The Totalization of Shadows, Part IX

By way of making a contrast—a contrast which I hope to use in a thought experiment—I picture two situations:

1) Particles—marbles, atoms, (individuals—where individual means undividable)—flow from top to bottom through a Galton’s quincunx (GQ.)

2) Human beings—conscious agents, subjects, animate beings capable of choice (individuals?)—walk, perambulate, stroll, or otherwise move through a GQ.

In either case, there can be a population of particles or human beings going through the quincunx, or there can be one particle or one human being going through, but over and over again.

I have tried to think through why I prefer the image of a “garden of forking paths” (GoFP) over that of the maze or labyrinth. A labyrinth is as much an image of “self” as a GoFP –a remarkable way to envision the “self” if you think about it…One wonders how this image came to be plausible. In a labyrinth, one is lost. One confronts dead ends. And finding one’s way through a labyrinth may not mean passing through the labyrinth—the maze may end when one reaches a closed-off ending at its center (where the Minotaur lives?) One solves a maze by finding out how to get to its center. In the GoFP or the GQ, there are no dead ends and one does pass through—the motion of passage is crucial. There wouldn’t be pooling or accumulation at any point, or at a center, but distributions of flows. There isn’t a solution to a GoFP or GQ, but a continuing motion.

I will present another two situations:

1) Particles—marbles, atoms, (individuals—where individual means undividable)—flow from into and around a labyrinth.

2) Human beings—conscious agents, subjects, animate beings capable of choice (individuals?)—walk, perambulate, stroll, or otherwise move through a labyrinth.


I’m going to short circuit my own analysis now and get straight to my conclusion (though I will probably have to retrace this out later): in the first pair of situations, there is no difference between the distributions of the particles and the human beings at the end of the GQ. In the second pair of situations, there will be.