Plasticity, Generativity, and the Acquisition of Constraint: A Preliminary Discussion of Subject Formation in a Background-Independent Relational Ontology

This paper treats the formation of subjects on a combinatorial substrate of the kind that background-independent approaches to quantum gravity, group field theory among them, have developed as models of the emergence of a discrete spacetime, in which no arena is given in advance and every structure, extent and order included, is carried by the relations themselves. The substrate is used here as a formal template, and no physical claim is made of the objects described; the apparatus is stated in full in the paper. Its principal instrument is a distinction between two capacities that developmental talk conflates because both are measured by the size of an accessible set. Plasticity is the breadth of what a subsystem could still become, formalised as the reachable set of its configurations under admissible continuation and compared by inclusion only. Generativity is the capacity to extend what is possible, formalised as the capacity to generate expansive products, ones whose presence admits continuations otherwise inadmissible. A foreclosure proposition shows plasticity non-increasing along every trajectory and strictly decreasing at every genuine branch point, and a trade proposition shows that generative capacity is exercised only at the price of plasticity, so that the two orders move oppositely along development. On this basis the paper gives a specification of the initial condition that replaces an incoherent one, a criterion distinguishing education from subjection with no new machinery, an account of one being's continuation of another that requires no memory, a structural treatment of interiority through timescale separation, a definition of reflexive symbols with the misfit of a self-image as their residue, and an account of self-determination on which unfreedom and subjection are one structure. A closing section describes exogenously constituted subsystems, whose sufficient-state sector was formed elsewhere and is unrevisable by them. The paper is conceptual and preliminary; its results are definitions, short propositions, and an explicit register of open problems.