There are a couple of ways of cashing out the concept of the ‘possible’. For example, we can think of the physicist’s phase space diagrams, charting the ‘degrees of freedom’ of a system; what it can do. In theory this sounds great, but in practice we often fall into a trap here. A tight net of causes, required if we’re to explain and understand anything in an articulate and determinate and predictive way, draw these ‘degrees of freedom’ (such a great expression!) back to the low, blurry, opacity of the ‘mere possible’. Possibility becomes a metric and heuristic useful under a regime of ignorance. Since we don’t know what will happen, but we do have a smattering of current conditions, and a bag full of past data, we can sketch out the ghostly, half-transparent, ‘possibilities’, the quantities of which represent our current ignorance, with fewer being a good sign, representing relative surety. The ‘possible’ becomes, then, a fog or haze that represents the unknown, yet still usefully determined, features that are the elements we have to come to grips with in a novel system.
But that expression, “degrees of freedom”, is so nice, it would be a shame to leave it as merely marking and representing an illusion, as though freedom could equal merely an as-yet-unknown quantity, that is, despite being currently unknown, fully determinate. Freedom being the name merely of an ignorance, an illusion, an optical effect – an unhappy interim before we know the outcome. What’s lacking here, and what that expression captures so nicely, is the mobility of a freedom known and realized by a double pendulum or a dripping tap. Once we see in the expression ‘the degrees of freedom in a system’ an ode to its mobility, the possibilities, charted by the phase space, cease to be ghostly; they instead become an environment. What is possible is not a state of ignorance but a terrain. The hiker, lost, soon to die of thirst, may console themselves that they merely need to uncover their fate from this hostile terrain, but in truth each step they take determines the terrain that they find themselves having to assail at each moment: the degrees of freedom determine the degrees of freedom. Freedom as the cause of freedom. Here possibility is not flat, ghostly, or illusory, but the description of a non-linear system, where feedback reigns, and decisions are fraught: the very conditions they are made within are altered by the decisions made.
In such situations, which are in fact the norm for almost everything that matters, there can be no master script, or instruction manual, because such a text would need to change itself as its enacted. It would be a conversation between collaborators, not a negotiation with an authority. Generally, we don’t like this. We prefer the dulcet tones of the captain telling us the turbulence is nothing to worry about: the thought that we are safe and enclosed by technical systems and experts who are supposed to know how to manipulate them. But, of late, this illusion, comforting as it is, has been shattered repeatedly, and revealed itself to be the regressive, reaction formation that it is. A kick in the guts, sure. But hope itself, like life itself, tends to emerge in those contexts where a nice feedback loop can get going, and define an environment, a milieu, whether that be a street corner, a tepid pool, a senators office answering machine, a volcanic vent, or an unfurling of dawn photons on the surface of a cornea. The degrees of freedom of a system are a product of the system itself. This does not mean that everything is possible (of course that’s impossible), but, rather, everything that is possible is a product of the labor of the real… (that’s you and me, let’s get to work).