merely a consequence of the law of large numbers which we invoke when we deal with a statistical aggregate that doesn't constitute a true individual fiber in Ruyer's sense.  In Ruyer's eyes, Schrödinger's only failure lies in not accepting the implications of his own conclusion, implications which the father of quantum mechanics was in a perfect position to appreciate.   

In the following chapters on neoDarwinism (16 and 17), Ruyer goes on to deal with the next logical step in the attempt to reduce the inherent trans-spatiotemporal unity of the organism to the illusory outcome of a purely statistical and step-by-step causal process.  Sure, we can hear a critic say, the organism is not a statistical phenomena in the physicists normal sense of something at thermodynamic equilibrium.  Granted, it's order derives from a development or amplification of the order already present in its genome.  But the order of this genome is itself the result of natural selection, a process that in the final analysis is just a differential sorting of fortuitous mutations.  So the adult organism reduces to the genome (as Schrödinger suggested and modern genetics supposedly confirms) and the genome reduces to chance, without the need for any finalist activity along the way.  As a result, the neo-reductionist argues, Ruyer's fiber of development is nothing more than an after the fact anthropocentric imposition of coherent form on evolution's random walk.

Ruyer produces some powerful arguments against these objections, not least of which is a version of the very first argument he made in the book -- the neo-reductionist incoherently claims that the meaning of the universe is its meaninglessness, that it's only order is disorder (NF, 166).  And, certainly, I don't know a single scientist that behaves as if they are nothing more than a random sequence of genetic variations.  But this is just the beginning of his critique, and these chapters are both quite technical refutations of the overly grandiose interpretations of evolutionary theory that pass as orthodoxy these days.  While I'll spare us the details, I do think there are two main points worth highlighting.  As always, Ruyer is not critiquing the veracity or usefulness of specific scientific fact, but only the sophomoric philosophical interpretation imposed upon these facts (ie. Dawinism and Materialism).  So he accepts that both natural selection and genetics are real forces shaping organisms, while rejecting the pretense that these theories explain everything about the organism.  His two main points are then simply: 1) the failure of the "Democritean" ambition (NF, 177) of the theory of natural selection to eliminate any possible form of order other than accumulations of chance and 2) the failure of of genetics to uncover a one-to-one correspondence between phenotype and genotype (NF, 187).  Together these failures open up the space for us to consider other sources of order in the organic world that do not operate in the step-by-step causal manner these theories insist upon.  And this of course is Ruyer's deepest point -- there are sources of order outside space and time

Fibers

In chapter 14, Ruyer takes up the question left hanging from our previous discussion -- is there a smallest domain?  He situates this question within a fascinating but difficult exploration of what he calls the "fibrous structure of the universe".  On one level, what he means by this is pretty clear.  He wants to distinguish his vision of reality from the materialist one we're so accustomed to.  For Ruyer, what's real are the ideal transspatial unities that actively assemble an absolute domain, and not the inert and static substances that the materialist imagines atoms to be.  Since finalist activity is outside of step-by-step time and organizes an entire trajectory of development in accords with some end, it can only appear to those of us living inside time as a sort of fiber or thread that connects different actual instants into a unified form.  It's these forms extending across spacetime (transspatial and transtemporal) that are the real building blocks of the universe for Ruyer.

This is completely different vision of reality than the materialist's hierarchical pyramid of substance.  Naive materialism imagines that the ground floor of reality is composed of distinct, inert, stable substances -- atoms that like behave like marbles.  Ignoring the fact that physics has long since ceased to think of the smallest entities as substantial particles, the materialist assures us that everything can be reduced to the interaction of these marbles, and that the higher entities that they compose are in some sense less real.  Human minds, biological organisms, and chemical compounds are 'really just' atoms moving around.  As we move up the pyramid from its static substantial bedrock, each level becomes less real, less stable, more 'spiritual', which for the materialist means more non-existent. 

For Ruyer, these substantial marbles are nothing but so many beads on the string of a real individual fiber.  Each fiber is an ongoing activity directed by an ideal end or norm or Form. This activity is never complete, never just passively resting in itself, but always playing out through time.  And these activity fibers can exist at any spatiotemporal scale.  So instead of a hierarchy, Ruyer envisions the universe as an intersecting tangle of fibers we might term ideal individuals.  While these may encompass different domains or regions of spacetime, they are all equally and analogously real, all in some sense on the same level.  And they all share the characteristics of finalist activity -- freedom, ubiquity, end directedness -- that Ruyer discussed at the outset.  Here, the atom is no more or less real than the other 'subjective' domains such as the embryo or the brain.  Each is an ideal individual activity that, from our perspective, threads its way through spacetime in a way that looks like growth and development.  So the fibrous structure of the universe turns out to be the panpsychist vision -- there are 'minds' everywhere, and these are the insubstantial 'building blocks' of the universe.  Sometimes, when he is not being strict with his language, Ruyer talks as if there are some things that are not minds, not individuated activities that are self-actualizing and self-creating forms.  For example, there appear to be collections of real individuals, statistical aggregates, mixtures.  But, strictly speaking, these things are not, since they have no form or activity of their own that maintains or develops or better yet posits a self as an ideal.  This forms the essence of his critique of Newton (NF, 143) and his defense of people who, fancifully, but somewhat accurately in Ruyer's eyes, speak of the "freedom" of the atom.  For Ruyer, all true individuals are on the same level, whereas "molar" aggregates are demoted to the level of mere appearance that Plato would have called the phantasm.

For example, Newton writes, "We know by experience that some bodies are hard. Moreover, because the hardness of the whole arises from the hardness of its parts, we justly infer from this not only the hardness of the undivided particles of bodies that are accessible to our senses, but also of all other bodies" ... The falsity of his inference is clear. ... [Newton and mechanistic physicists] believed they were simply inferring from the whole to the part that is homogenous to this whole, but they went illegitimately from "molar" and statistical properties to individual properties. This movement is equivalent to conflating in biology the physical and geological properties of sedimentary limestone levels with the properties of the individual mollusks that constituted them. By contrast, contemporary physicists who strive, like Bohr, Jordan, de Broglie, and Eddington, to connect microphysics and biology or psychology, the indeterminism in the atom and human freedom, remain at least within the order of individuality (despite the obvious audacity of this reconciliation). They respect the sense of the "fibrous structure" of the universe. The limestone-shelled animals that constituted miles of sediments may not look a great deal like human beings, but they resemble them (because they are living individuals) more than they resemble a sedimentary layer. We should not therefore be intimidated by the irony with which the "freedom of the atom" is greeted. (NF, 143)

That was all meant to be a completely clear and straightforward overview. Only transtemporal fibers are real.  The beads of substantialized spacetime on them are just snapshots or slices of the real.  And things that look to us like forms (say a limestone rock formation) may or may not correspond to real individual fibers; we have to investigate further (using a method that has not been adequately specified yet).  Now we get to the tricky part though.  It seem that at this point in the book, Ruyer has unfolded his full metaphysical vision in outline.  Which means that it's finally time to start asking some questions about the details of his universe.  He gives us a fascinating, though often confusing, glimpse of some of these issues in this chapter, and I'd like to go through these parts line by line to firm up my understanding.

First, we have the complex question of the immortality of individual fibers. 

The virtual immortality of protozoa requires the life of an actual protozoan to be represented by a long "fiber" climbing back to the very origins of life. The divisions of reproduction and the unions create bifurcations or interweavings of "fibers" but do not hinder their continuity. Because it seems very likely (after the discovery of ultraviruses) that unicellular beings derive from large organic molecules, the "fiber" can climb back much higher, up to the very origin of the real universe. (NF, 142)

I can see a simple sense in which one might call a protozoa "virtually immortal".  As a self replicating cell, we shouldn't attach 'the protozoa' as an entity too tightly to the particular copy of it alive right now.  If we think of it as a sort of program for building, maintaining, and propagating itself, the protozoa appears as a fiber connecting all the many steps involved in this program, thus threading its way through all the protozoa descended from a particular cell.  Obviously, this fiber would have to branch each time the protozoa makes more than one copy of itself, so it might be better to describe it as a tree rather than a fiber.  Nevertheless, from a transtemporal perspective, this constitutes a single structure that in principle knows no limits.  Once assembled, the 'protozoa recipe' is immortal, though of course the ingredients in the pantry may not suffice for dinner.  So, in a sense, the protozoa has no end.

But doesn't it have a beginning?  How can we claim that the fiber called 'the protozoa' goes back to "the very origins of life" given that it is already a eukaryote, much less to "the very origin of the real universe", unless one of these little guys was dining at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe when the big bang happened?  Once set in motion, the protozoa expands indefinitely, but didn't something other than itself need to set it in motion?  The only way I can make sense of this sort of passage (whose structure is repeated three times on this page) is to imagine that Nature had been preparing the protozoa all along as if it were a form that it 'had in mind' and was working towards from the very beginning.  In this case, all the steps leading up to the first protozoa -- all the unicellular beings and large organic molecules -- would be aspects of its embryonic development, so to speak.  Just as an egg differentiates into the organism towards which it 'tends' and which in turn reproduces the egg, the 'cosmic embryo' differentiates into things like protozoa, via steps that looking nothing like the self-reproducing finished product.  While this image threatens to invoke the "gaseous vertebrate" by another name, we've already seen that there's a big difference between an embryo and a brain.  The embryo doesn't contain a blueprint for just the protozoa as finished product the way (we think) my brain contains a blueprint for a hammer.  Instead, the cosmic embryo contains an entire trajectory of development, a whole cascading set of tendencies that lead to the protozoa as a possible form, but also lead far beyond it.  It's almost as if 'protozoaness' captured part of the ongoing differentiation of this embryo because that specific form represented a self-sustaining feedback loop or vortex.  Or we might imagine that the initial embryo is a huge bundle of fibers which branch off at different points but which are all there as potentials right from the beginning. In fact, perhaps we can only identify these tendencies as fibers once they loop back onto themselves, even if these loops or knots in their trajectories are exactly branching points where 'new' fibers emerge.  I'm still not sure exactly how to interpret all this because we enter into confusing questions of identity -- there's not a sharp line dividing the first protozoa from the last macromolecule.  But it seems clear that since the Ideal Protozoa is a Form outside of or across time, a virtual immortality, it cannot look anything like the protozoa we identify under a microscope.  This ideal form seems to be there waiting in a timeless metaphysical dimension until it is 'called into being' under the correct conditions.  When these actual conditions are fulfilled, we can then trace an unbroken line of actual variations all the way back to the beginning of the universe that appears to prepare the ground for the materialization of the form in this particular and unique instance.  This appears to us a chain of step-by-step material causes that happen to randomly lead up to this form. But unless we want to claim that the adult organism just happens to develop from the embryo, we will have to acknowledge that these forms are somehow there from the beginning.  In other words, we can only trace an actual fiber back because it represents a virtual trajectory.

Ruyer goes on to observe that this fibrous schema doesn't apply well to individual sub-atomic particles.  All the electrons and photons appear to be exactly identical, and in fact things like the double-split experiment or hydrogen bonding demonstrate that they don't seem to have any clear spatiotemporal identity at all and can all overlap in a superposition.  Far from looking like individual marbles or particular protozoa whose origins we can trace back along fibers, quantum mechanical forms seem to be direct instantiations of mathematical ideals in some sense. 

The schema does not become impossible to apply until we reach the most elementary "particles" of microphysics; these particles have an indeterminate individuality, and it is impossible to "track" their identity in a domain of interaction, as though far from being the fundamental bricks of the construction, these "particles" were less "substantial" than complex individualities. (NF, 142)

As discussed above, microphysical particles are still absolute domains, just like protozoa or organisms or me.  They are an ideal finalist activity, which makes them as much a subject or fiber as any of these other entities.  However, since they are not actually individuated but possess an overlapping quantum ubiquity in space and stability in time, these particles are sort of degenerate fiber in the mathematical sense -- a fiber of length zero.  They have no actual predecessors, no parts, and so no fiber of actuality to trace back to an original embryonic Idea.  In a sense they are born fully formed, as if the Ideal appeared directly on the spot, as an incarnation of pure math.  All the other Ideas seem to require an elaborate actual development and substantial edifice to come into being, but these just crop up everywhere.

Treating the ideal individual as a latent tendency that can appear within spacetime in the form of a certain span of actual fiber helps makes sense of the peculiar discussion of "possession" that immediately follows the passage above.  Ideas like 'the electron' appear always and everywhere since they need not "possess" parts.  Their ideal Form manifests directly as the first differentiation of the cosmic egg, which defines distinct types of fibers (ie. photons, electrons, etc ... whatever physicists are cooking up as the smallest units) that all have 'zero length'.  Other, more complex ideal individuals require the cosmic embryo to grow and differentiate a bit before they can use such distinctions to come into being, "possessing" them as the parts or sub-individualities that give body to the organic activity that defines them.   

The higher organisms are indeed "made up" of cells, molecules, and atoms (by Überformung), but not in the same way that a house is made up of bricks. Instead, the cells or molecules are "possessed" from within by an individuality that managed to colonize and organize, according to a thematic unity, a collection of other individualities often produced from its own division. This "possession" should be conceived on the model of the possession and the reciprocal capture of psychomnemic spheres and not as the relation of a brick to a wall. Physical beings are in no way more real than the higher organisms; they cannot serve to explain them or to make them intelligible. (NF, 143)

The wall possess bricks in the purely extensive sense of being composed of them.  This is equivalent to saying that the wall is 'really just' bricks.  But an ideal individual possesses a physical substance the way an ancestor possesses a shaman, or at least this is how I read the reference to the "possession and the reciprocal capture of psychomnemic spheres".  Possession is a form of domination (NF, 150) or colonization where an Idea which has been there eternally suddenly erupts into being as a new branch in the fibrous structure of the universe by commandeering some of the existing fibers.  So now we're not just imagining a bifurcating tree, but a more tangled rhizome (alluded to in the "often produced from its own division") where multiple fibers converge into one, only to then split up again.  It's as if all the Ideas are bundled together all along, but only certain ones are active, or at least more active, at any given time.  And we identify a certain span of rhizomatic fiber by the dominant activity that succeeds in organizing that chunk of spacetime.  Since so many complex ideal individuals are bundled together and overlapping, waiting to come into a distinct actual existence of their own, it seems we are missing a concept of the 'power of possession', the virtual power or intensity that Deleuze and Spinoza describe.  Otherwise, how are we to make sense of which of the innumerable possible Ideas is actualized at a particular moment?

Finally, understanding Ideas as latent fibers (at differing 'depths' of latency) and fibers as actualized Ideas helps make sense of some of the peculiar comments Ruyer makes about the 'smallest' domains that correspond to particle physics.  In fact, these domains aren't small at all.  In spatiotemporal terms they are actually indefinitely large and temporally ubiquitous because they are not individuated particles but smeared out as overlapping waves.  They have no parts and therefore no substance (NF, 149), but are pure activity (they are a quantum of action NF, 145).  These simple Ideas are always actual because they don't rely on colonizing any other actual fibers to bring their empire into existence.

Organisms present themselves as hierarchical, colonial Empires. And so "noncolonizing colonies" exist at the final level of these Empires. The cells in an organ- ism do not resemble bricks in a wall, but they are indeed subindividualities. As a result, when we reach the final level, we come up against a paradox. On one hand, the facts prove that the general properties of absolute domains are conserved; on the other, it is impossible—unless an infinite regress is accepted in this instance as well—not to arrive at a domain that is no longer colonial, that no longer has dominated subindividualities. This seems to contradict the very notion of domain, where dominus must have "inferiors." (NF, 150)

But the trade off for being so simple is that these individuals must always be fully active, with no latency or reserve about them.  This accounts for Ruyer's description of these entities as a "temporal melody" or a "mnemic rhythm" (NF, 149).  Instead of storing memories they incarnate an ideal memory directly, in very much the same way that Plato imagines the incarnation of the Forms as gods.  Ruyer even suggests that their ceaseless activity accounts for physical conservation laws.  A complex organism with parts might shift its activity from the level of the whole to the level of its parts, providing for the possibility of rest or sleep that appears to use less energy.  The simple Ideas that correspond to quantum particles don't have this option -- if they were to rest, they would cease to actually exist.

A special status has to be attributed to "final domains," which are colonized by the others and do not colonize. But this special status is poles apart from what classical materialism imagined. The "final domains" are the least substantial of all domains, they are pure activities; paraphrasing the expression Descartes applies less fittingly to the soul, we can say that they "always act." They are uninterrupted activity; they cannot rest or sleep like higher organisms. They cannot even temporarily demobilize their elements, for they have no elements to demobilize. They are a pure unity of action without a subordinated multiplicity. They have neither a structure nor even, strictly speaking, a form. They only have an activity-form; and the spatiotemporal domain and the metaphysical "transversal" can no longer be dissociated in them (even ideally) as in the other domains. The two are now one. They lack a detachable memory, and they have no need for one, because they never have to take up again the thread of their uninterrupted activity. (NF, 151)

Transspatiality and Ideas

Having dropped his main concept -- subjective unities are absolute domains -- Ruyer uses the next few chapters (12 and 13) to explore how these domains are structured very similarly to Plato's Ideal Forms.  They express a norm or ideal or end that literally stands out of the spacetime of the material world as a "metaphysical transversal" (NF, 99), but nevertheless acts to organize this world.  The unity of these subjective forms dominates the multiplicity of their instantiations.  While this is clearly an old idea, Ruyer's version adds a new twist by conceiving this Ideal realm as something that progressively differentiates itself into our material world.  That is, instead of being forever divorced from one another, the two realms form a continuum.  The material world is actually the limit of the ideal world -- spacetime is the limit of the differentiation of the transindividual.

Ruyer begins to explore the structure of the transspatial by focusing on a theme dear to Plato's heart -- memory.  Since the unified end which holds together an absolute domain stands outside of time, the relationship between this transtemporal essence and a particular instantiation of it appears as a form of memory.  The essential Form or Idea acts like a sort of stitch in time that sews together actual forms as parts in its self 'development'.  The scare quotes are meant to indicate that its really a question of an ideal repetition, a repetition of a problem, rather than any progressive solution in the normal sense. Any number of actual instantiations, however distinct and sequential they may appear from within time, can be seen as manifestations of the same singular Idea that stands outside it.  Ruyer insists that this transtermporal realm is necessary to account for all the types of psychic repetition that we commonly recognize. [For the sake of brevity (too late) the following discussion centers on psychic repetition.  However, to be clear, Ruyer considers this just one form of a more general organic repetition.  The whole organization of an organism is a 'memory' repeated by the embryo.]  Our evocation of a memory, its ability to subsist through time, our ability to recognize a resemblance between any two experiences, our ability to imitate another's action -- all these everyday phenomena testify directly to the existence of a subjective 'dimension' that links together forms within time and must therefore be somehow orthogonal to it.  And these phenomena of psychic repetition are also directly related to the main characteristic of finalist activity -- it makes sense, meaning.  Consider how poor our memory is for random scattered facts, and how good it is for things that mean something to us or fit into some framework.  This is precisely why something like the memory palace is such an effective mnemonic technology.  Or think about the way we decide that two objects resemble one another based on their ability to serve the same role; despite potentially large differences, they are of the same type.  Or contemplate the allegedly hardwired capacity humans have for mimesis.  Children don't imitate just any action of their parents, but immediately pick out the ones that seem to have some special meaning.  When you look at any of these phenomena through a materialist lens, they appear rather inexplicable.  Somehow we parse the endless never-repeating diversity of the world into the recurring patterns of a much smaller set of meaningful forms.  It's hard to fathom how this sort of compression could arise without invoking our need to perform some action, an end which a strict materialism and evolutionism would seem to preclude (we will not rehash how this type of explanation pushes everything back to chance). From Ruyer's perspective though, the whole question moves in the opposite direction.  The unity of the essence, the idea or "mnemic theme" as he often calls it, is our real starting point.  The diverse instantiations of memory are all immediately included as part of its transspatial unity, which, as it were, unfolds in time through a process of ideal repetition that it synonymous with ideal differentiation.

All these facts thus exhibit the same schema. They have this in common: they set in play a resemblance within the actual, without invoking a mechanical tracing to explain it. Memory without engrams, the action of resemblance, imitation without tracing—all of this is contrary to the laws of ordinary physics and cannot be explained by them. To account for these phenomena, we have to resort to transspatial themes or essences. The resemblance of two actualizations of a single memory requires the idea of a mnemic theme; the organic resemblance of two individuals of the same species requires the idea of a specific potential. (NF, 131)

There are still a bunch of questions this schema raises, the most obvious of which seems to be why time and space appear to us to exist at all.  Ruyer seems to suggest that space-time is a mere illusion produced as the limit created by the differentiation of ideas, a place where one idea can collide with another (perhaps even collide with itself?) from the outside, as an abstract confrontation between two actual parts divorced from the wholes from which they derive. 

A development has no causes that can be localized in space-time. The domain of space-time is nothing more than a limit; it cannot even really contain existents, because their subjectivity "straddles" the two regions and because their instantaneous structure and even the whole series, moment by moment, of their instantaneous structures is just an abstraction. (NF, 132)

This development or differentiation of ideas is progressive only in a logical not a temporal sense.  Each idea spans and unifies an entire region of space-time, an already complete absolute domain.  Nevertheless, certain ideas have 'larger' domains, a description that can only mean that domains are nested inside one another.  There are thus Ideas and sub-Ideas and sub-sub-Ideas, etc ... While Ruyer doesn't explicitly say this, it seems that this nesting, since it cannot be measured by spatio-temporal extension, must involve some sort of intensive or topological definition (see note below).  Though he's not clear on exactly how this logical or intensive ordering ("ordinalization" doesn't appear to be a word) works, Ruyer does make clear that this process of differentiation is what creates a continuum between the poles of pure Idea and pure Matter. 

The region of the transspatial is not opposed to the space-time of classical physics in an abrupt way; it presents several kinds of sub-regions that become less similar to space-time and its content as they "distance themselves," as it were, further and further from it. We can distinguish at least four regions:

1. the region of actual consciousnesses with the extensive sensations and the specious present, limited ubiquity and eternity
2. the region of individual psychological memories

3. the region of specific organic memories
4. the region of essences and values

To these we can add the "region" of the "Sense of senses," the tran-scendent Unity, the supreme Logos, the unnameable Tao that no longer has a nature. (NF, 134)

While he's listed these regions as ascending towards the pure Ideal, it's clear that the process really works in reverse, and that the limit we spoke of as corresponding to a pure SpaceTime would need to appear above 1 on this list, as some species of sub-sub-consciousness (at least, if all the Ideas can appear in monotonic order).  He later provides a drawing that captures this perfectly. 

As we move away from the realm of pure transspatial Ideas, as we progress towards more and more differentiated Ideas, the subjectivity of each one gets 'smaller'.  Nevertheless, each of the curly brackets regardless of size is still an absolute domain, a transspatial unity, in short, a mind.  Our material space-time only appears if we take this process to the limit, repeating the sub-division of brackets ad infinitum.  Strictly speaking then, it would seem that space-time is only the set of points at the intersection of the brackets.  However, since only the encompassing brackets themselves are real for Ruyer, these points are more like spaces between real entities, a set of measure zero as it were, an abstraction we only take to be real if we imagine it "straddling" two real regions.

[

Since I'm reading Ruyer in the shadow of Deleuze in general and Difference & Repetition in particular, I'm finding it almost impossible not to understand some of Ruyer's concepts apart from the filter of Deleuze's modifications of them.  For example, Ruyer talks about the ideal end that 'dominates' an absolute domain (NF, 150).  In fact, since the domain is always a unitary activity, it's not really different than the end that dominates it.  This end is not a point or goal or particular state, but rather, because the domain is absolute and transtemporal, it's more like the shape or form of the entire trajectory of multiple states that are unified in the domain.  This ideal pole that organizes an entire surface is what Deleuze will call a singularity.  It works a lot like an attractor in phase space, not so much because it is a central point to which things converge, but because it gives the space a particular topology that distinguishes it from other spaces.  To consider a concrete image, we might think of the attractor as a black hole that organizes the curvature of the spacetime around it.  Different masses can orbit this black hole on different trajectories depending on the mass and the initial conditions, but in a mathematical sense all of these orbits are solutions to the same problem, a problem defined by the existence of the black hole's gravitational singularity.  There's much more than this to the concept of an Idea in D&R, but I think this is its crucial core.  

I find Deleuze's modification (or perhaps specification) of Ruyer's transspatial εἶδος very useful for a few reasons.  First, it makes clear that the forms we find in space and time are not copies of ideal forms.  A topological singularity is categorically different from a particular state or even a whole step-by-step succession of states.  The two look nothing like one another, so the question of copy or resemblance cannot even arise.  Instead, it's a question of instantiation or actualization.  Second, this notion that the Ideal constitutes the structure of a problematic space while actual forms are solutions within it, makes it much easier to understand how forms that don't resemble one another can nevertheless actualize the same idea.  Two trajectories may look nothing like one another externally, but may both be solutions to the same problem that structures them internally.  That is, this schema creates a concept of repetition that doesn't rely on tracing or copying or resembling or analogy, but constitutes a sort of ideal repetition that can be exact without being at all similar.  Finally, interpreting an Idea as a topological 'type' gives us a way of thinking about the difference between Ideas without simply relying on the external differences between the actual forms that instantiate these Ideas.  The relation among Ideas, the internal structure of the ideal realm is something that Ruyer has yet to address very precisely, but we need to have a way of passing from one idea to another. Ruyer conceives of this in terms of a differentiation of Ideas analogous to the embryo.  Deleuze's image of a set of nested topological forms created through a cascade of symmetry breaking is helpful when it comes to applying the embryogenesis analogy in a non-material setting.  So we might say that the structure of Ideas is mathematical.

]

Absolute Domains

Chapters 9 and 10 move into a deeper exploration of the structure of the subjective unities Ruyer argues are indispensable to an understanding our world.  He defines these more precisely as absolute domains that are self-surveying in the sense that they do not need to stand outside themselves to see their entire form at once.  This definition has the curious byproduct of letting us see that these things we have been treating as pure all-at-once unities are nevertheless always unities of multiplicities.  While they are unitary, they are not simple, but instead cover a whole domain, pulling together into a single form things we would usually refer to as parts.  This unity of multiplicity is Ruyer's concept of an individual, and its clearly the profound idea at the heart of his philosophy, the one whose influence on Simondon and Deleuze explains why we're reading this stuff to begin with.  But it's also where the book starts to get more difficult.  In particular, understanding the relationship between absolute domains and finality is complex because it involves the noodle-baking idea of an absolute survey in time. 

The concept of an absolute surface is relatively straightforward.  Many readers will undoubtedly be familiar with Edwin Abbot's classic Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.  To perceive the entirety of a two dimensional shape like a square, we have to occupy a third dimension orthogonal to it.  Conversely, a two dimensional being can only perceive a three dimensional one as the set of its sections appearing in the plane.  This geometric law is of course valid for any number of dimensions we discuss.  For example, as beings with three spatial dimensions, we have a very hard time imagining a fourth dimension as anything but successive slices of present moment, whereas a four dimensional being would be able to encompass what appears to us as an entire temporal succession with a single glance.  So to 'comprehend' a N dimensional surface, we need to observe it from an N+1 dimensional vantage point; it only appears as a whole relative to this perspective.  Obviously, this creates the infinite regress which the concept of the absolute surface is designed to solve.  An absolute surface sees itself as a whole from within its own dimensions.  It comprehends itself without needing the addition of an observer in another, higher dimension. 

At first we may think that an absolute surface is about as real as a square circle.  But in fact every moment of our experience testifies to the existence of this mysterious non-geometric surface.  Each experience is given to us as a whole.  For example,  cannot help but experience the entire visual field as a unitary form.  Obviously, we can move our attention around this visual field and successively examine various elements within it, which makes us sometimes think that we are outside the field, observing it from a distance.  In reality though, these shifts in attention don't happen from outside the field, as if we were moving our attentional spotlight across a poorly illuminated scene.  They each constitute a new whole experience.  Each instant of experience is an absolute surface.

Let us return to the surface of the seen-table. It does not obey geometric laws. It is a surface seized in all of its details, without a third dimension. It is an "absolute surface," which is not relative to any point of view external to it, which knows itself without observing itself. If I were to place my eye on the table, I would see nothing, but I need not be "at a distance" from the sensation to see it extended. In contrast, I cannot turn around the sensation to consider it from various angles. "I" (my organism) can turn around the table to obtain different sensations, but "I" cannot turn around my sensation once I obtain it. (NF, 92)

Admittedly though, we commonly picture ourselves at a remove from our experience, which we then observe like the homunculus who lives in the screening room of our brain.  However, while Ruyer doesn't discuss it, there are also very direct ways to see the absolute surface in meditation.  The simplest of these is simply to pay careful sustained attention to some part of the body at a remove from the head.  Consider the feeling of your sit bones pressing into the chair as you read this.  At first, it may seem that 'you' are situated somewhere behind your eyes, and that to have the experience of sitting, this central controller must send out messengers to your bottom in order to bring sensory information back to where it is experienced in your head.  It appears as if the content of the sitting experience happens in one place and the knowledge of it, its form or sense, happens in another.  If you wait for a while though, it will dawn on you that this is entirely an illusion.  The position of your head and its distance from the supposed location of the experience is irrelevant.  Your ass experiences itself right where it is, without needing your head to get involved.  Or perhaps it would be better to say that the experience itself has no physical location at all, locating itself neither in the object nor the putative subject.  We overlook this fact because we usually want to do something about an experience, to act on it though a sensory-motor chain, which does imply organizing a movement through space (such as, for example, scratching my butt).  So the apparent distance between object and subject is not given but entirely constructed according to what I want my next experience to be.  

The other way I've found to directly experience the absolute surface is through MahaSati Awareness practice.  By opening the aperture of our awareness, as it were, and letting go of its center, we can actually glimpse of state of global awareness that has no distinct objects or subjects at all.  The traditional analogy for this all-at-once and encompassing Awareness is space.  But this remains an analogy -- we construct geometric space through the movement of attention.  Whether this movement reaches out to physical objects, or to energetic flows, or even to mental talk, the space that results is constructed step-by-step.  The movement of attention can be very rapid, which can sometimes fool us into thinking that geometric space is simply given as a Kantian a priori of experience.  But no matter how fast this attention moves, or how totally it appears to 'occupy' all space, it still infers space from its constant shuttling motion.  By contrast, the 'space' of Awareness is not geometrically constructed step-by-step, but given all at once whenever we turn towards it.  This is an absolute experience, referring us to a 'space' that knows itself without having to examine or observe its own content and without requiring a separate subject that would serve to successively illuminate this content.  People sometimes characterize it as a completely still, but we could just as easily think of it as infinitely fast.  Either description points to the same idea -- a non-dual experience of direct unity that seems to have no boundary or location.  Awareness is an absolute surface that is aware of itself from within, without the need for any observer.  That is, Awareness is empty of self.

Interestingly though, the unity and simultaneity of an absolute surface, what Ruyer aptly calls its "self-survey", doesn't mean that, "all is one".  The non-dual is not some formless grey goop that results from melting down and mixing white objects and black subjects.  This empty and still Awareness contains a wealth of diversity held together as a unity.  All of the details to which I can later successively attend are given at once in my visual field.  These details aren't objects in the proper sense until this field later splits into subject and object, actor and action, but all the difference necessary for their construction is given as part of the initial experience.  So while unified, the absolute surface doesn't exclude multiplicity.  

This is Ruyer's second main point about absolute surfaces.  They are a form of binding that tends to blur the individuality of the bound parts without, however, averaging them into a statistical mush.  The simplest analogy for this is quantum superposition.  When hydrogen and oxygen bind to form water, their respective free electrons enter a shared state where we can no longer really say which electron belongs to which atom.  It's this overlapping of the atoms' quantum wave functions that allows a binding between H and O. 

Is a water molecule (does it consist of) two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, or does it have, as its unity and being, three component atoms? We see straight away that this problem has the same solution as the problem of the bonding of elements and the partial loss of their individuality in the unity of the interacting system. According to wave mechanics ... in the schema of the water molecule, the wave functions of the three atoms partially overlap. Then an interaction energy appears. But this partial overlapping implies a partial loss of the individuality of the electrons involved in the valences. This loss is gained by the molecular system, which is thus a genuine unity and, in this sense, "possesses" the three atoms. If there were no zone of overlapping, the molecule would only consist of three atoms—or rather, there would be no molecule at all. (NF, 108)

Ruyer argues that we need this kind of binding to stop the same type of infinite regress we saw when it was a question of observation.  If we say that A and B are bound together by an interposed third term C, then we are forced to explain how both A and C as well as C and B bind.  Introducing terms D and E responsible for binding A to C and C to B, respectively, just multiplies the problem.  To explain any potential for binding, we need to reach a surface which is "self-binding" just as we needed a surface that was "self-experiencing" to prevent an infinite regress of observation.  Quantum superposition responds to exactly this demand, because it creates one thing that is paradoxically two things at once.  The unified state and its ability to bind are really two sides of the same coin.  The quantum analogy makes clear that this unification is not simply a statistical collection of individuals, but a true form in its own righ,t with properties that could never result from any number of separate individual interactions (consider the double-slit experiment in this light). 

Naturally, quantum effects are not the only way an absolute surface can be both a unity and a multiplicity at the same time.  The brain and the embryo are each also a unity of multiplicity.  They contain the entire complex organization of an organism or an experience in one succinct form.  Any of these absolute surfaces constitute a unifying activity that connects and organizes its parts, at the same time that it knows these parts as unified.  These activities of binding and knowing are in fact the very existence of the surface, which Ruyer refers to as a "being-together" or a "being-having".

As a unity in the multiplicity, an absolute domain or a true form realizes the otherwise inconceivable synthesis of being and having. Is the system ab a and b, or does it have a and b as parts? Does the surveying unity have the details it surveys, or, because the survey is purely metaphorical, is it the very totality of the surveyed details? (NF, 107)

Though we already saw at the outset that the axiomatic quality of the cogito can only be posited of an activity, and not of a substance, Ruyer reiterates this point here in the context of absolute surfaces.  We often speak as if the surface were an actor or an agent, because we tend to model its unity on that of our own psyche.  And this psyche frequently appears to us as a sort of homuncular interior substance.  As a result, we are led to the idea that there is a difference between actor and action, a difference that we often invoke when we discuss the counterfactuals of freedom (I could have had ham, but I chose turkey).  For Ruyer though, there's no actor over and above the action carried out.  His freedom has nothing to do with the indetermination of a merely observing inner will that has no assignable properties.  Instead, it is a self-determination that is necessarily active, that knows itself as it binds its parts together, in a sense creating itself on the spot.

Cerebral equipotentiality gives the impression that the mind is detachable from the brain it uses (whether this brain is damaged or not). In reality, once the brain is totally destroyed, the "user" vanishes.  It is often inevitable—we have done it ourselves—to personify the "surveying unity" of an absolute domain, to realize the division into unity, on one hand, and into multiplicity, on the other. But we should always remember that we are only dealing with metaphors here, because survey is "absolute," without "distance." (NF, 121)

So an absolute surface is an overall form that isn't held together as a series of step-by-step links in space and time.  And it is an activity, a simultaneous knowing and binding together.  These features already connect the absolute surface to Ruyer's earlier definitions of finalist activity.  Nevertheless, I found this connection (roughly, the connection between chapters 9-10 and chapter 11) rather tenuous until I realized that I was conceiving the absolute surface in spatial terms, just as the name implies.  I thought the "survey" involved flying over a landscape in a third dimension.  And that the "binding" surface was a region of the plane that separated two others.  But now I get it.  My thinking had become very uptight.  The absolute surface is a unity in time as well, which is why Ruyer introduces the more general term "absolute domain".  The unity in question here surveys both time and space without needing a supplementary fifth dimensional vantage point.  This is precisely why it appears slightly mysterious to us -- we find it very difficult to conceive of time as anything other than to irreversible march of a step-by-step process.  An absolute survey in time, however, just like finalist activity, seems to posit that the future can somehow precede the past, or at least that an entire temporal trajectory can be experienced all at once.  This experience seems to be out of 'my' reach as I normally think of myself, but it is no more mysterious than the life of Sphere in a world of Squares.

Understanding the absolute domain as a spatio-temporal survey helps make sense of the more obscure parts of Ruyer's description of the idea.  For example, in a moment that reminded me of Spinoza (NF, 102), he discusses  how it doesn't really make sense to say that an absolute domain has a beginning or an end.  While he doesn't quite say that absolute domains are eternal, its clear that something which surveys time cannot be in it in the same sense that step-by-step causality happens within time.  While it won't have a fifth spatiotemporal dimension, its full organization can't be expressed as anything other than a trajectory that we see as changing or evolving, even though this whole trajectory is absolutely surveyed in advance from the perspective of the domain.  This seems to open the door to something like an absolute domain called Life, which develops through an evolutionary finality by differentiating into various organisms in much the same way Ruyer saw the development of the embryo as an expression of the organism.  It's still not clear to me how this would work, but we can immediately dispense with one confusion if we observe that the finality of Life or Organism is not simply the last state of these systems.  The absolute domain does not have a goal in our normal sense of the term -- it is not developing towards or maintaining an equilibrium endpoint that could only represent one particular location in a surveyed terrain.  Ruyer has probably avoided the word "goal" for precisely this reason, because it potentially distracts us from the fact that the 'end' of an organism includes its entire development as a unit.

This perspective also helps us make sense of the other puzzling connection between absolute domains and finalist activity -- the way Ruyer characterizes the domain as expressing an Idea in the Platonic sense.  Since it is a survey of time the Idea that a domain expresses isn't of any particular moment in its development.  The Idea isn't like any of the states it organizes, which makes it a true metaphysical entity standing outside of space and time. 

This is the most delicate point of our difficult question. We should vehemently deny the existence of a geometric dimension that provides a point of observation external to the sensory field. But we should affirm no less vehemently the existence of a sort of "metaphysical" transversal to the entire field, whose two "extremities" are the "I" (or the x of organic individuality), on one hand, and the guiding Idea of organization, on the other. (NF, 99)

Since the Idea of an absolute domain organizes a whole trajectory at once, every moment along this path becomes a sign of its activity.  I don't think Ruyer means to entirely exclude the existence of chance with this notion, but he certainly wants to argue against our materialist habit of relying on chance as an explanation of any order we see (eg. evolutionary explanations).  

In order to dramatize how the mysterious Idea could be hidden in plain sight at every moment, Ruyer develops a thought experiment invented by Norbert Weiner (NF, 118-120)--  one not unrelated to Chiang's Story of Your Life.  Weiner observed how difficult it would be to communicate with intelligent aliens if their sense of time ran in reverse.  For both species, time is defined as the statistically inevitable progression towards greater entropy.  Milk spreads throughout our coffee, and never again concentrates itself and jumps back out.  Alien time is similar but runs in the reverse direction.  Let's say the aliens built a great pyramid on Mars but then faced the sort of dynastic trouble that beset the Egyptians.  Eventually, this unattended pyramid would erode and be covered by the sands.  Obviously, as we saw, if we discovered this pyramid in its full glory, we would immediately infer the existence of pyramid building extraterrestrials who were spying on us and cutting secret deals for cow lips with the NSA.  But since our entropic timelines runs in reverse, what we see is the wind and water blowing around, slowly acting to shape something that looks surprisingly ordered like a pyramid.  From our perspective this unusual shape would appear to be the simple product of chance, of an unlikely, but presumably entirely natural, phenomenon.  Perhaps we couldn't explain exactly how it formed, but we certainly wouldn't invoke alien intelligence. 

So the absolute survey of consciousness and an inversion in the direction of entropy and in the course of thermodynamic time have similar effects. (NF, 120)

The finalist activity of an absolute domain is thus, strictly speaking, inobservable.  When we see and interact with a structure from the outside, we can always explain things as the mindless casual interaction of parts.  We cannot know it from the 'inside', that is from a transtemporal perspective.  In fact, if the absolute domain is a survey in time, we are never actually interacting with the whole domain at once.  Interaction, observation, always proceeds step-by-step in space and time, so it seems we are always forced to infer the Idea in an imaginative leap.  While Ruyer has distinguished it from observation, he hasn't really discussed the structure of a knowing that would allow us to interact with Ideas, with full absolute domains, as such.  Actually, it seems this same caveat would apply even to ourselves.  I mean, my felt "I" of this moment doesn't seem capable of grasping the entire trajectory of my life as a unit.  And when exactly did this life start?  So do I even really know my self?  An absolute temporal survey brings up as many new questions as it answers.