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)