Some everyday words take on a particular meaning on this blog, mostly from the sublunar ontology. This page collects them as they turn up, in case you want to check what I mean by them.
below
What a whole is made of and held up by. A relative direction of composition, not a place. Everything is below to something and above to something else.
Seen in: Hypogearchy, Acid Chthomunism, Dropping Crystal Balls
character
What a whole hands down and keeps recognisable over time. For a god, its character is everything its series has ever been, still there to be taken up, together with what the moments carrying it now can still become. It is never a timeless form.
Borrowed from: Whitehead, who calls it a defining characteristic; for gods, Edward Butler's reading of Proclus (hyparxis).
Seen in: Hypogearchy, Dropping Crystal Balls
constraint
Whatever narrows what can happen next. Constraints limit, but they also enable: a riverbank is what lets a river be a river, and a rite's exact form shuts most of the world out so that one thing can happen inside it.
Borrowed from: Alicia Juarrero, on limiting and enabling constraints (Dynamics in Action, 1999), and Gregory Bateson, who calls them restraints ("Cybernetic Explanation", 1967).
Seen in: Dropping Crystal Balls
crowd
A whole seen from below: its members as many, not as one. Most of what a body does is settled in its crowd, without the one who's supposed to be in charge. A self is a crowd that says I.
Seen in: Acid Chthomunism
loop
A whole taking in its own past, and so shifting what it is likely to do next. A habit is a loop, and so is a tradition, a season, or a week that comes round again carrying what the last one left. A loop can close, which keeps a body warm but, taken too far, only repeats its past and shuts out whatever doesn't fit. An open loop takes in its past to become something else: each turn of the spiral is shaped by the earlier ones but keeps room for what turns up.
Borrowed from: Yuk Hui, who calls it recursion (Recursivity and Contingency, 2019). A closed loop is his homeostatic recursion, the cybernetic kind that only keeps itself steady; an open loop is his open recursion.
Seen in: Dropping Crystal Balls
moment
The smallest thing that happens, physical or not. It takes in what came before, settles into one thing, and passes on, and what it was is never lost: it lives on in every later moment that takes it in. A moment is not an instant: it takes its own time and has an inside. That doesn't mean awareness, only that each moment takes in its world from where it stands and leans towards what it could become. A stone, a cell or a thought is a loop of moments, each handing the same character on to the next, so alike that they look like one thing that stays.
Borrowed from: Whitehead, who calls it an actual occasion (Process and Reality, 1929).
Seen in: Hypogearchy, Dropping Crystal Balls
rite
A small improbable thing done on purpose, to shift what is likely. Its form is a constraint. Still a hypothesis.
Seen in: Acid Chthomunism, Dropping Crystal Balls
series
A whole spread across many kinds of members: the living chain that carries a character through temples and priests, but also stones, plants, animals, places, days and people. Gods have the widest series, but a local spirit, a daimon, a tradition or a family line has one too, sometimes as narrow as a single life. A series can be fed or starved, and can die and be revived.
Borrowed from: Proclus, who calls it a seira, the chain of beings that depend from a god, read through Edward Butler; widened here beyond gods.
Seen in: Dropping Crystal Balls
sympathy
How a moment takes on the feeling of what it takes in. Not a force sent across a distance, but things answering each other because they share something, like two clocks on one beam.
Borrowed from: Whitehead, who calls it conformal feeling (Process and Reality, 1929). The name is the Stoics' sympatheia, kept as a historical name without their mechanism.
Seen in: Dropping Crystal Balls
whole
Many moments that hang together and act as one: a stone, a cell, a body, a family, a market, a god. What makes them one is a shared character, and what holds them is constraint: the whole narrows what its members can do, and their working together lets it do what none of them could alone. Seen across, a whole is its members, held up from below, and itself a member of larger wholes. Seen over time, it is a loop.
Borrowed from: Whitehead, who calls it a society (Process and Reality, 1929).
Seen in: Dropping Crystal Balls