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1.7

Irreducibility

Unlike Being in which parts make up a whole, and a whole is composed of parts, in Becoming, the parts are unique, successive, paratactically arrayed; their alignment coordinates their movements, creating a larger movement. There is no ascent or descent, only a transversally coordinated movement across all members of the set. The part in Becoming is more analogous to the fractal in which smaller elements contain larger ones and vice versa without a hierarchy. Becoming does not admit any representation, there is no need for it. Irreducibility applies to complexity according to Wolfram -- but we could extend that to also apply to behavior. Behavior is complexity. And what Wolfram sees in complexity can also be seen in behavior. The system in this case cannot be reduced, it cannot be generalized; there is no short cut. It must play out entirely from beginning to end, from start to finish. Most crucially it must reach its ending before it can be completely known. In this way, Wolfram sees it as a kind of limit of knowledge itself, beyond which no further reduction or compression is possible. One could say that this kind of trajectory is synonymous with Becoming.