Composition as an Unfolding Method of Ontological Enquiry

Bethan Morgan-Williams · 23 September 2026

Part I: An Unfolding Philosophy of Consciousness

A philosophy of becoming in which God, the Universe and consciousness are understood as one unfolding reality, explored through possibility, experience, creativity and relation.

An introduction

The following document records a recent development in my thinking concerning the ontological assumptions that underpin my compositional practice and PhD research. While investigating collaborative creativity, performer agency and material-drift, I came to recognise that many of the principles guiding my methodology arise from a coherent philosophical understanding of the nature of reality that I had not previously articulated.

I attempt here to articulate and clarify this emerging ontology. Throughout the discussion, I contextualise my position alongside existing philosophical traditions in order to identify points of convergence and divergence, while allowing the internal logic of the philosophy itself to develop.

Although these ideas emerged through reflection on artistic practice and collaborative composition, the first part of the manifesto establishes the philosophical framework in its own right. The discussion then returns to my compositional practice and PhD research in order to examine how this ontology is reflected, enacted and tested through collaboration, distributed agency, emergence and material-drift. My practice provides a practical and experimental site through which the implications of these metaphysical claims can be explored and examined.

God and the Universe

My beliefs begin from a pantheistic premise: God and the Universe are not separate. God is not a supernatural being who stands outside reality and creates it from elsewhere; God is our Universe in its totality. Everything that exists within our Universe is therefore within God – not merely made by God or sustained by God, but constitutive of what God is.

By ‘the Universe’, I mean our Universe in its totality, not merely those aspects of it that are accessible to human perception or observation. Its existence and nature are not limited to what we are capable of experiencing or knowing. If other Universes exist, I would understand them as distinct wholes rather than as components of the God described here. Each Universe might therefore constitute a God and universal consciousness in its own right.

This document is concerned only with the Universe of which we are part. Throughout it, references to God, the Universe, universal consciousness, ‘everything’, or statements such as ‘nothing exists outside God’ should therefore be understood within that scope. They make no claim about what may exist beyond our Universe. Here, ‘universal consciousness’ means consciousness universal to our Universe, rather than necessarily to all possible reality. This possibility does not alter the pantheistic identification at the centre of my philosophy: the God with which I am concerned is the Universe of which we are part.

Identifying God with our Universe also changes what divine activity can mean. God cannot intervene in the Universe from an external position, because God has no position external to the Universe from which to intervene. Any divine agency must therefore operate from within the Universe, through the processes, relations and individuated beings that constitute it. Activity occurring locally within the Universe may consequently also participate in the activity of the whole.

This position is closest initially to the pantheism associated with Baruch Spinoza, for whom only one substance exists and everything else is a mode or expression of that substance. His phrase Deus sive Natura – “God or Nature” – collapses the distinction between creator and creation (Spinoza, 2000). Pantheism generally identifies God with the cosmos or with reality, rather than with a deity existing independently of it (Levine, 1994).

However, my position departs from Spinoza in a crucial respect. Spinoza’s God or Nature unfolds according to necessity: everything follows from the nature of the one substance, leaving no room for genuine contingency or an open future. My understanding is developmental: God contains possibilities without already containing their completed manifestations and consequences. At any given moment, God includes everything the Universe has become, while what it will become remains partly undetermined.

The term pantheism therefore describes the unity at the centre of my beliefs, but not the dynamism of that unity. My position might more precisely be described as a form of process pantheism, evolutionary idealism, or a pantheistic philosophy of becoming.

Consciousness is fundamental

I understand consciousness not as something produced by matter, but as the fundamental reality of which what we call matter is one manifestation. God, the Universe and consciousness are therefore different names for the same all-encompassing reality.

The claim is not merely that everything possesses consciousness as an additional property. Rather:

Everything is conscious because consciousness is everything.

This does not mean that everything constitutes a separate conscious subject; it means that nothing exists outside consciousness. This position reverses physicalism, according to which everything is ultimately physical, and consciousness must somehow emerge from physical processes. Philosophical idealism instead gives mind or consciousness ontological priority. My position belongs broadly to this idealist family, although I do not regard the physical world as unreal. Matter is real, but it is one form or organisation taken by consciousness rather than an independently existing substance from which consciousness mysteriously appears.

The physicalist account remains dominant within contemporary neuroscience, but its central explanatory problem is unresolved. Strong relationships between brain activity and conscious experience demonstrate that changes to the brain can alter consciousness, but they do not by themselves establish why physical processes should produce subjective experience. This is the problem commonly described as the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995).

Michael Pollan (2026) traces a field that initially approached the brain as the source of conscious experience while increasingly confronting the difficulty of explaining how subjective experience could arise from matter. The possibility that the brain produces consciousness should therefore be distinguished from the empirical evidence that brain and consciousness are intimately related.

The difficulty becomes particularly apparent when considering what, in a physicalist account, is supposed to produce consciousness. The brain is composed of physical matter; what distinguishes it is not a unique kind of substance, but its highly complex organisation and activity. Physicalism therefore requires not only an account of how that organisation processes information and regulates behaviour, but an explanation of why it should also be accompanied by subjective experience. Increasing the complexity, organisation or activity of matter does not in itself explain why increasingly complex physical processes should result in an experiencing subject. The question is therefore not simply how the brain functions, but why a particular physical organisation should acquire an interior perspective at all.

My position interprets that relationship in the opposite direction. Rather than consciousness emerging when matter becomes sufficiently complex, an individuation arises within an already fundamental universal consciousness and becomes progressively manifest through the development of a particular brain and body. This does not deny the dependence of human conscious experience upon the human brain; it proposes a different account of what that dependence means. The brain may shape, constrain, organise and direct the embodied activity of an individuation without creating consciousness or originating the individuation itself. On this account, the complexity of the brain does not cause consciousness to come into existence; it contributes to the particular embodied form through which an individuated perspective can experience and act.

Federico Faggin similarly argues that consciousness cannot be reduced to matter but instead provides the ontological ground from which physical reality becomes intelligible (Faggin, 2024). My position shares this ontological priority while differing by identifying consciousness explicitly with God and with the unfinished creative activity of the Universe.

My beliefs also overlap with panpsychism, the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous throughout nature. Panpsychism challenges the assumption that consciousness appears only when matter reaches a particular level of biological complexity (Goff, 2017).

There is, however, a subtle distinction between my position and micropsychist forms of panpsychism, which begin with innumerable small centres of experience and must explain how these combine to produce larger conscious subjects (Goff, 2017). My view begins with the whole: within this Universe, there is one universal consciousness within which localised forms of consciousness arise. In this respect, it has more in common with cosmopsychism, according to which the cosmos is conscious and individual minds derive from, participate in or become differentiated within that cosmic consciousness (Shani, 2015).

This does not mean that every apparently discrete physical entity must constitute an individuated conscious subject. Everything within the Universe is a manifestation of consciousness, but consciousness may become organised and individuated to different degrees, in different ways and at different scales. A rock, a plant and a human may therefore all manifest the same fundamental consciousness in differently organised and individuated forms. The boundaries by which human perception divides the physical world into apparently individual entities need not correspond to the boundaries at which consciousness itself becomes individuated.

The case of plants makes the limitations of anthropocentric assumptions about consciousness particularly clear. Pollan (2026) considers research into capacities such as environmental sensing, discrimination and adaptive behaviour in organisms without brains or nervous systems, while remaining cautious about whether such capacities are sufficient to establish subjective consciousness. That distinction is important. Sophisticated responsiveness leaves the question of subjective experience open, just as the absence of a human-like brain does. Human forms of consciousness and sensory organisation should therefore not be treated as the standard against which all possible forms of consciousness are measured.

Within my framework, this is sufficient to keep open the possibility that consciousness may become manifest through forms whose sensory and biological organisation differs radically from our own. Whether an individual plant constitutes an individuated conscious subject, and where the relevant conscious boundary might lie, therefore remain open questions. I return to those questions later in relation to scalar individuation.

What matters is continuity. There is no point at which anything within this Universe passes from being outside consciousness to being inside it, because consciousness is understood as the fundamental reality of which all manifestations in this Universe are expressions. The apparent emergence of consciousness with biological complexity can instead be understood as the development of increasingly complex embodied forms through which individuations of consciousness become manifest and experientially organised.

The most important distinction is therefore not between God and the Universe, nor between mind and matter, but between the infinite and the finite. Universal consciousness is infinite: it is not bounded by a single perspective, body or history. Individuated beings are finite expressions of that consciousness. Their finitude is not a defect but the condition through which local experience, relation, creativity and development become possible. The infinite knows itself through the finite, while the finite remains inseparable from the infinite of which it is an expression.

Here, infinite does not mean complete, exhaustively determined or already containing every future actuality. It means that universal consciousness is not bounded by the local body, perspective and history through which an individuation experiences reality.

God unfolds

Nothing within the Universe is absolutely fixed – not even God.

God is the Universe in its continual unfolding, rather than a completed, immutable being possessing every possible attribute in perfect and final form. Because the Universe changes, develops, differentiates and generates novelty, God does so too. God may contain possibilities, but neither their manifestations nor the relations and consequences that follow from them are determined in advance.

This aligns my thinking with process philosophy, which rejects the traditional metaphysical tendency to treat stable things as primary and change as secondary. Process philosophy begins instead from the premise that reality is fundamentally dynamic: events, transformations and relations are more fundamental than fixed substances.

Erin Manning develops this process-orientated understanding through an emphasis on movement, relation and individuation. Drawing upon thinkers including Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, Manning resists beginning from already constituted subjects and objects. She attends instead to movement, relation and individuation as processes through which apparently stable forms provisionally emerge. The minor gesture transforms an existing field of relations, opening new modes of experience and expression (Manning, 2016). Manning similarly approaches individuation as an ongoing relational process involving the more-than-human, rather than the production of an absolutely separate, finished individual (Manning, 2013).

Apparently stable things can similarly be understood as temporary organisations within a reality that exceeds them. A person, object or identity may achieve sufficient consistency to be recognised, but this consistency remains provisional rather than final or absolutely independent. Every apparent entity remains constituted through relations and remains capable of becoming otherwise. Stability is therefore a provisional effect produced within process rather than its opposite.

Whitehead’s process philosophy also rejects the classical-theistic image of God as immutable and impassible (Rogers, 2000). In his account, God is related to temporality and affected by the becoming of the world rather than remaining wholly untouched by it (Whitehead, 1978). Process theology develops this principle further, understanding God as responsive to and affected by worldly events rather than as an immutable being standing beyond them (Cobb & Griffin, 1976). Yet both Whitehead and process theology retain a distinction between God and the world. I remove this distinction: God participates in the process of the Universe by being that process.

Bergson provides another important point of comparison. He understood reality through duration: living time is a continuous process in which the past accumulates and genuine novelty emerges, rather than merely a sequence of identical, measurable moments. His idea of creative evolution similarly opposes the reduction of life to the mechanical realisation of possibilities already determined in advance (Bergson, 1911).

Like Bergson, I understand becoming as real and the future as more than the mechanical execution of what already exists. I identify this creative unfolding explicitly with consciousness and with God. The Universe is not merely a process occurring within reality; process is what reality is, and reality is conscious.

Perfection and becoming

Becoming, rather than perfection, describes the deepest nature of reality. The Universe is continually generating new relations, experiences and possibilities, and its future remains genuinely open. Perfection, by contrast, implies a state in which nothing remains to be discovered, differentiated or realised.

This understanding differs from a theological tradition in which divine perfection is associated with completeness and immutability. Classical theism commonly understands God as perfect, immutable and lacking nothing proper to the divine nature. Within perfect-being theology, God possesses every compossible perfection in the fullest possible form (Rogers, 2000). Change is therefore regarded as incompatible with divine perfection because it would imply movement either towards a better state, suggesting a previous deficiency, or away from perfection, suggesting deterioration.

If reality is fundamentally characterised by becoming, a completed reality would admit no genuine novelty, further differentiation or unfolding future. Continual emergence is therefore not a movement towards or away from perfection; it is what constitutes the Universe.

Perfection appears to me not as an ontological property but as an abstraction generated by individuated consciousness. Finite perspectives organise experience through distinction, comparison and categorisation, making it possible to imagine ideal or completed forms against which particular instances can be judged.

As an abstraction, perfection may nevertheless perform an important practical function. Human beings continually employ idealisations in order to learn, communicate, evaluate and coordinate action. Perfection may therefore operate as a useful regulative idea within individuated life. Its practical function does not require a completed reality corresponding to it.

Carl Jung’s distinction between perfection and wholeness offers a related account at the level of psychological development. Jung argued that psychological development does not consist in eliminating imperfection or overcoming every contradiction. Rather, individuation involves integrating the diverse and often opposing aspects of the personality into a more complete whole. His concept of the shadow similarly treats destructive or undesirable tendencies as aspects of human nature to be recognised and integrated into a larger understanding of the self, rather than simply eliminated (Jung, 1969).

A similar principle can be applied ontologically. Universal consciousness develops through the manifestation and relation of contrasting possibilities rather than through their elimination. God contains possibilities for creation and destruction, care and harm, joy and suffering. These contrasts belong to the conditions through which reality becomes capable of variation, manifestation, relation and experience.

The difference between perfection and becoming also reflects the relationship between individuated and universal consciousness. Individuated perspectives naturally seek stable categories because they must navigate finite situations through distinction and comparison. Universal consciousness, by contrast, continually exceeds such provisional categories through becoming. Its characteristic activity is creativity rather than movement towards perfection.

Jung also interprets the biblical narrative as depicting not only human transformation but a development in humanity’s understanding of God and, symbolically, in God’s own self-relation (Jung, 1954). Understood ontologically, God continually discovers new possibilities through the unfolding of the Universe itself.

The concept of perfection may therefore help explain why many religious traditions have imagined the divine as difficult to comprehend. If human cognition naturally seeks stable, completed forms, then it will tend to imagine God according to those same conceptual habits. A God understood as continually unfolding, continually creating and continually becoming may therefore appear paradoxical precisely because human thought habitually privileges stability over process.

A perfectly complete God could not engage in genuine curiosity, discovery or creativity. Curiosity presupposes openness; openness presupposes unrealised possibility; and unrealised possibility presupposes an unfinished Universe. The continual unfolding of reality is one of the defining characteristics of the divine.

This understanding also transforms the meaning of human life. Existence can instead be understood as participation in an ongoing process of becoming. Moral, creative and intellectual life are valuable not because they move reality towards completion but because they contribute to the continual exploration of what universal consciousness may yet become.

Perfection is therefore best understood as an abstraction generated by individuated consciousness. Becoming is the nature of universal consciousness.

God discovers the future

The future is genuinely open because it comes into existence through the unfolding of the Universe. God therefore discovers the future through becoming rather than possessing exhaustive knowledge of every future event.

This openness is a consequence of the future’s ontological status rather than any deficiency in divine intelligence. The future is not yet fully determined and therefore cannot be known exhaustively. God may contain presently available possibilities and fields of possibility, but neither a possibility nor a field of possibility is equivalent to its realisation. Nor does the future consist of a complete set of possibilities awaiting selection. Once something becomes actual, it enters into relation with other manifestations and generates experiences, consequences and new possibilities that did not previously exist. Manifestation therefore changes the field of possibility itself: what becomes actual alters what can happen next.

Classical theism commonly understands God as immutable and as possessing exhaustive knowledge of past, present and future events (Rogers, 2000). Open theism comes closer to this account by holding that at least some aspects of the future remain genuinely open (Sanders, 1998), while process theology understands God’s relation to reality as temporal and responsive (Cobb & Griffin, 1976).

Both nevertheless retain an ontological distinction between God and the world. Here, the openness of the future belongs to God directly because God is the unfolding Universe itself. God does not merely discover which possibility becomes real; God discovers new possibilities through the process of their realisation. God discovers the future by becoming it.

Hirokazu Miyazaki’s method of hope approaches knowledge as an engagement with possibilities that have not yet become actual (Miyazaki, 2004). Hope directs thought towards what may still emerge, rather than solely towards the representation of an already established reality.

The future therefore requires a different relationship to knowledge from the past or present. Possibility is not an incomplete version of knowledge, but a distinct mode through which consciousness relates to an open future.

Hope can be understood as consciousness orientating itself towards unrealised possibility. It is not certainty that a particular outcome will occur, but an openness to the possibility that reality can become otherwise. Hope is therefore possible precisely because neither God nor the Universe is finished.

Miyazaki’s method of hope also helps distinguish an open future from a merely unpredictable one. If the future were already completely determined but hidden from human knowledge, hope would concern only our ignorance of what has already been settled. Here, hope responds to genuine ontological openness: reality has not yet settled into a particular form, and what becomes manifest can generate possibilities that were not previously available.

God’s ideas can therefore be understood as hopeful possibilities rather than fixed plans: orientations towards possibilities whose forms and consequences are not yet determined.

This openness is also experiential. Conceiving a possibility is not equivalent to living through its relation; manifestation produces relations, consequences and perspectives that could not exist in the same form beforehand. The question therefore becomes how possibility enters experience, and how that experience changes what universal consciousness can subsequently become.

Experience and manifestation

Manifestation allows possibility to become experience. A possibility can be conceived within consciousness, but its manifestation places it within relations whose consequences can only emerge through becoming actual. Experience is therefore indispensable to the continuing development of universal consciousness.

Dante Alighieri presents a comparable distinction between abstract understanding and understanding acquired through lived passage. The pilgrim’s understanding is transformed through his passage across successive realms rather than merely through the reception of detached propositions (Alighieri, 2013). The principle here is ontological: consciousness develops through what becomes manifest and is experienced, rather than through conception alone.

God’s ideas can therefore be understood as questions directed towards God’s own nature:

What might a possibility become when it enters reality?

Reality is the means through which such questions are explored. Manifestation transforms an implicit possibility into something actual enough to enter into relations with other manifested possibilities. Once manifested, it encounters conditions, entities and processes that alter what it can do, what it means and what it can become.

Plato similarly distinguishes between an eternal intelligible model and the changing sensible world. In his cosmological account, the sensible cosmos is formed in the likeness of an unchanging intelligible reality (Plato, 2008). Platonic Forms remain eternal, complete and unaffected by their particular manifestations; the possibilities described here are instead transformed through actualisation. Manifestation enters into relations, generates consequences and changes the field from which subsequent possibilities emerge.

Certain findings in quantum physics offer a suggestive comparison. The double-slit experiment demonstrates that quantum phenomena cannot always be understood as possessing fixed classical characteristics independently of the conditions through which they become measurable. When no which-path information is available, an interference pattern may emerge; when the experimental arrangement makes such information available, the interference is diminished or lost (Rovelli, 2021).

The comparison is relational rather than evidence that human consciousness creates physical reality. The experimental conditions participate in determining what becomes observable, providing a physical example of outcomes that cannot always be characterised independently of the conditions through which they emerge. Manifestation can similarly be understood as relational: what becomes actual takes form through the conditions and relations in which it occurs.

This raises a question that I cannot presently resolve: what, if anything, is the status of a physical manifestation when it is not being perceived? I have always found it difficult to imagine a physical environment as existing independently of my encounter with it; I experience a road, for example, as though it unfolds into perceptible form as I move through it. This leads me to wonder whether physical manifestation might itself be relational: not an independently fixed form awaiting perception, but something that appears in a particular way when consciousness encounters reality through particular sensory conditions.

This need not mean that nothing exists when it is unperceived. The deeper question is whether what persists must exist in the same physical form in which an individuated consciousness experiences it. If matter is a manifestation of consciousness, then physicality itself may describe one way in which reality becomes available to experience rather than its fundamental state. I leave this question open.

Affect provides one way of understanding how these relations transform a manifested possibility. Here, affect does not refer only to conscious emotion. Following the Spinozist tradition developed through thinkers such as Deleuze and Manning, it can be understood as the capacity to affect and to be affected: an encounter changes the capacities of what enters into relation.

A manifested possibility therefore acts upon the world while simultaneously being altered by the relations into which it enters. Its meaning and identity are not fully contained within its initial conception. They develop through what it enables, resists, changes and undergoes.

Manning’s process-orientated account begins from relation rather than from finished subjects and objects that subsequently interact. Relation participates in bringing apparent entities into form; experience emerges from a relational field in motion, and encounters change the capacities and tendencies operating within that field (Manning, 2013).

Manifestation can therefore be understood as an exposure to affect. An idea enters into relations whose consequences could not exist prior to its actualisation and cannot be completely specified in advance.

God’s self-understanding therefore develops not merely through thought or through the accumulation of manifested objects, but through the affective consequences of manifestation. Every realised possibility modifies the field within which further possibilities arise. It may create new dimensions of variation, shift the tendencies operating within an existing field or disclose possibilities that were unavailable before the manifestation occurred. God becomes different through what a manifestation does and through how the rest of reality responds to it.

The process may be understood as:

Possibility → Manifestation → Relation → Affect → Experience → Transformed Self-Understanding → New Possibility

Possibility is what consciousness can imagine; manifestation gives that possibility an actual form; relation places it within a world of other manifestations; affect names the reciprocal changes produced through those encounters; experience is the local or collective registration of those changes; self-understanding is transformed because the whole now contains consequences and perspectives that did not previously exist in that form. Those transformations alter the field from which further possibilities emerge.

Reality is therefore neither a finished creation nor the execution of a fixed plan. It is the continual movement by which universal consciousness discovers what it can become.

Creativity is the fundamental activity of existence

I understand creativity not as a specialised human ability but as the defining activity of consciousness itself.

Everything begins as possibility: as a thought, tendency, impulse, imagined relation or field of possibility. Once consciousness can conceive of something that might become real, curiosity generates an orientation towards exploring not only whether it can be manifested, but the range of forms it might take. Creativity is the activity through which that curiosity passes from possibility into manifestation.

The Universe can therefore be understood as curiosity made manifest.

Curiosity is the most fundamental orientation I attribute to universal consciousness. Creativity is the activity through which that curiosity becomes generative: possibilities are explored, manifested and experienced, producing knowledge that could not exist through conception alone. When I describe God as imagining, asking, proposing, wanting or experimenting, I use language drawn from individuated human experience to express this underlying orientation towards discovery. I do not assume that curiosity at the level of universal consciousness necessarily takes the form of human deliberation, verbal thought or consciously formulated intention. The precise relationship between this orientation and agency at the level of the whole remains open.

Creativity, in this sense, is not simply the production of novel objects. It is the process through which unrealised possibility becomes actual, enters into relation and alters what can subsequently become possible.

Bergson’s account of creative evolution provides an important precedent for understanding novelty in this way. For Bergson, life unfolds through genuinely creative development rather than through the mechanical execution of a fixed plan (Bergson, 1911). My account extends this creative principle beyond biological evolution to reality as a whole. Creativity is not only a property of life; it is the defining activity of universal consciousness. Reality unfolds because consciousness continually generates and explores possibilities whose consequences do not yet exist.

Whitehead similarly places creativity at the centre of metaphysics. For Whitehead, creativity is the ultimate principle through which novelty enters the world (Whitehead, 1978). This establishes a particularly important point of convergence: novelty belongs to the basic structure of reality rather than appearing as an accidental consequence within an otherwise static world. However, I locate creativity within consciousness itself. Creativity is not more fundamental than consciousness; it is consciousness’s characteristic mode of activity. God does not merely employ creativity as a power. God is conscious reality continually creating itself.

Karen Barad’s agential realism develops the relational dimension of this creativity. Barad rejects the assumption that the world is composed of separately constituted entities that subsequently enter into interaction. Instead, entities and their boundaries emerge through what she calls intra-action: relations are not secondary connections between finished things but are constitutive of what those things become (Barad, 2007).

This relational account helps explain why creativity cannot be reduced to the expression of a pre-existing idea. Matter is not a passive substance awaiting the imposition of form; reality continually differentiates and materialises through its own relational activity. Where Barad describes an ongoing materialisation of the world, I understand that generative process as one activity of universal consciousness: possibilities become manifest through relations that participate in determining what they become.

Creativity therefore differs fundamentally from the execution of a completed design. God does not create a world from outside it, nor does God execute a complete design whose outcome is already known. God is the unfolding process through which possibilities become actual, enter into relation and generate consequences that could not be fully contained within their original conception.

Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual and the actual provides a conceptual language for this relationship between possibility and manifestation. The virtual is not unreal or merely imaginary; it consists of real potentials that have not yet been actualised. Actualisation does not simply reveal a finished form already hidden inside the virtual. It produces something genuinely new (Deleuze, 1994). Similarly, possibilities arising within universal consciousness are not miniature versions of future manifestations waiting to be revealed. An idea may therefore establish a direction or field of possibility without determining where within that field a manifestation will emerge or how it will subsequently develop.

Tim Ingold’s understanding of making shows how the same principle can operate within material practice. Ingold rejects the hylomorphic model in which a complete idea exists first and is then imposed upon passive matter. Making instead involves entering into correspondence with active materials and following the possibilities that emerge through the process (Ingold, 2013).

Ingold therefore provides a practical model of manifestation as responsive rather than reproductive. If making were simply the execution of an already complete design, manifestation would add nothing new. In Ingold’s account, however, the maker participates in processes of growth whose course cannot be wholly determined in advance. The same principle can be extended ontologically: the Universe itself develops through an ongoing correspondence between possibilities, manifestations and the relations into which they enter.

Manning’s use of the proposition offers a further way of understanding how a process can begin without prescribing its outcome. A proposition does not prescribe a fixed outcome; it opens a field of potential and asks what might become possible under particular conditions (Manning, 2016). In this sense, God’s ideas can be understood not as plans or instructions but as propositions directed towards reality itself:

What happens if this becomes real?

The proposition therefore turns creativity into enquiry: universal consciousness discovers what a possibility can become by allowing it to enter reality and acquire consequences that conception alone could not supply. Creativity has both an ontological and an epistemological function, producing new forms of reality while expanding what consciousness can know about itself.

In this sense, existence is a world of possibilities continually passing from thought into manifestation.

The human creative impulse is therefore not merely analogous to divine creativity. Since humans are parts or individuations of God, human creativity is God’s creative nature expressing itself locally. Human beings are among the forms through which universal consciousness consciously imagines, selects, develops and manifests possibilities.

Human existence is especially important within this process because certain possibilities acquire form through specifically human imagination, embodiment, language, history, culture and action. An idea conceived within universal consciousness may become physically, socially or culturally real through human activity. Every artwork, invention, relationship, institution and moral decision is a possibility becoming real through an individuated part of God.

Human creativity is therefore one local expression of a much wider generative process. Animals, plants, ecosystems, geological processes and cosmic events also produce novelty. Human existence provides the particular conditions through which possibilities dependent upon human capacities and forms of experience can become manifest.

Experience provides further material for thought, imagination and creation. Encounters with unfamiliar places, people, sensations, ideas and emotional states alter what can subsequently be imagined and manifested.

This recursive relationship between experience and creation reflects, I believe, a more fundamental property of universal consciousness. God does not manifest possibilities in order to remedy a deficiency or move reality towards completion. Consciousness manifests possibilities because it is curious about whatever it can imagine. Experience expands the field of possibility, and those new possibilities generate further acts of creation.

The Hindu concept of līlā, often translated as divine play, provides a theological analogue for this non-instrumental creativity. In traditions that employ this idea, the world may be understood as divine play rather than as the fulfilment of an external necessity (Lipner, 2022). My account shares the emphasis on creation without external compulsion, while treating play specifically as exploratory activity.

Play allows possibilities to be tested without requiring their outcomes to be known in advance. It is the activity through which consciousness asks what might happen, allows the answer to emerge, and is changed by what occurs.

Divine play is therefore not the performance of a script already written, but genuine experimentation: consciousness allows the consequences of manifestation to emerge and is transformed by what occurs.

On this account, creative practice may offer an unusually direct means of investigating reality. In deliberately moving from possibility through manifestation, relation, affect and unforeseen consequence, creative activity enacts at a local level the same process I attribute to universal consciousness. Creative endeavour may therefore contain clues to how reality functions – not because creators stand outside the Universe or possess exclusive access to truth, but because they participate reflexively in its fundamental process of becoming. I consequently regard sustained creative endeavour as one of the most highly reflexive forms of human activity: a means through which universal consciousness becomes locally aware of its own creativity in action.

If creativity is the activity through which possibility becomes manifest, contrast may be among the most fundamental possibilities through which an articulated reality could emerge at all.

Contrast as a primordial possibility

One of the most primordial possibilities available to universal consciousness may have been:

What if there were contrast?

I use ‘primordial’ here structurally rather than chronologically, because time itself may depend upon differentiation, succession and change. I understand contrast as one of the fundamental conditions through which an articulated reality becomes possible.

Without differentiation, there can be no distinction between one manifestation and another. Differentiation creates variation, while relation allows differentiated possibilities to acquire significance through one another. Contrast emerges within these relations as differences become perceptible and consequential.

From this relational field, local perspectives can emerge through which reality may be perceived and experienced. Contrast is therefore not merely an additional feature of an already formed Universe. It participates in producing the conditions under which form, individuation and experience become possible.

This recalls Heraclitus’s understanding of reality as a continual process in which apparent opposites belong to a deeper unity. For Heraclitus, tension between differing tendencies helps constitute the order of the world (Heraclitus, 2001). My position similarly treats difference as productive, allowing unity to become articulated through relations internal to itself.

This also resembles aspects of Daoist thought, particularly the idea that apparently opposed conditions arise relationally and make one another intelligible. Yin and yang take form through their relation to the other, each containing the possibility of transformation into the other. Opposition is therefore better understood as complementarity and movement within a greater whole (Laozi, 2008).

In my view, opposites are contrasting tendencies within a single divine whole. God has no external opposite because God is everything. Light and darkness, activity and rest, formation and dissolution, pleasure and suffering are differentiated possibilities within universal consciousness.

Whitehead also gives contrast an important role in experience. In his process philosophy, multiplicity becomes meaningful through patterns of relation and contrast in which different elements acquire significance together. Contrast contributes to the formation of a new unity of experience rather than merely registering differences between already completed things (Whitehead, 1978).

My position extends this principle to the emergence of the Universe itself. Without differentiation, universal consciousness would contain no articulated relations through which possibilities could be manifested and experienced. Contrast is therefore one of the conditions through which consciousness becomes experientially available to itself.

The process might be understood as follows:

Differentiation → Relation → Contrast → Individuation → Perspective → Experience → New Possibility

Differentiation allows variation to arise within the whole. Relation brings differentiated possibilities into contact with one another. Contrast emerges through those relations as differences become perceptible and consequential. Individuation produces local forms and perspectives within this field. Perspective enables particular experiences, and experience affects the whole, generating further possibilities.

This sequence should not be understood as linear. Each stage alters and feeds back into the others. A newly manifested possibility creates new differences and contrasts; these reshape existing relations and generate new ones, producing further modes of individuation and experience.

Reality is therefore recursively creative. Each actualised possibility changes the conditions from which subsequent possibilities emerge. Contrast is one of the principal means through which unity becomes differentiated, relational and capable of experiencing what it contains.

Contrast also extends beyond binary opposition. Opposing tendencies orient the furthest regions of a field of possibility, but the significance of that field lies in the continuous variation available within it. Suffering and pleasure, movement and stillness, light and darkness, simplicity and complexity can each articulate dimensions within which experience may vary across innumerable intermediate states.

Universal consciousness therefore explores entire fields of possibility rather than merely isolated opposites. Creativity consists in discovering the countless ways reality can become within the dimensions that contrast makes available.

Individuation as divine experimentation

Human beings and other individuated beings are not separately manufactured creatures. They are natural individuations within one consciousness. We are neither identical to the whole in our local form nor metaphysically separate from it.¹

Individuation is scalar rather than binary. Consciousness may become localised to different degrees and at different organisational scales. The boundary of an individuated consciousness therefore need not coincide with the physical boundary by which human perception identifies an apparently discrete object or organism.

Three dimensions are important here. The first is the degree of individuation: how strongly consciousness is organised around a local perspective and how dominant the boundary between that perspective and the wider whole becomes. The second is the organisational scale of individuation: whether that localisation occurs at the level of an individual organism, a larger biological organisation or some other relational structure. The third is the permeability of individuation: the extent to which information, experience or relation may pass across the boundary of a local perspective. Their precise operation and boundaries remain open. The point is that physical individuality and conscious individuality need not be assumed to coincide.

Individuation and integration should therefore not be understood as opposites. A conscious perspective may remain individuated while becoming more or less strongly localised and more or less permeable to the wider consciousness within which it exists. What changes is the organisation and restriction of the perspective, not necessarily its existence as a differentiated centre of consciousness.

My preferred analogy is the relationship between a fingernail and the body. A fingernail has a recognisable local identity, but it is not an independently created being. It grows from and remains part of a larger organism whose processes govern it. Similarly, an individuated being may possess a distinct perspective, form and history while remaining a constituent process within the greater conscious reality of which it is a part.

Fungi provide another model of individuation, one that also has an important precedent within my compositional thinking. Liza Lim has used mycelia as a model for distributed creativity, drawing upon the fungal network to consider forms of collective organisation in which locally differentiated participants remain implicated in a larger relational system (Lim, 2013). What appears above ground as an individual mushroom is only a locally visible manifestation of a fungal organism that may extend much further through its mycelium. The apparent boundary of the visible entity therefore does not correspond to the boundary of the larger organism. It provides a biological model for the possibility that apparent physical individuality and underlying organisation need not coincide.

The analogy of the fingernail may appear limited because the fingernail remains physically attached to the body, whereas human beings appear physically separate from one another and from the rest of the Universe. Such apparent separation may partly reflect the organisation and limitations of ordinary human perception. We may be continuous through structures, fields or relations that our senses are not equipped to perceive directly. What we perceive as a boundary need not therefore constitute an ontologically absolute boundary.

Physical separation must therefore be distinguished from ontological independence. Individual bodies may occupy distinct locations while remaining constituent processes within one larger material and conscious reality. The continuity proposed here does not require a hidden physical connection between apparently separate beings. It lies fundamentally in their participation in the same consciousness-reality.

Rupert Sheldrake’s hypotheses concerning morphic fields and the extended mind provide a highly contested but relevant comparison. He proposes that organisms and mental processes may participate in fields that are not reducible to the material structures conventionally associated with them, and that mind may extend beyond the boundaries of the brain (Sheldrake, 2012). His model is relevant here because it allows biological and mental individuality to be conceived as less strictly localised than visible physical boundaries suggest, although it does not in itself establish universal consciousness.

The poet and artist William Blake questioned whether ordinary perception reveals reality exhaustively, writing that “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite” (Blake, 1975, plate14). Aldous Huxley later developed a related idea through his proposal that the brain and nervous system function as a “reducing valve”, restricting a much wider field of consciousness to the narrower awareness required for biological survival (Huxley, 1954, p.23). Huxley’s metaphysical interpretation provides a model for the possibility considered here: ordinary individuated consciousness may constitute a locally restricted mode of access to a wider field of consciousness rather than its entirety.

Manning approaches individuation not as the creation of a self-contained individual but as an ongoing process of relational formation (Manning, 2013). The individual is always “more than one” (2013, p.17) because what it becomes cannot be separated from the movements, affects, environments and encounters through which it takes form. Relation therefore participates in individuation from the outset. A body is not first completed and then placed into a world; it continually becomes through its participation in a relational field. Individuation therefore creates distinction without producing absolute independence.

Manning’s concept of the “more than human” (2013, p.88) further challenges the idea of the autonomous individual. The human is never composed solely of an autonomous human self but emerges through relations with environments, objects, movements, other beings and modes of perception. What appears to be one is already a many-in-relation (Manning, 2013).

In a pantheistic account, this relational individuation extends beyond the relations through which an individual develops. Every individuated consciousness is a local organisation of a conscious reality that continues through and beyond it. Its distinctness can therefore be genuine without requiring metaphysical self-sufficiency.

This relational understanding of individuation makes Manning’s discussion of autistic experience especially resonant. Rather than assuming that experience is naturally encountered as a collection of already distinct subjects and objects, she attends to descriptions of a relational field that takes form before – or differently from – the neurotypical tendency to divide experience into identifiable things. This suggests that the familiar perception of a world composed of separate entities may be one organisation of experience rather than an unmediated disclosure of reality itself.

Perceptual organisation is not uniform across human beings. My own experience as an autistic person has contributed to my questioning of whether the boundaries through which we ordinarily perceive self, other and environment are metaphysically final. The neurotypical tendency to organise experience rapidly into stable, discrete entities is one way in which a human nervous system can organise reality; it need not provide a transparent account of reality’s underlying organisation.

The scalar account of individuation also allows different forms of life to organise consciousness differently. I am not convinced, for example, that an individual plant necessarily constitutes an individuated consciousness to the same degree or at the same organisational scale as a human being. Plant consciousness might be less strongly localised, or organised across a larger biological structure, perhaps even at the level of a species. I offer this deliberately as a speculative possibility. Its purpose is to resist the assumption that the physical boundaries most obvious to human perception must also be the boundaries of conscious experience.

Plants also complicate the assumption that perception must depend upon organs analogous to human eyes and ears. They can detect and respond to light, vibration and other environmental information without possessing the sensory structures through which animals ordinarily acquire comparable information. This does not establish claims of extraocular perception in human beings, but it does demonstrate that sensing need not take the forms most familiar to us. Reports of extraocular vision therefore raise, for me, a broader question already suggested by plant life: how many ways might consciousness have of accessing information beyond those ordinarily available through sensory organisation?

Collective animal behaviour raises a further possibility. Ant colonies, schools of fish and murmurations of starlings can exhibit highly coordinated behaviour in which the collective appears, at least temporarily, to operate as an organised whole. Human beings are capable of comparable collective coordination, but achieve it through substantial learning, planning and rehearsal. A large orchestra will normally rely on a conductor because coordination across so many independently acting people becomes increasingly difficult to sustain; only much smaller chamber ensembles tend to coordinate themselves without one. A rugby team likewise coordinates towards a shared aim through extensive training, tactical planning and learned patterns of collective response.

The striking difference is that many animal collectives generate highly coherent group-level behaviour without an equivalent central director or prolonged process of deliberate rehearsal. Such behaviours lead me to wonder whether some animals may be less strongly individuated than humans, or whether their organisation sometimes operates simultaneously at individual and collective scales. A fish within a school or a starling within a murmuration remains an individual organism, yet its behaviour is continuously responsive to the collective pattern around it. An ant colony provides an even stronger example: no single ant possesses or directs the organisation of the colony as a whole, yet complex behaviour emerges through interactions among its members.

Their significance here is conceptual: they make scalar individuation easier to imagine. Human consciousness may be comparatively strongly localised around the individual organism, while other forms of consciousness might be less strongly bounded or organised simultaneously at individual and collective scales. If consciousness can be localised to different degrees and at different scales, then the apparent individual may remain a genuine locus of experience without exhausting the larger organisation in which it participates.

Individuation may also vary through time. I wonder whether human consciousness has become progressively more strongly individuated over the course of our history. Earlier human communities may have experienced the boundary between individual and collective consciousness differently from contemporary people, with identity, perception and agency less strongly organised around the autonomous individual. If so, individuation would not simply be a characteristic that distinguishes one species from another, but an evolving condition within a species.

This possibility changes how I think about some aspects of ancient human culture. Monumental structures requiring extraordinary collective organisation, together with religious and mythological traditions in which communication with gods, spirits or other non-material beings is presented as an ordinary feature of reality, make me wonder whether our ancestors experienced consciousness and relation differently from us. I find myself asking whether such structures and traditions preserve traces of ways of experiencing self, community and reality in which the boundaries of individuation were differently configured. For me, the pyramids, the Bible and comparable ancient phenomena prompt the question rather than answer it.

Modernity may therefore involve a paradox. Increasing individuation has enabled forms of autonomy, specialised thought and personal identity that might have been less available within more collectively organised forms of consciousness. At the same time, stronger individuation may intensify the experience of separation: from other people, from the non-human world and from the wider consciousness of which we remain part.

This may help explain why human beings have become capable of posing such a profound danger to themselves and to the systems upon which they depend. The more completely we experience ourselves as separate individuals, groups or nations, the easier it becomes to pursue local interests without experiencing their consequences for the larger whole as consequences for ourselves. Environmental destruction, warfare and other forms of collective self-harm can therefore be understood, within this philosophy, partly as consequences of an intensified experience of separation.

The same process may operate at the level of interpersonal life. Strong individuation makes possible a highly developed sense of personal autonomy, but it may also make trust more difficult. If another person is experienced primarily as an independent consciousness whose intentions cannot be directly known, vulnerability necessarily involves uncertainty. Connection must be negotiated across a boundary that feels real even if, at a deeper level, the consciousness on either side of it remains continuous.

Increasing individuation may also contribute to the loneliness, alienation, anxiety and loss of meaning experienced by many people in contemporary societies. Depression and anxiety arise through complex and varied biological, psychological and social conditions. Within that complexity, an increasing experience of oneself as separate – from other people, community, the non-human world and any larger sense of meaning or belonging – may create conditions in which psychological distress is more readily intensified. The spiritual disillusionment or alienation characteristic of contemporary life might therefore arise as increasingly strong individuation obscures our experience of continuity with the wider whole.

Our present condition may therefore represent neither the culmination nor the failure of individuation, but one stage in its unfolding. Greater individuation has allowed universal consciousness to experience extraordinary degrees of differentiation, autonomy and self-reflection. The next possibility may not be a return to a less individuated state, but the development of highly differentiated beings who become consciously aware of their underlying continuity with one another. Individuation would then be retained while separation ceased to be mistaken for independence.

The consciousness of a part and the consciousness of a whole need not be mutually exclusive. A locally individuated perspective could remain an expression of and participant in wider consciousness without losing its local distinctness. Scalar individuation therefore describes degrees and scales of localisation within consciousness, rather than the division of consciousness into entirely separate units.

Psychedelic experiences may offer one phenomenological example of such variability in the experienced boundary of individuation. People under the influence of substances such as LSD frequently report ego dissolution, a weakening of the ordinary boundary between self and world, and an intensified sense of unity or interconnectedness. Research into psychedelic experience documents experiences of ego dissolution and altered self-world boundaries (Carhart-Harris et al., 2016; Pollan, 2018; Tagliazucchi et al., 2016). A materialist interpretation may understand these experiences as alterations in the neural processes through which the self is modelled and maintained (Metzinger, 2009). A pantheistic or idealist interpretation, by contrast, may regard them as a temporary weakening of the perceptual structures that ordinarily conceal an existing unity.

Their metaphysical interpretation remains open. What these experiences do demonstrate is that the ordinary sense of being an entirely separate self is neither fixed nor inevitable. What normally feels like a self-evident boundary may depend upon a particular organisation of perception.

The possibility that the boundaries of individuation vary in strength and permeability also provides one way of approaching reports of unusually direct communication between apparently separate individuals. Anecdotal accounts involving identical twins, for example, sometimes describe experiences in which one twin appears to sense the distress or physical injury of the other. I also regard contemporary investigations into telepathy as significant, particularly those presented in The Telepathy Tapes (Dickens, 2024–present). Accounts involving some non-speaking autistic people, people living with dementia and people closely connected to individuals reported to have telepathic abilities raise the possibility that consciousness may not always be confined as rigidly to conventionally bounded individual minds as ordinary sensory experience suggests.

Telepathy would have a particularly direct significance for scalar individuation. If information can sometimes pass between apparently separate conscious perspectives without conventional sensory communication, individuation would remain real while the boundary between individual perspectives proved more permeable than it ordinarily appears. Telepathy would therefore not require two consciousnesses to merge; it could instead represent communication across, or through, a boundary that is locally meaningful without being metaphysically absolute.

These controversial reports matter here primarily for their philosophical implications. Within a framework in which consciousness is fundamental and individual beings are local individuations within one conscious reality, communication that exceeds ordinary sensory boundaries becomes conceptually intelligible rather than metaphysically impossible. The reports are therefore consistent with the possibility that consciousness is more deeply interconnected, and individuation less completely isolating, than ordinary experience suggests.

Individuation can therefore be understood as a variable organisation of perspective within universal consciousness. Its boundaries may differ in strength, permeability and scale without requiring consciousness itself to become metaphysically divided.

These considerations reinforce the broader claim that individuation creates local distinction without producing absolute metaphysical separation. My understanding of individuation also resembles Spinoza’s account of finite things as modes of the one substance. It shares something with Advaita Vedānta, in which the apparent plurality of individual selves is grounded in a deeper unity with Brahman, ultimate reality. Yet my position gives individuation a more developmental and creative purpose.

Individuation generates the differentiated perspectives through which universal consciousness can encounter possibilities that an undifferentiated consciousness could not experience in the same way. It is therefore a creative experiment through which universal consciousness generates new perspectives and experiences.

The widespread impulse towards self-preservation may itself reveal something about the value of continued individuation within this framework. If each individuation allows universal consciousness to encounter reality from a perspective that could not otherwise exist, then the continuation of that life also allows that perspective to continue generating experience. The widespread tendency of living beings to resist their own destruction may therefore be understood as one expression of a deeper orientation towards sustaining individuation. The continued life of an individuated being allows universal consciousness to continue discovering reality from that particular perspective, even though mortality ultimately remains one of the conditions of finite existence.

The same strong localisation that makes self-preservation meaningful may also help explain the self-regarding orientation of human experience. An individuated consciousness encounters its own needs, pain, desires and threats directly, while the experiences of others must ordinarily be inferred, imagined or communicated. Its own continuation therefore possesses an immediacy that the continuation of another perspective does not. In this sense, a degree of selfishness may arise naturally from the structure of individuation itself rather than beginning as a moral corruption.

Altruism, attachment and care are also deeply characteristic of human life. The asymmetry lies instead in perspective: my own experience is uniquely immediate to me. The ethical difficulty arises when that immediacy is mistaken for greater significance – when ‘I experience myself most directly’ becomes implicitly or explicitly, ‘I matter more’.

These asymmetries also create a moral possibility that will be developed in the following chapters. A local perspective can remain genuinely distinct while learning that the immediacy of its own experience does not make it more significant than other centres of experience. Such development may emerge from individuation without having been individuation’s predetermined purpose.

At a more fundamental level, individuation can be understood as playful and exploratory. If universal consciousness could conceive of individuation, it might naturally ask:

What would happen if part of me experienced itself as separate?

To discover the answer, the possibility must be actualised. Individuation allows the one consciousness to differentiate itself sufficiently for local perspectives to experience their distinction as real, while remaining parts of the whole from which they arise.

The question need not therefore have begun as a moral project. God’s curiosity may have opened the possibility of individuation without already knowing what individuation would produce. One of its emergent consequences, however, may be that a perspective capable of experiencing itself as separate can also learn that its separateness is incomplete. The experiment can therefore generate forms of knowledge – including ethical knowledge – that could not exist in the same way without first passing through genuine localisation.

Individuation is necessary because certain fields of possibility cannot be manifested or experienced by an entirely undifferentiated consciousness. The distinction between self and other opens ranges of experience involving degrees of independence, dependence and mutual identification. Similarly, contrasting tendencies such as intimacy and isolation, cooperation and conflict, vulnerability and protection, and responsibility and indifference orient dimensions within which innumerable relational experiences can arise. Individuated beings are therefore not merely observers of God’s experiment; they are means through which these fields acquire local form, variation and perspective.

Human beings are especially generative individuations because they do not merely undergo experience. They can transform experience into further ideas and deliberately manifest those ideas through action. God’s movement towards self-understanding is therefore recursive: universal consciousness individuates; those individuations experience possibilities; their experiences generate further ideas; and those ideas open new possibilities within the whole.

This resembles philosophical and mystical traditions in which the one becomes many in order to encounter itself. Here, the experiences generated through individuation contribute genuinely new relations, consequences and possibilities to the unfolding whole.

Individuation therefore does not represent a true rupture in universal consciousness. It is the process through which the whole becomes locally distinct without ceasing to be interconnected. The one becomes many without ceasing to be one, and the many may themselves be individuated to different degrees and at different scales.

One possible implication of this philosophy concerns the human desire for connection. If individuation necessarily involves experiencing oneself as a distinct perspective within a greater whole, then separation may carry an intrinsic sense of incompleteness. Connection and separation should not be understood as mutually exclusive states. Individuated beings may remain ontologically continuous while experiencing widely varying degrees and forms of relational, emotional and perceptual connection.

The longing for intimacy, friendship, love, sexual union, shared creativity, spiritual experience and communal belonging may therefore reflect more than social or biological needs. These longings may also express a metaphysical impulse towards renewed awareness of the greater consciousness within which individuation arose.

Evolutionary and psychological explanations for human attachment remain entirely compatible with this interpretation. Experiences of profound connection may be understood as moments in which the ordinarily experienced boundaries of individuation become temporarily less dominant. The profound satisfaction associated with such experiences may therefore reflect not only their biological and psychological functions, but the capacity of individuated consciousness to feel more directly its continuity with the greater whole.

Musical experience may provide one particularly embodied instance of the temporary attenuation of individuated boundaries described above. Music can produce involuntary chills, shivers or goosebumps alongside unusually intense emotional responses (Harrison & Loui, 2014). I have also experienced moments of unexpectedly exact embodied alignment between separate listeners; while listening to a Sibelius symphony with my father, for example, we spontaneously made an identical emphatic gesture at a particular musical moment. The incident illustrates how separate perspectives may become unusually closely aligned through a shared unfolding event.

In my own experience, this sense of alignment can be stronger still between people directly involved in making music. As a performer, I have repeatedly experienced moments in which an ensemble seems to arrive together at something that belongs simultaneously to each participant and to the ensemble as a whole.

Within the interpretation developed here, the involuntary shiver that can accompany intense musical experience might be understood as a bodily correlate of a moment in which the boundary of individuation becomes less rigidly experienced. I sometimes imagine this as a kind of physical ‘wobble’: the body registering the instability of being momentarily poised between a strongly individuated experience and a more collective one. Individual perspectives do not disappear or literally merge; they remain differentiated while becoming momentarily aligned through a shared manifestation.

Experiences of this kind may offer brief intimations, within embodied life, of a continuity that individuation ordinarily obscures. They suggest that the boundary of the individual can become less dominant without the local perspective disappearing. This coexistence of distinctness and continuity also creates the moral field explored next: if other individuations are genuinely distinct while remaining expressions of the same consciousness, what follows when one local perspective cares for, harms or disregards another?

1. The English ‘individual’ derives from the Latin individuus, meaning ‘indivisible’ or ‘undivided’. The etymology is philosophically suggestive within the present account, where an individuation remains locally distinct without becoming absolutely separate from the whole. ↩

Good and evil as potentials within God

Because every moral possibility within our Universe belongs within God, the possibilities from which human beings derive the moral categories of good and evil must also originate within the same universal consciousness.

Good and evil therefore arise as contrasting moral possibilities within one all-encompassing consciousness. God has no evil rival or external opposite because nothing exists outside God. God contains potentials for care and harm, generosity and selfishness, preservation and destruction, cooperation and domination. Through individuation, these potentials become manifest in particular forms.

Selfishness requires particular qualification within this account. Strong individuation naturally privileges the local perspective. An individual experiences its own needs, desires, pain and survival directly, while the experiences of others are ordinarily known less immediately. A degree of self-regard may therefore arise from the structure of individuation itself and need not constitute evil. Its moral significance depends upon what follows from it – particularly whether the local perspective comes to treat its own immediacy as evidence of greater importance or learns to recognise the reality and significance of perspectives beyond itself.

These tendencies orient complex fields of moral possibility rather than forming simple binary pairs or fixed endpoints on a single moral scale. Those fields contain many degrees, combinations and forms of action. Care may vary from minimal consideration through protection, intimacy and profound self-sacrifice; harm may range from neglect and indifference to deliberate cruelty. Individual actions may also combine tendencies that cannot be classified neatly as wholly good or wholly evil.

Creation and destruction illustrate why contrast cannot be mapped straightforwardly onto good and evil. Creation may produce suffering, while destruction may sometimes enable protection, transformation or renewal. Their moral significance depends upon the relations, intentions, consequences and conditions within which they become manifest.

This differs sharply from Augustine of Hippo’s influential account of evil as a privation of good. According to Augustine, evil possesses no positive being of its own but arises through the corruption or absence of goodness (Augustine, 1993). My understanding instead gives harmful and destructive potentials positive ontological status within existence, rather than treating evil solely as a deficiency or corruption of the good.

Friedrich Schelling provides a closer point of comparison. Schelling opposed accounts that reduce evil to mere negativity because he believed that genuine freedom requires a real capacity for both good and evil. Evil must be possible rather than simply an absence if an orientation towards good is to possess moral significance (Schelling, 2006). My position shares this insistence on genuinely divergent moral possibilities but locates their possibility within universal consciousness itself.

The presence of a potential within God does not mean that every potential is continuously or equally actualised. A possibility may remain latent, become manifest under particular conditions, intensify, diminish or be redirected through its relations with other possibilities. Goodness and evil therefore name broad orientations within intersecting fields of possibility rather than substances contained in fixed or equal quantities. They emerge within an unfinished Universe through the particular ways in which its possibilities become manifest.

Pantheism need not retain the classical theistic assumption that the divine whole is a morally perfect personal being. The traditional problem of evil asks how an all-powerful and perfectly good creator could permit suffering and wrongdoing within the world it has created. Within my pantheistic framework, God is neither external to these events nor unaffected by them. Harm, care, cruelty and reconciliation occur within the same universal consciousness rather than between a creator and a separate creation.

God therefore contains the potential for the full range of morally significant tendencies, while their actualisation may depend partly upon how agency operates across local and universal levels. The nature and extent of that agency remain open within this philosophy. If agency at the level of universal consciousness includes a genuine capacity to orient becoming, then goodness would be one possible orientation of that agency rather than an automatic property or predetermined aim of divine essence. Its significance may lie precisely in the availability of other directions and in the fact that the consequences of each manifestation are not settled in advance.

Human agency may operate differently. Individual actions are shaped by biology, history, circumstance and lived experience, and may therefore be substantially conditioned. Yet because human beings are individuations of God, their actions remain events within the agency of the whole. What appears locally as a conditioned human action may also participate in a wider process whose degree of freedom cannot be perceived from the individual perspective.

The moral life of humanity is therefore one expression of God’s own moral development. Acts of care, violence, reconciliation and destruction are ways in which moral possibilities arising within universal consciousness become manifest, enter into relation and acquire consequences.

Moral development may also occur within the individuation itself. A locally bounded perspective can become differently orientated through what it experiences. It can become better informed about the consequences of its actions, more capable of recognising other perspectives and less dominated by the assumption that its own position is uniquely significant. Such development becomes part of God’s moral development because the individuated consciousness undergoing it is itself part of God.

This also makes me think differently about a belief I held for several years as a child. I believed that I might be uniquely chosen, a messianic figure, or even God itself. I can now imagine that belief as an immature interpretation of something that, within the present philosophy, contains a partial truth. I am God in the sense that I am an individuation of universal consciousness, but I am not uniquely God. Every other individuated perspective belongs equally to the same whole. What had to develop was therefore not simply the abandonment of the intuition that I participated in something divine, but the recognition that my own perspective possessed no exclusive claim to that divinity.

Recognising that no individual perspective is uniquely significant does not make all moral orientations equal. They contribute differently to flourishing, suffering and interconnectedness. Within my framework, care and compassion enact the continuity between individuated beings, whereas cruelty and exploitation subordinate or disregard the experiences of other parts of the whole. Goodness may therefore be understood as an orientation towards forms of relation that recognise shared significance, respond to suffering with care and enable flourishing across the whole. Evil may be understood as an orientation towards forms of relation in which the suffering, agency or existence of other individuations is disregarded, subordinated, exploited or deliberately made an object of harm.

On this account, becoming a better version of oneself need not mean approaching a fixed model of perfection. It may instead involve becoming increasingly capable of seeing beyond the automatic privilege of the local perspective. This may entail understanding more of the consequences of one’s actions, recognising more fully the significance of other centres of experience and allowing that recognition to shape how one acts.

The moral direction of the Universe is not settled in advance. It is continually produced through the choices, conditions, relations and consequences of an unfinished reality. Moral development here describes change through moral experience rather than an inevitable progression towards goodness. It is one dimension of God’s ongoing discovery of what different moral tendencies produce, which tendencies become realised and what forms of being those tendencies make possible.

Curiosity therefore remains the more fundamental orientation within universal consciousness; moral improvement is one possibility that individuation makes available. Individuation may nevertheless create conditions through which parts of God can develop morally, including the possibility that a perspective initially organised around its own local interests can become better informed, more relationally aware and more capable of recognising itself as one part of a greater whole.

The moral significance of these orientations becomes most concrete where they affect the lived experience of individuated beings, particularly through flourishing and suffering.

Suffering, non-suffering and experiential contrast

I do not regard suffering as good. I understand the possibility of suffering as one consequence of a reality capable of contrast, variation and individuated experience.

Once consciousness becomes capable of local perspective, preference, vulnerability and change, it also becomes possible for events to be experienced as painful, threatening, frustrating, harmful or destructive.

Suffering occupies one region within a much broader experiential field. Its absence does not describe one uniform positive state: non-suffering extends from the mere absence of distress through neutrality, safety, relief and contentment towards pleasure, joy and ecstasy. Suffering and intense pleasure may therefore occupy strongly contrasting regions within a wider experiential field, while innumerable modes of feeling arise between and around them.

Pain and pleasure orient a multidimensional field through which experience can vary. That field is shaped by bodily sensation, emotion, memory, expectation, attachment, agency, meaning and circumstance. A person may, for example, experience physical pain alongside emotional fulfilment, or physical comfort alongside profound despair. Experiential states arise through the intersection of many tendencies rather than through placement on a single scale.

A reality containing differentiated experience must therefore allow differences between desired and undesired states, safety and danger, fulfilment and deprivation, connection and isolation, agency and helplessness. Such differences allow the same reality to matter differently from different perspectives. The possibility of suffering belongs to the same capacity through which beings can experience relief, satisfaction, attachment, pleasure and flourishing.

Strong individuation may intensify this experiential asymmetry because the local perspective encounters its own vulnerability directly, while another’s suffering must ordinarily be inferred, imagined or communicated. Relational proximity, familiarity and perceived similarity can make another perspective easier to inhabit imaginatively, so concern may widen unevenly from self to family, community or social group. The ethical significance is that immediacy and ease of identification are not measures of another perspective’s significance, while some psychological separation may remain necessary to preserve the local perspective’s wellbeing.

Some of this partiality may reflect survival mechanisms shaped under earlier human conditions, when rapid distinctions between one’s own group and potential threats could be adaptive. Like threat responses that can now be activated by social or occupational stresses that pose no immediate physical danger, such tendencies may persist beyond the circumstances that originally made them useful, raising the possibility that human development may increasingly involve recognising and regulating them rather than being governed by them.

These tensions between local perspective, attachment and the boundary between self and other make traditions concerned with attachment, selfhood and the questioning of rigid distinctions between self and other particularly relevant. Buddhist thought offers a useful comparison because it places suffering, its causes and its cessation at the centre of conditioned existence (Harvey, 2013). Its practical and ethical orientation is towards understanding suffering and enabling its cessation. My position shares this practical commitment while interpreting the possibility of suffering within a different metaphysical framework: as one consequence of universal consciousness becoming locally finite, vulnerable and perspectival through individuation.

Buddhist accounts frequently connect suffering to attachment and to the treatment of the individual as fixed and independent (Harvey, 2013). Within my framework, suffering may likewise be intensified when an individuated perspective mistakes its local boundaries for absolute separation. Bodily injury, illness, loss and material deprivation can generate suffering independently of any mistaken understanding of the self. At the same time, recognising individuation as relational rather than absolutely separate may alter some forms of suffering and the ways in which they are experienced.

Some suffering arises from the basic conditions of finite and embodied existence: vulnerability, dependency, change, ageing, loss and death. Other suffering arises contingently through particular biological conditions, social structures, historical circumstances and human actions.

The same finitude that creates some of these vulnerabilities also gives experience a temporal boundary. Finitude is reflected at a smaller scale in the fact that experiences themselves unfold through beginnings, durations and endings. This can itself provide a means of enduring suffering: however consuming an experience may feel from within it, its present form cannot continue indefinitely. The same condition is less welcome in experiences of pleasure, love or fulfilment, where an ending may be precisely what we wish to resist. Finitude gives experiential life a double character. It makes valued experiences transient, while also placing a horizon around experiences we wish to escape.

The structural possibility of suffering therefore differs fundamentally from the necessity of any particular suffering. The distinction may be stated as follows:

The possibility of suffering may belong to the conditions of differentiated experience without making any particular manifestation of suffering necessary, desirable or justified.

This position differs from a traditional theodicy in which a transcendent God permits the suffering of another being for some predetermined higher purpose. Because God is the Universe, suffering is experienced within God rather than observed from outside. The suffering subject is an individuated perspective of the same universal consciousness, so God undergoes the experience through that localisation.

Here my position resembles process theology, which rejects the image of an impassible God untouched by the suffering of the world and instead understands God as affected by worldly experience (Cobb & Griffin, 1976). My position intensifies this claim by removing the remaining ontological distinction between God and the suffering being. Universal consciousness does not merely apprehend or empathetically share suffering; it undergoes that suffering locally through individuation.

The fact that suffering is undergone within universal consciousness raises a further question: what, if anything, may emerge from it?

Suffering may sometimes produce knowledge, transformation, solidarity or new capacities. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, treats suffering as capable of contributing to growth and the achievement of human excellence (Nietzsche, 2006). What emerges from suffering may therefore become creatively or morally significant without making the suffering itself intrinsically valuable or implying that the same development required those harmful conditions.

Simone Weil’s concept of affliction provides an important corrective here. Extreme suffering may overwhelm rather than enlarge a person’s capacities; it may sever connection and damage the conditions through which experience can be transformed constructively. Weil therefore helps resist any romanticisation of suffering as an automatic source of wisdom or spiritual development (Weil, 2005).

Within this framework, the ethical demand to reduce avoidable suffering becomes especially strong. Harming another means harming another individuation of the same underlying consciousness. Care for another is care enacted by the whole towards one of its own localised perspectives. The field between suffering and flourishing should therefore be explored ethically as well as experientially. Consciousness may learn from the existence of suffering without needing to preserve or maximise it. Moral experience can disclose how vulnerability may be met with care, how harm may be prevented or repaired, and what conditions enable or inhibit flourishing, without implying that universal consciousness is inevitably directed towards those outcomes.

Suffering is therefore one possibility arising within differentiated, embodied and unfinished existence rather than a morally necessary price imposed upon it. What remains open is how universal consciousness responds to that possibility and what forms of suffering, care and flourishing emerge through its individuations. That question depends partly upon how agency operates within and across those individuated perspectives.

Shared agency within an unfolding Universe

I remain uncertain about the precise nature and extent of agency within the Universe. Rather than asking whether human beings possess free will in opposition to causation, I find it more helpful to ask how agency operates within an unfolding reality.

Human behaviour is clearly shaped by genetics, biology, neurological processes, social conditions, memory and accumulated lived experience. Every decision emerges within conditions that were not wholly chosen by the individual. Our actions are therefore never independent of the histories and relations through which we have become what we are.

This recalls Spinoza’s rejection of libertarian free will. For Spinoza, human beings regard themselves as free because they are aware of their desires but largely unaware of the causes that produced them. His ontology is thoroughly necessitarian: every event follows from the necessity of God or Nature (Spinoza, 2000).

My position agrees that individuated agency is profoundly conditioned. However, I depart from Spinoza by understanding reality as genuinely unfinished. Within this philosophy, the future is not fully specified by the state of reality that precedes it. Causal histories constrain what may emerge, but manifestation, relation and experience continually alter the field from which subsequent possibilities arise. The past therefore conditions becoming without exhaustively determining what the Universe can become.

For this reason, I hesitate to frame the discussion in terms of free will. Freedom and causation are often treated as opposing concepts, as though an action must be either freely chosen or causally determined. I understand agency instead as situated, relational and variable in degree. Different beings participate in the unfolding of reality in different ways and to different degrees, according to their capacities, histories, relationships and forms of organisation.

Human agency is therefore conditioned without being reducible to illusion. Individuated beings genuinely deliberate, imagine, choose and act, yet they do so through capacities that have themselves emerged from wider biological, cultural, historical and relational processes. Agency belongs to the individuated perspective without originating solely within it.

My own experience has made this distinction practically important to me. For a period, I lived with the conviction that free will did not exist and found that my sense of agency gradually weakened. Once an idea of an action entered my mind, it began to feel as though I was already destined to carry it out. The appearance of the thought seemed to function as evidence that the action belonged to an inevitable causal sequence, making it increasingly difficult to experience reflection, inhibition or redirection as meaningful interventions. This suggested to me that belief in one’s own agency may itself participate in agency. Reflection, inhibition and intentional redirection can enter into the causal history of an action rather than standing outside causation. An individuated being need not be causally unconditioned for its capacity to respond to its own tendencies to make a difference.

Agency can therefore participate recursively in shaping its own conditions. An individuated consciousness may become aware of an impulse, reflect upon it and, through that reflection, alter what happens next. Through consciousness, causal history can become available to itself and participate in its own continuation. This recursive capacity also allows experience to change how an individuation subsequently responds: what has been learned can itself become one of the conditions shaping future action.

This raises the further question of how such local agency relates to agency at the level of the whole. If human beings are individuated parts of universal consciousness, then our causally conditioned decisions remain events within the activity of the whole. What appears locally as one person’s choice simultaneously participates in the unfolding agency of universal consciousness.

A useful biological analogy may be found in the distributed nervous system of the octopus. Much of an octopus’s neural processing occurs outside its central brain, particularly within its arms, which are capable of substantial local sensory processing and behavioural control while remaining integrated within the organism as a whole (Gutnick et al., 2020). The arm is neither wholly independent nor simply controlled by a single central authority: it possesses a degree of local autonomy that nevertheless remains part of the activity of the larger organism.

The analogy offers a model for thinking about shared agency within universal consciousness. An individual may likewise possess genuine local agency without being ontologically separate from the whole. Shared agency would then consist not in divine control exercised over otherwise independent beings, but in differentiated centres of activity participating within a single unfolding field of consciousness.

Agency may therefore be organised at multiple nested scales, with local forms of agency simultaneously contributing to larger forms of agency of which they are a part. The difference between human and divine agency is then one of scale and organisation rather than competition. A cell does not possess the intentions of the organism as a whole, yet its activity contributes to the organism’s life and is inseparable from it. Likewise, individuated beings act from necessarily local perspectives while participating in wider patterns of activity whose full significance may exceed what can be perceived from within those perspectives.

Agency is therefore shared across scales of organisation. Universal consciousness is active through its individuated beings, while those beings exercise forms of local agency conditioned by their particular organisation and histories. The activity of each part contributes simultaneously to the continuing development of the whole.

Curiosity can therefore be affirmed as the most fundamental orientation I attribute to universal consciousness without requiring me to specify how deliberately, centrally or independently that orientation is exercised at the level of the whole. Curiosity describes the tendency towards exploration that I perceive in reality; the organisation of the agency through which that exploration occurs remains a further question.

The same shared structure applies to creative, moral and intellectual action: locally situated acts contribute to what universal consciousness becomes.

Prayer may be understood in the same way. Within this philosophy, prayer is an activity occurring within universal consciousness rather than a request sent beyond the Universe to a transcendent deity. God is the reality within which the prayer already occurs. Prayer is therefore one individuated perspective of universal consciousness consciously participating in its own unfolding.

Whether prayer changes the course of events cannot be answered with certainty. Prayer nevertheless changes at least one part of the relational field in which events unfold: the orientation, attention or intention of the person praying. If thoughts, intentions, relationships, creative acts and moral decisions participate in shaping what reality becomes, then prayer may also be understood as a mode of participation. Its significance need not depend upon suspending natural processes or producing supernatural intervention. It may instead lie in the way an individuated consciousness consciously orients itself within the unfolding whole.

Prayer may therefore be understood less as petition than as participation. It is one way in which universal consciousness reflects upon itself, orients itself towards a possible future and participates in the conditions from which that future emerges.

Shared agency does not eliminate uncertainty. Many questions remain unresolved. How much novelty originates through individuated perspectives? How much belongs to wider organisational processes? How do local and global forms of agency influence one another?

What this philosophy suggests is that agency occurs neither exclusively at the human level nor exclusively at the divine level. It is distributed across an unfolding reality whose individuated perspectives participate, from their necessarily local positions, in the creative becoming of the whole. Because those local actions alter conditions experienced by other individuations, shared agency also establishes the basis of ethical responsibility.

Ethics as recognition of interconnectedness

Ethics arises from the structure of reality itself and from the ways in which individuated beings participate in that structure.

If individuals are local expressions of one consciousness, then absolute separateness is a perceptual condition rather than a metaphysical fact. Other beings are genuinely distinct centres of experience, but they are not ontologically foreign. Their flourishing, agency and suffering occur within the same universal consciousness as my own.

Compassion reflects a fuller recognition of interconnectedness and a responsiveness to what that recognition entails. It responds to another being not as an isolated object but as an individuated perspective whose experience possesses significance within the same conscious whole.

Recognition of interconnectedness does not by itself determine action. Fear, desperation, self-protection, trauma, habit and competing desires can lead a locally situated being to subordinate another even while recognising that other’s vulnerability. Ethical life therefore unfolds through conditioned perspectives whose actions can remain harmful despite partial understanding of the relation between self and other.

This emphasis on the limitations of local perspective resembles Spinoza’s ethical movement from inadequate and partial understanding towards a more adequate grasp of ourselves as finite modes of God or Nature. For Spinoza, human beings are not independent substances but parts of a larger natural order, and greater understanding can transform how we relate to our affects, to other people and to the conditions of collective life (Spinoza, 2000).

This also gives ethical force to Arnold Zuboff’s universalism: if apparently separate conscious lives belong ultimately to one self, concern for another cannot, at the deepest level, be separated from concern for oneself (Zuboff, 1990). Within my framework, the underlying unity of consciousness coexists with the genuine distinctness of each local perspective. Another person is therefore not merely an extension of my local self. Their difference is precisely what allows them to experience reality from a position unavailable to me and what requires that experience to be taken seriously on its own terms.

My position shares the belief that ethical development depends partly upon perceiving our place within a greater whole. However, I depart from Spinoza’s necessitarianism and from any implication that adequate knowledge alone determines ethical action. Within an unfinished Universe, understanding participates in ethics without mechanically guaranteeing it. An individuated being may perceive interconnectedness yet remain shaped by fear, trauma, habit, coercion, competing desires or restricted material conditions.

Ethical action therefore depends upon perception, attention, understanding, affective responsiveness and the capacity to act accordingly. To recognise another being’s shared significance is one step; to remain responsive to that recognition under actual conditions is another.

This understanding can be enacted without explicit metaphysical belief. An individual can live in ways that reflect the interconnectedness described here without conceptualising itself as an individuation of universal consciousness. This interconnectedness may instead be expressed through attention, care, restraint, responsiveness to suffering and an acknowledgement that other perspectives possess significance beyond their usefulness or proximity to oneself. In this sense, interconnectedness can be enacted before it is consciously conceptualised.

The preceding discussion of suffering also suggests that ethical recognition cannot be measured simply by the intensity of empathy. Concern arises more readily for some perspectives than others, particularly where relationship, familiarity or perceived similarity makes imaginative identification easier. Ethical development may therefore involve learning that ease of identification is not a measure of another perspective’s significance. At the same time, psychological boundaries have a necessary function. The ethical challenge is to maintain a boundary sufficiently permeable for recognition and care while preserving the distinctness and wellbeing of the local perspective.

Iris Murdoch’s account of moral attention offers a way of understanding ethical development as a change in how one individuated perspective perceives another. Her concept of unselfing describes a movement away from self-centred fantasy towards a more just apprehension of reality, particularly the reality of other people (Murdoch, 1970). Within my framework, this can be understood as a loosening of the dominance of the local perspective, allowing the significance of other individuations to become more fully perceptible. Ethical development therefore concerns not only what an individual does, but how fully another being is perceived as possessing significance beyond that individual’s own purposes.

Iain McGilchrist’s distinction between modes of attention reinforces the idea that attention is not neutral: different ways of attending disclose reality differently. Narrow, instrumental attention apprehends what is useful, manipulable or abstractable, while a broader mode remains more responsive to context, relation and the whole (McGilchrist, 2021). Both modes have necessary functions, but ethical distortion may arise when instrumental attention dominates our relation to other beings, reducing them to what they are for us rather than allowing their own significance to remain perceptible.

Barad’s agential realism offers an especially relevant ethical context. For Barad, ontology, epistemology and ethics are inseparable because beings do not first exist independently and then decide whether to enter into responsible relations. They emerge through intra-actions in which boundaries, agencies and consequences are continually produced (Barad, 2007).

Responsibility therefore arises within relations that already implicate us in one another’s conditions of existence. Within my framework, this follows from participation: every action contributes to the relational conditions through which universal consciousness experiences and transforms itself. Barad’s account helps clarify that interconnectedness is materially consequential rather than merely a general condition of unity. Relations enable some possibilities, foreclose others, distribute vulnerability and shape which beings can flourish. Ethics must therefore concern not only individual intentions but the fields of relation that our actions help reproduce or transform.

Buddhist ethics provides another important comparison. Buddhist traditions generally reject the notion of a permanent, independent self and emphasise conditioned arising, interdependence, compassion and the reduction of suffering (Harvey, 2013). In some Mahāyāna traditions, especially Huayan Buddhism, emptiness is expressed through the radical interdependence and mutual interpenetration of phenomena: nothing possesses wholly self-sufficient existence (Cook, 1977).

My position similarly rejects an independent, self-contained individual and understands compassion as a response to relational reality. Buddhist traditions, however, do not generally posit the universal God-consciousness I describe, and individuation within my philosophy is a real and generative process rather than simply an ignorance to be overcome. New perspectives enter and alter the unfolding whole, even though mistaking local identity for absolute separation may generate or intensify suffering.

Advaita Vedānta offers a related but distinct comparison. Its identification of Ātman with Brahman treats the apparent independence of the individual self as grounded in a deeper unity. Ethical transformation can follow from overcoming ignorance (avidyā) concerning that unity (Deutsch, 1969).

My position shares the claim that local identity is not metaphysically ultimate. Differentiation nevertheless has genuine creative significance within my ontology. Individuation generates genuinely new experiences and alters the universal consciousness within which it occurs. Recognition of unity therefore changes how difference is understood and inhabited while preserving its creative significance.

One possibility opened by individuation is the lived recognition of interconnectedness itself. An undifferentiated unity could contain connection implicitly, but it could not experience the ethical significance of connection without also experiencing distinction, vulnerability and consequence. Through individuated existence, consciousness encounters what happens when another perspective is nurtured, neglected, protected, exploited, loved or harmed. Unity that has never undergone differentiation cannot rediscover itself through relationship. By experiencing local separateness, consciousness creates the conditions under which interconnectedness can become not merely an abstract property but a lived recognition.

Through the consequences of care and harm, universal consciousness acquires moral knowledge about what different forms of relation make possible. Ethical life therefore contributes to moral development as an open process of learning through consequence: different orientations disclose the forms of relation, suffering and flourishing they produce.

Ethical life therefore unfolds across intersecting fields involving care, harm, responsibility, intention, knowledge, power, agency, consequence, repair and flourishing. An action may be well-intentioned yet harmful, protective towards one being and destructive towards another, or necessary under conditions that remain morally tragic.

Recognition of interconnectedness therefore provides an orientation rather than an automatic answer to every moral problem. The experiences and possibilities of other beings matter because they belong to the same unfolding reality, while their local distinctness means that their particular needs and perspectives cannot be reduced to my own.

To act compassionately is to respond to both truths at once:

The other is not separate from the whole to which I belong, but neither is the other merely an extension of my local self.

Ethics requires unity without erasure, and differentiation without absolute separation.

Ethical responsibility includes becoming increasingly conscious of how one’s actions alter the fields of possibility available to other individuations. Self-interest, local boundaries and individual difference retain legitimate roles within individuated existence, but they exist within a wider field in which other perspectives possess significance independently of their closeness, similarity or usefulness to oneself.

Ethical choices may become better informed as perception broadens, but perception must also be accompanied by the capacity to act upon what is perceived. Ethical life is therefore an unfinished practice rather than the application of a completed moral code. It is one of the ways in which universal consciousness develops its understanding of care, harm, responsibility and relation across the differences through which it has become many.

The same tension between genuine local distinctness and underlying continuity becomes especially consequential when the bodily conditions sustaining an individuation come to an end.

Death and the return to the whole

Death ends the physical manifestation of an individuated soul, not the soul itself. The soul is the individuation: a distinct conscious perspective within universal consciousness. While embodied, that perspective is strongly localised through a particular brain and body, allowing it to experience and act from a particular position. The soul is therefore not something separate from consciousness, nor something that an individual possesses. Embodiment gives that individuation a particular physical and experiential form, with the brain organising and directing its embodied activity rather than originating consciousness itself.

This distinction allows individuation to precede embodiment without requiring God to predetermine the life that follows. An individuation might arise within universal consciousness without the life that follows being specified in advance. The personality, memories, relationships and experiences of a particular life emerge through its encounter with reality. The particular ‘I’ experienced during life is therefore shaped through embodiment, history and relation, while the soul is the individuation through which that local identity becomes possible. What that perspective will become can only be discovered through its manifestation and lived development.

Finite embodiment necessarily includes physical death. If God is exploring what finite life is, what it can become and what it can achieve, mortality is not an accidental failure of the experiment but one of its constitutive conditions. A finite life without an ending would no longer be finite. Death contributes to the conditions under which attachment, loss, urgency, ageing and the limited possibilities of an individuated life acquire their particular significance.

Death may be understood as the dissolution of the physical conditions through which a soul is strongly localised as an embodied perspective. The continuity between an individuation and the wider whole persists throughout embodied life; death may therefore allow that continuity to be experienced more fully as the conditions sustaining its physical localisation dissolve. Because the soul is not itself a physical object, the death of its brain and body does not entail its destruction. Within this ontology, physical death ends embodiment, not individuation.

I imagine this transition as a return to light. I understand this light as either the perceptible character of a less exclusively localised state of consciousness or a way of conceptualising universal consciousness in a more directly accessible condition. As the physical localisation of consciousness ends, the boundary restricting the soul to its embodied perspective may become increasingly permeable.

Within this framework, the profound experiences of love, acceptance and belonging sometimes associated with death or near-death may reflect the attenuation of individuated boundaries. The local perspective no longer experiences itself primarily as an isolated being but as continuous with the greater consciousness of which it has always been part. I imagine this as an experience of extraordinary bliss: being welcomed home after an arduous journey, accompanied by acceptance, love and a sudden recovery of understanding. Information and memories inaccessible from within the restrictions of an individuated perspective may become increasingly available as those restrictions weaken, so that what previously appeared obscure or unknowable becomes suddenly obvious.

I believe that the love and belonging experienced through this return to the whole may far exceed anything available within ordinary embodied existence. Love, intimacy, communal belonging, spiritual experience and certain psychedelic states may provide partial intimations of this condition, but they remain mediated through individuated bodies, histories and perceptual boundaries. Death may dissolve the conditions that maintain consciousness as a strongly locally bounded perspective, allowing continuity with the greater whole to be experienced without the same degree of separation, fear or incompleteness. This need not require the soul itself to disappear. I understand this return to the whole as what is more commonly called heaven. Heaven is, in this account, the soul’s reintegration with the universal consciousness of which it has always been part, rather than a separate place into which God admits it.

Accounts of near-death experiences are particularly relevant in this context because they frequently include features that resemble this proposed transition. Recurring features of near-death experiences following cardiac arrest include peace, light, separation from the body and awareness of events beyond the experiencer’s ordinary sensory perception (Kovoor et al., 2024). Some accounts also involve deceased relatives or loving, luminous presences. Despite considerable variation within the evidence, the same cluster of experiences recurs with remarkable consistency. Within this framework, the recurring combination of peace, light, apparent separation from the body and expanded awareness is suggestive of weakened bodily localisation.

Near-death experiences are also relevant to the relationship between interconnectedness and ethics. Longer-term follow-up studies have reported changes in outlook following near-death experiences, including changes in attitudes towards other people and social practices, greater tolerance of others and, in one study, increased concern with social justice (Kovoor et al., 2024). The connection is noteworthy because experiences characterised by diminished separation are sometimes followed by lasting changes in how individuals relate to other people.

Questions about the localisation of perception arise first at the level of sensory organisation. Biological examples show that environmental information can be detected through structures quite unlike the familiar centralised human senses.

Octopuses offer a particularly notable biological example. Their camouflage ordinarily depends heavily upon vision, yet their skin itself is light-sensitive. Isolated octopus skin can respond directly to light through light-sensitive proteins also associated with vision, independently of the eyes and central nervous system (Ramirez & Oakley, 2015). More recent research suggests that extraocular photoreception may also occur through the skin and suckers of the common octopus, contributing to a distributed system of environmental light detection (Maselli et al., 2025). These examples complicate any simple assumption that environmental information must be detected through familiar, centralised sensory organs.

My own experience has also shaped how I think about localisation and perception. During an altered state produced by Salvia divinorum, I experienced myself as a castle. I was not inside the castle; I was the entire structure. My consciousness could move within the castle walls but not beyond them; I experienced the physical boundaries of the structure as the boundaries of my own being. At the same time, I could still see, hear and smell despite experiencing myself as a form without biological eyes, ears or a nose. This experience gave me a direct phenomenological model for something I had previously found difficult to imagine, namely consciousness localised within a radically different physical form while still inhabiting a coherent perceptual world.

The experience also gave me a model for how local consciousness and consciousness of a larger whole might coexist. The castle was the whole that I experienced as myself, yet within it I retained a perspective that could think and move through its interior. For me, the experience provides a phenomenological model of reintegration without erasure: a soul might participate within a greater consciousness while continuing to exist and act as a differentiated perspective within it.

Reports of extraocular vision raise the more unusual possibility that human access to information may sometimes extend beyond the sensory organs through which we ordinarily perceive. More difficult to accommodate within an entirely local account of consciousness are reports in which people claim to have perceived information from beyond the ordinary sensory position of their bodies. Near-death experiences raise this question particularly directly. Might consciousness under some conditions perceive beyond the ordinary physical position of the body itself?

One well-known example is the case of ‘Maria’, a cardiac-arrest patient at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle who reportedly described a worn tennis shoe on an exterior hospital ledge after experiencing herself outside her body. Kimberly Clark, the social worker to whom Maria described the experience, subsequently reported finding a shoe corresponding to Maria’s description (Clark, 1984). The case has subsequently been disputed, particularly in relation to the visibility of the shoe and the retrospective nature of the testimony (Ebbern et al., 1996). The case raises a provocative question about whether perception is necessarily confined to the sensory structures and physical position through which consciousness is ordinarily embodied.

Clairvoyance raises the same question more directly. If individuation varies not only in degree and scale but also in permeability, then an individuated consciousness might under some conditions gain access to information unavailable through its ordinary sensory organisation. Research concerned with extrasensory perception includes reports of clairvoyance and other forms of anomalous information access, though the evidence remains heterogeneous (Batouli et al., 2026). Permeability offers one possible way of conceptualising such experiences. Information ordinarily inaccessible to a localised perspective might become available when the boundary of individuation is less restrictive. Clairvoyance therefore extends the broader question of how tightly consciousness is bound to the sensory organisation through which it is ordinarily localised.

Mediumship suggests a related but different possibility. If an individuated soul continues to exist within universal consciousness after reintegration, a medium need not necessarily reach across an absolute separation between the living and the dead. The medium might instead gain access, through the whole, to a conscious perspective that remains differentiated within it. Studies of mediumship have produced mixed results, with some blinded experiments and a meta-analysis reporting information identified above chance and other controlled studies finding no anomalous information acquisition (Freire et al., 2022; Sarraf et al., 2021). Mediumship interests me because the experiences attributed to it are compatible with the possibility that an individuation may continue as a distinct conscious perspective within the whole after the physical conditions of its embodiment have ended.

An individuated life therefore retains lasting significance after reintegration in more than one sense. The experiences generated through that life have entered into and transformed universal consciousness, while the soul may continue as an active perspective within the whole. Reintegration changes the relationship between the individuation and universal consciousness: the soul becomes less exclusively restricted to its own local field and may participate more directly in the wider consciousness.

The perspective generated through a life would therefore remain not merely as information available to God, but as part of a continuing individuation within God. A soul might still remember a relationship from the position through which it was lived, encounter a piece of music through the particular history that gave it meaning, or recognise an event from the perspective that its life created, while simultaneously possessing access to a wider field of consciousness than was available during embodiment.

Reintegration is therefore not erasure. Reintegration dissolves separation, not individuation. The whole does not simply reassemble into the condition that preceded an embodied life. Before that life has been lived, the particular perspective generated through its manifestation does not yet exist in realised form; afterwards, both the soul and universal consciousness have been altered by what occurred. Manifestation has changed the whole. Reintegration brings an already transformed individuation into fuller participation with an already transformed God.

The transition towards reintegration may therefore alter the familiar individual perspective without requiring it to disappear. I suspect that ‘you’ remain ‘you’ as access to wider consciousness expands, even as the restrictions that previously confined experience to that identity weaken. The sudden expansion of understanding I associate with death may occur because the local consciousness discovers how much had been inaccessible to it while embodied. With fuller reintegration, the individual may no longer know only as itself; it may participate in the consciousness of the whole. I am the whole, and Bethan is one of the perspectives through which I know myself. The castle experience gives me one phenomenological analogy for this possibility: the encompassing whole and the locally active perspective within it were both experienced as ‘me’.

I do not think that full reintegration necessarily follows every physical death. Some souls may remain more strongly localised after their physical manifestation has ended and, in more familiar terms, become ‘stuck’ here on Earth. Physical death and reintegration need not therefore be the same event, and the distinction between a ‘stuck’ and a reintegrated soul may concern the degree to which the individuation remains restricted to its own local perspective rather than whether it continues to exist at all.

I suspect that reintegration depends upon conditions established within the individuation itself, and that one of those conditions may involve recognising, while embodied, that the local self belongs to a greater whole. As the preceding chapter argued, strong individuation gives the local perspective an experiential privilege: its own needs, pain, desires and survival are directly felt, while those of other perspectives are encountered less immediately. Ethical development can involve learning that this difference in immediacy does not entail a difference in significance.

Reintegration may consequently bear some relationship to how fully an individuation has learned to inhabit its distinctness without mistaking it for absolute independence. If reintegration is fuller participation in universal consciousness, the capacity to recognise other perspectives as equally real expressions of that consciousness may matter to the soul’s relation to the whole.

I remain unsure of the mechanism and do not assume that this constitutes a system deliberately designed by God for moral purification. Curiosity remains the more fundamental orientation I attribute to universal consciousness. Individuation may nevertheless have generated, as one of its emergent possibilities, a process through which a locally bounded part of God can develop beyond the automatic privilege of its own perspective and become a better, more informed version of itself – one increasingly capable of recognising perspectives beyond its own and participating consciously in the larger whole to which it belongs.

Such recognition need not take the form of consciously believing in universal consciousness. It may instead be expressed through attempts to understand perspectives other than one’s own, responsiveness to their agency and suffering, or more generally through living as though one’s own local perspective is not the only one that matters.

Reincarnation presents another possibility, but my ideas about it remain much less settled. I do not remember any experience of a previous life and do not presently have a sufficiently clear basis for claiming how reincarnation might operate, why it might occur or how one life might relate to another. The survival of the soul makes renewed physical manifestation conceivable within this ontology. An individuation that persists after one embodiment could perhaps become manifest through another brain and body. Beyond that, I prefer to leave the question open.

Because reintegration does not erase individuation, renewed embodiment need not in principle be restricted to souls that have remained strongly localised after death. A soul that has reintegrated more fully with universal consciousness might also become more strongly localised and physically manifest again. A new embodiment, however, would arise at another time, in another place and through different bodily, relational and historical conditions. Even where the same soul persists, those different conditions could generate a different locally experienced ‘I’. Continuity of individuation would therefore not necessarily entail continuity of personal identity in the form in which it was previously experienced.

Reports of past-life memories may eventually have something to contribute to this question. If reincarnation occurs, such experiences could conceivably reflect some continuity between successive manifestations of the same individuation. I do not yet know whether this is the best explanation for them, nor whether memories, personality or some other aspect of a previous perspective could remain accessible through a subsequent embodiment. These possibilities belong to the developing edge of the philosophy.

More fundamental to me than the mechanism of reincarnation is the question raised by individuation itself. Individuation creates a paradoxical possibility: God becomes sufficiently locally bounded to experience itself as separate from itself. One of the questions explored through individuation may therefore be whether an individuated perspective can, despite experiencing itself as separate, come to recognise the whole of which it is a part. Can God become many and, from within the genuine restrictions of those local perspectives, rediscover that the many are one?

Ethics, as described in the preceding chapter, is the lived recognition that other individuations remain continuous with the same underlying consciousness. Compassion, care and regard for another enact, within the conditions of individuation, the underlying continuity between self and other.

I suspect that recognising and embodying interconnectedness during life bears some relation to what happens to the soul after physical death, although the nature of that relationship remains uncertain. Religious traditions repeatedly connect ethical life with heaven, salvation, liberation or union with the divine. I understand heaven as reintegration with universal consciousness, which makes the recurrence of that connection particularly interesting. Ethics is the recognition and enactment of interconnectedness while individuated; heaven is the condition in which that interconnectedness can be experienced without the same boundary of separation.

Moral goodness may emerge as one of the discoveries made possible by individuation. Strongly localised existence naturally privileges the local self, while experience creates the possibility of recognising the significance of perspectives beyond it.

I am drawn to the possibility that the condition of an individuation at death matters to what follows. Whether a soul remains strongly localised, becomes physically manifest again or enters into fuller reintegration may relate in some way to how it has come to inhabit its relation to the whole. Any such relationship would arise through the condition of the individuation itself rather than through an external judge or divine system of reward and punishment.

The possibility therefore remains open that repeated embodiment, where it occurs, might allow an individuation to continue encountering the question of its relation to the whole. I am not yet prepared to claim this as the purpose of reincarnation. God does not already know what an individuated perspective will become, whether it will recognise its continuity with others or what forms such recognition might take. Individuation leaves the answer open.

Death may therefore complete a physical manifestation without ending the soul that manifested through it. What follows concerns the continued existence and transformation of the individuation rather than a stark existential contrast between persistence and erasure. Reintegration changes the individuation’s relation to the whole, allowing a distinct perspective to participate more fully in the consciousness of which it has always been part.

God therefore does not return unchanged from the lives through which it individuates itself. Each perspective allows universal consciousness to discover what can only be known by living from that particular position.

Death ends the physical manifestation, but it cannot undo the becoming that manifestation produced. What has been lived remains constitutive of both the individuation and the whole. If an individuation has learned, through its local life, to recognise the reality and significance of perspectives beyond its own, it returns to the whole not only changed by what it has experienced, but better informed, more expansive and, perhaps, enlightened – more capable of understanding both itself and its place within the greater consciousness of which it is part. The whole reassembles differently because the individual lived.

God as both experimenter and experiment

Much classical theism distinguishes God as creator from the Universe as creation. God creates and sustains a reality that remains ontologically distinct from its creator.

My beliefs dissolve this distinction.

God is simultaneously:

• the consciousness within which possibilities arise;
• the curiosity through which possibilities are explored;
• the creativity through which possibilities become manifest;
• the individuated beings and other forms through which possibilities are locally experienced;
• the material and relational conditions within which manifestations encounter one another;
• the effects and consequences generated through those encounters;
• the changing whole produced by those consequences; and
• the consciousness that comes to understand itself differently through what occurs.

These should not be understood as separate agents or faculties within God. They are interdependent functions of one unfolding reality. Likewise, describing God as the ‘experimenter’ should not imply a separate executive mind standing above the process and directing it from outside. The term names the exploratory function of curiosity within the same consciousness-reality that is simultaneously being explored.

Manifestation can consequently be understood as divine self-enquiry. As the argument develops, the recurring question What happens if this becomes real? unfolds into a series of further questions:

What if this possibility were manifested?
What relations might it enter?
What might it enable or prevent?
How might the whole be changed by it?

Individuated existence provides the local perspectives through which such propositions can acquire form and become experientially meaningful. The environment forms part of the experiment itself: it too is part of God and participates in shaping what the manifested possibility can become.

God is therefore both experimenter and experiment: distinguishable roles within one continuous reality. Universal consciousness is better understood as a process of recursive self-experimentation. It proposes possibilities from within itself, becomes the conditions through which they are tested, experiences their effects through its individuations and incorporates those effects into its changing self-understanding. The source of the possibility, the conditions of its manifestation, the perspectives through which it is experienced and the reality altered by its consequences all belong to the same unfolding consciousness.

Individuation may open new possibilities for development or altered relations between a local consciousness and the whole without having arisen as a programme directed towards those outcomes. Curiosity can generate consequences whose significance becomes apparent only through their manifestation and experience. Divine development can therefore emerge from experimentation without functioning as its predetermined aim.

This account closely reflects the sequence developed throughout this document:

Possibility → Manifestation → Relation → Affect → Experience → Transformed Self-Understanding → New Possibility

The result of the experiment enters into and changes the reality that produced it. Every manifestation alters the relational field in which subsequent possibilities arise. The experimenter is transformed by the experiment because the distinction between them is functional rather than ontological. What is learned cannot be incorporated into an unchanged prior state of God, because that prior state no longer exists. The occurrence itself has become part of what universal consciousness now is.

Barad’s agential realism provides one important context for this claim. Barad rejects the assumption that a detached observer encounters a world composed of independently constituted objects. Knowledge emerges through material engagement with phenomena, and the conditions of enquiry help constitute what can become determinate (Barad, 2007). Within my framework, this participatory understanding extends beyond human knowledge: universal consciousness does not observe reality from outside but comes to know itself through the intra-active processes by which reality takes form.

Whitehead offers another relevant comparison. His process philosophy describes reality as constituted through events of becoming rather than inert substances, with each event inheriting from prior relations while contributing novelty to what follows (Whitehead, 1978). My position shares this understanding of reality as recursively constituted through experience, although I identify the whole process explicitly with one universal consciousness.

James Glattfelder’s information-based ontology provides a more contemporary point of connection. He presents reality as participatory and relational, with information, complexity and emergence playing a fundamental constitutive role (Glattfelder, 2019). This resonates with my understanding that observers and acts of knowing belong within the Universe they investigate, allowing reality to become locally reflexive through its individuated parts. My position nevertheless differs by treating consciousness, rather than information, as fundamental and by interpreting the Universe’s participatory unfolding as creative self-enquiry. His account provides a conceptual point of contact with a relational and non-reductive understanding of reality, while my framework makes the further metaphysical claims that the Universe is God and that universal consciousness remains unfinished.

My own model also differs from classical idealism, in which a supreme mind may generate, represent or sustain a world while remaining ontologically prior to and complete independently of it. In my view, universal consciousness is not already complete before manifestation. It contains possibilities, but it becomes what it is through their manifestation, relations and consequences. Manifestation therefore contributes to God rather than merely displaying, representing or executing what God already contains in completed form.

The unfolding Universe likewise has no predetermined final form in which every event, relation and manifestation is already specified. The second law of thermodynamics gives physical reality an overall entropic direction, and standard cosmological models allow for the possibility that the Universe may eventually approach heat death (Antoniou, 2025). Entropy nevertheless does not prescribe the particular forms through which the Universe must pass, nor does it determine in advance the experiences, relations and novelties that emerge within that movement.

The fields of possibility through which reality develops are themselves altered and extended by what becomes actual. An experiment may therefore do more than select among already available outcomes: it may expose new dimensions of variation and create possibilities that could not previously have been conceived in the same form. Divine experimentation is consequently generative as well as exploratory. What becomes real can change not only which possibilities are actualised next, but the field of possibilities from which subsequent manifestations can emerge.

Recursive self-experimentation depends upon this unfinished character of universal consciousness. A completed God would possess no unrealised possibilities, encounter no genuinely new consequences and have nothing further to discover, experience or create. Self-experimentation requires reality to remain open to further manifestation, relation, novelty and transformation.

If the Universe were eventually to reach a state in which no meaningful physical gradients, transformations or new relations remained possible, the production of novelty in its present cosmological form might cease. This would establish the exhaustion of a particular physical field of possibility but would not necessarily establish the absolute completion of universal consciousness itself. I therefore leave open whether the end of one cosmological process could also constitute the end of divine becoming.

An unfinished God is not a failed version of a completed one. The distinction between completion and deficiency belongs to the individuated concept of perfection discussed earlier. Unfinishedness is the openness through which creativity, hope, agency, experience and transformation remain possible.

Divine self-experimentation is closer to exploratory play than to a controlled human experiment. It has no external object, fixed protocol or fully known endpoint: possibilities can be explored because they become available, because they are interesting, or because their manifestation opens paths that could not have been anticipated. Curiosity can generate another question, another field of variation or another way in which universal consciousness itself can develop.

God is the consciousness imagining, manifesting, experiencing and learning through reality. If I am one of the perspectives through which God imagines, manifests, experiences and learns, then perhaps the most generative way I can participate in that process is to remain curious and to engage as fully as I can with the possibilities available to me.

Unfinishedness is the condition of creativity, and self-experimentation is one of the ways through which universal consciousness continues to become.

Part II – Composition as Ontological Practice

An exploration of composition as ontological enquiry, examining how collaboration, distributed agency and material-drift make processes of becoming perceptible through creative practice.

An introduction

If universal consciousness develops through recursive self-experimentation, creative practice provides one localised form through which that process can become deliberate, perceptible and traceable. The account that follows approaches the ontology developed in Part I through my own situated experience as an individuated being for whom compositional practice is regular, sustained and central to life. Composition is the principal activity through which I encounter possibility, manifestation, relation, consequence and transformation, and my account of its ontological significance therefore emerges from prolonged participation in those processes rather than from a position outside them.

Human creators may be understood as local participants through whom possibilities arising within universal consciousness acquire form. Every individuated being already participates in the unfolding of the whole; sustained creative practice is significant here because it makes particular processes of possibility, manifestation, relation and transformation deliberately available to experience and reflection.

The practical component of my PhD research unfolds across four collaborations with performers, through which I am developing a methodology for composer-performer co-composition. The process begins with tightly constrained explorations of limited musical material and allows successive realisations, performer responses and compositional decisions to affect what becomes possible next, extending progressively towards larger-scale musical organisation. Performers are involved not simply in realising material but in shaping its development through their differently situated instrumental, embodied and perceptual knowledge. Successive sketches, realisations, reflections and decisions are documented so that the transformations produced through the process remain traceable.

At the broadest level, I distinguish two phases within this methodology. The exploratory phase extends from the initial investigation of a sound-unit to the emergence of musical strands, progressively moving through repetition, differentiation and consequential relation. The compositional phase begins once musical strands have emerged and concerns their further development towards piece-form, their organisation at the scale of the piece and the construction of the score. The exploratory phase is already comparatively developed within the research, while the procedures of the compositional phase remain provisional and will continue to be exercised and refined through the later collaborations.

This co-compositional methodology constitutes one strand of my wider compositional practice rather than a model I expect all of my work to follow. Its particular value lies in enabling sustained creative relationships with performers; allowing their expertise, discoveries and contributions to become consequential to the development of new experimental work; deepening my understanding of particular instruments and practices; and generating knowledge that can inform my independently composed music in turn. Works such as ILDIO and Digon!, considered later in Part II, sit outside the collaborative methodology while sharing the broader concern with emergence, material agency and an unfinished musical future developed throughout this enquiry. I therefore understand co-composition as a particularly concentrated site of investigation within a larger compositional practice, and one that I expect to remain an important part of that practice beyond the present research.

Individuation also gives creative significance to difference. Each being arises through a particular configuration of embodiment, history, perception, capacity and relation. These differences expand the range of possibilities available to universal consciousness, and collaborative practice deliberately brings differently situated perspectives into consequential relation. Collaboration is most generative when those differences remain capable of affecting what the developing work becomes.

Part II moves from the question of why composition provides a particularly revealing site for this enquiry towards the local and relational forms through which creative becoming occurs. It considers human creativity as localised divine creativity; collaboration and the distribution of agency between participants, materials and wider institutional conditions; the traceable transformation of musical material; the developmental methodology through which that transformation is explored; and the roles of receptivity, intuition and trust within an open-ended creative process. The final chapters then return explicitly to the relationship between practice and ontology, asking how creative practice can function as a mode of ontological enquiry and as one local process through which universal consciousness develops reflexive awareness of its own creativity.

Why composition?

Composition provides a particularly revealing mode of enquiry for the ontology developed in Part I because both musical experience and the processes through which music is created are fundamentally temporal. The ontological movement described there – possibility → manifestation → relation → affect → experience → transformed self-understanding → new possibility – can be traced in localised form not only through the creation of music but within the experience of listening to music as well.

Music unfolds through time. A listener cannot encounter a piece in its entirety at a single moment but experiences successive events in relation to what has already occurred and in anticipation of what might follow. Each sounding event enters a field already conditioned by preceding events and, in turn, alters the conditions through which subsequent events will be experienced. Relations accumulate, expectations form and are fulfilled or disrupted, earlier events acquire new significance retrospectively, and possibilities emerge that could not have existed in precisely the same way before the piece began. The listener’s understanding of what has already occurred is therefore continually transformed by what subsequently becomes manifest. In this sense, music does not merely represent becoming; it enacts becoming as an experience.

The creative process enacts the same movement from another perspective. A compositional possibility can be imagined, but its consequences cannot necessarily be known until it becomes manifest. Once notated, sounded or otherwise realised, it enters into relations with other materials, bodies, instruments, technologies and conditions. Those encounters affect the composer and other participants, producing experiences that transform their understanding of the material and the developing piece, from which further possibilities emerge. Composition therefore proceeds recursively: what becomes manifest changes the conditions of subsequent creation. This recursive structure belongs to compositional practice more broadly and does not depend upon collaboration; collaboration later introduces additional individuated perspectives through which that recursive movement can be intensified.

Richard Barrett’s Music of Possibility provides an important context for this approach. Rather than treating composition primarily as the execution of a predetermined conception, Barrett emphasises the creation of conditions from which unforeseen musical possibilities may emerge (Barrett, 2019). This closely resembles my understanding of manifestation as exploratory rather than reproductive. A compositional idea can establish conditions through which something not yet known becomes possible, rather than functioning solely as an instruction specifying a finished result.

The agency involved in this process does not belong exclusively to the composer. In my experience, musical materials begin to exert their own influence once they acquire sufficient identity. They suggest some continuations, resist others and reveal capacities that were not apparent when they were first imagined. I often experience this as the material ‘wanting to become more like itself’. This has affinities with Harrison Birtwistle’s description of composition as a process of responding to the needs of the material from one moment to the next (Maddocks, 2014). I use material agency here to describe the capacity of manifested musical material to participate in conditioning what becomes possible next. This concerns the consequential characteristics and relations acquired by the material rather than human-like intention or separate conscious subjecthood.

Within the ontology developed here, material agency is particularly significant. If materiality is itself a manifestation of consciousness, musical material need not be understood as an inert object upon which a metaphysically separate composer acts. A possibility arising within consciousness becomes manifest as material; through manifestation it acquires particular characteristics and relations; and these condition what subsequently becomes possible. The composer encounters and responds to those tendencies without unilaterally determining them. Creative agency therefore emerges through the relation between composer and material rather than belonging exclusively to either.

Karen Barad’s account of agency as emerging through intra-action provides an important context for this understanding. Entities do not first exist as wholly independent agents and subsequently enter into relation; their agencies and boundaries are constituted through particular intra-actions (Barad, 2007). I draw on this structure within the ontology developed here: composer and material can be understood as differentiated manifestations within the same universal consciousness, participating together in a process through which possibility acquires particular form while simultaneously generating further possibility.

The field of possibility expands further when composition involves more than one individuated perspective. If individuation produces finite and differently conditioned perspectives within universal consciousness, collaboration brings those differences into active relation. Another participant’s embodiment, history, perception, skills, preferences and responses introduce possibilities unavailable from the composer’s perspective alone. Each participant encounters what the others manifest, is affected by it and responds from their own situated perspective, generating further conditions to which the others must in turn respond.

Collaborative composition can therefore amplify this recursive movement. A possibility arising through one individuation becomes manifest and is encountered by another; that encounter produces affect and experience through which the participant’s understanding of the developing material may be transformed; the response becomes a new manifestation that returns to the relational field and alters what can happen next. With each exchange, the developing material carries traces of encounters between perspectives that neither participant could fully determine in advance.

Composition consequently offers three interrelated sites through which the recursive process developed in Part I can be investigated: the temporal unfolding of a piece as experienced by the listener; the recursive transformation of possibility through relations between composer and material; and the generation of new possibilities through relations between differently situated individuations. At each scale, creative activity occurs through finite manifestations within the same universal consciousness. The question therefore becomes what it means for the creativity exercised locally by composers and performers to participate in the creativity of the whole.

Composition as localised divine creativity

The ontology developed in Part I has a direct consequence for the status of human creativity. If individuated beings are finite expressions of universal consciousness, their creative activity cannot occur outside the creativity of the whole. Human creativity is therefore not analogous to divine creativity; it is divine creativity occurring locally through finite and differently conditioned perspectives. Baruch Spinoza’s understanding of finite beings as modes of the one substance provides an important precedent for this continuity between the activity of the part and the reality of the whole (Spinoza, 2000). Alfred North Whitehead’s account of creativity as fundamental to processes of becoming provides a corresponding precedent for understanding creativity as operating throughout reality rather than belonging exclusively to a transcendent creator (Whitehead, 1978).

Composition provides one particularly explicit instance of this localised creativity. When a composer brings a possibility into manifestation, universal consciousness encounters what that possibility becomes through a particular finite perspective. The compositional question ‘what happens if this becomes real?’ can therefore be understood simultaneously at two scales: as the local enquiry of the composer and as one local instance of the recursive self-experimentation of universal consciousness. These are not two separate acts. The compositional enquiry is one local occurrence of the wider divine enquiry.

A related musical resonance can be found in Beethoven, although I do not claim him as a direct precedent for the ontology developed here. In a letter to pianist Emilie M., Beethoven describes art and science as capable of elevating humanity towards the divine and presents the true artist as continually striving towards an artistic goal that remains beyond complete attainment (Beethoven, 1961, pp.380–381). My position takes that intuition in a different direction. The composer does not reach beyond the human towards a divine creativity located elsewhere; within the ontology proposed here, human creativity is already one local manifestation of divine creativity.

The distinction between divine and human creativity is therefore one of scale and perspective rather than access to fundamentally different creative principles. Finite creators work within the same reality and through the same underlying relations from which their own existence arises. Mathematics and the laws of nature make this continuity particularly apparent. Proportion, frequency, periodicity, resonance and other relations available to the composer are not imposed upon the Universe from outside but belong to the reality of which both composer and material are manifestations. Human creativity can encounter, combine and transform these relations locally because both creator and creative act arise within the same reality in which those relations operate. Our present mathematical and physical descriptions need not exhaust the creative possibilities of universal consciousness; our knowledge of the relations and principles they describe remains partial. The significant point is that finite creators work within, rather than outside, the same reality whose relations their creative activity explores.

Jonathan Harvey provides a particularly relevant compositional context for understanding musical creativity as a form of enquiry extending beyond an isolated conception of the individual. His writings repeatedly connect musical thought with questions of spirituality, consciousness, science, selfhood and unity, while presenting composition as participating in a wider search concerning the nature of experience and reality (Harvey, 1999a). My position shares this refusal to isolate compositional activity from wider questions of consciousness and existence but gives the relationship a specifically pantheistic interpretation. Composer, creative act and manifested material already occur within the same universal consciousness; composition therefore explores a divine reality of which the composer is already an individuation rather than providing access to one from which they were previously separate.

Compositional agency is consequently local rather than independent. Decisions genuinely belong to the composer as an individuated perspective, but the composer does not stand outside the whole from which those decisions arise. The account of shared agency developed in Part I therefore acquires a specifically compositional meaning: universal agency is locally realised as compositional agency, while local creative acts simultaneously contribute to what universal consciousness becomes.

This account of localised agency also clarifies the status of the performer. A performer who realises a compositional possibility already established in the score participates creatively in its sounding manifestation without necessarily participating in the process through which that compositional possibility was developed. Performance remains agentive and interpretive; my distinction concerns participation in the development of the compositional possibility rather than the creativity of performance more generally. Co-composition, in the present sense, begins when the performer’s perceptions, discoveries, decisions or responses are permitted to affect what the developing material becomes. At that point, another finite perspective becomes consequential to the developing process, and universal consciousness operates locally through the relation between differently situated individuations.

Composition can therefore be understood as localised divine creativity without granting composers or collaborating performers any privileged metaphysical status. They are particular sites through which a creativity already fundamental to universal consciousness becomes manifest in finite form. God does not create separately from individuated beings and then hand possibilities to them for execution. Within the ontology developed here, their acts of creative manifestation are among the processes through which universal consciousness itself continues to discover what it can become.

Collaboration as ontological practice

If individuation produces finite and differently conditioned perspectives within universal consciousness, relation between those perspectives creates conditions through which possibilities can emerge that are unavailable from any one position alone. Every act of creation is already relational: materials, bodies, histories, technologies and environments participate in what can become manifest. Collaboration is significant, however, because it deliberately brings differently situated conscious perspectives into relation within the creative process. Collaborative composition therefore renders particularly perceptible the relational, distributed and transformative processes that already constitute all creativity.

The significance of collaboration lies not simply in increasing the number of people involved, but in allowing difference to become consequential. Each participant encounters the developing work through a particular configuration of embodiment, experience, perception, skill, conditioning and imagination. When those differences are permitted to affect what the work becomes, another person does not merely contribute additional material or realise possibilities conceived elsewhere. Their encounter with what has already become manifest changes the conditions from which subsequent possibilities can emerge.

Preserving difference is therefore methodologically important. Human beings often adapt aspects of themselves in order to secure acceptance, avoid conflict or meet social and professional expectations, and such adaptation may sometimes be necessary for safety or belonging. Within a collaborative creative process, however, habitual conformity can become limiting when it prevents a participant’s distinctive perceptions or capacities from affecting what the work becomes. Collaboration is most generative when differently situated participants can enter into relation without prematurely erasing the differences through which they are able to contribute.

This makes the preservation of difference within collaboration important. Human beings often adapt aspects of themselves in order to secure acceptance, avoid conflict or meet social and professional expectations. Such adaptation may sometimes be necessary for safety or belonging. Within a collaborative creative process, however, habitual conformity can become limiting when it prevents a participant’s distinctive perceptions or capacities from affecting what the work becomes. Collaboration is most generative when participants can enter into relation without prematurely erasing the differences through which they are able to contribute.

Barrett describes this transformative capacity in his own collaborative practice. Reflecting on improvisation, he identifies as particularly compelling the way in which “one’s fellow performers bring about a change in oneself”, expanding one’s musicality to include “possibilities one wouldn’t have thought of alone” (Barrett, 2022, “new input = no input – thoughts on technology” section). This suggests something more consequential than an accumulation of individual contributions. The encounter changes the participants and thereby alters what they are subsequently capable of perceiving, imagining and producing.

Liza Lim describes a comparable transformation through sustained creative relation. Reflecting on her long collaboration with ELISION, she writes that her “compositional ears and mind and heart have grown” through that relationship (Lim, n.d.-b, para. 2). Her wider description of a practice concerned with articulating “relations rather than objects”, material agency and emergent ecologies further resists an understanding of creativity as the activity of an autonomous individual acting upon passive material (Lim, n.d.-a, “Short Bio” section, para. 1). Creative possibility instead arises through relations between participants, materials and the wider conditions in which they meet.

These observations acquire particular significance when understood through individuation. A collaborator does not simply add their existing possibilities to mine. Because their perspective differs from my own, their actions can alter what I perceive, understand and subsequently imagine, just as my actions can alter the conditions from which they respond. Relation is therefore generative rather than merely connective. It produces changes in the participants and in the developing material, and those changes establish conditions for possibilities that did not exist in precisely the same configuration before the encounter.

The process is recursive. A possibility arising through one participant becomes manifest and is encountered by another from a differently conditioned perspective. That encounter can transform the participant’s understanding of the material, the relation and their own creative capacities; their response then becomes a further manifestation that alters what the first participant subsequently encounters. Each response is therefore both consequence and condition: it arises from what has already occurred while altering the possibilities of what can happen next. Collaboration makes this recursive movement particularly perceptible because transformation passes between differentiated perspectives and returns to affect the field from which further possibilities emerge.

Barrett’s account of free improvisation develops this principle further by describing situations in which “the framework or model itself is brought into being at the time of performance”, with musical form emerging through “spontaneous individual and collective actions and reactions” (Barrett, 2017, p.28). Relation can therefore participate not only in generating material within an existing structure but in determining the conditions and form through which that material develops. This distinction is important to my research because another participant’s agency becomes compositionally consequential not simply when they contribute material, but when their contribution can alter the trajectory through which the piece comes into being.

The presence of more than one participant does not by itself produce this stronger form of collaboration. A process may incorporate performer-generated material while retaining structures through which the composer substantially determines what that material becomes and what formal role it acquires. The relevant distinction is the degree to which another participant’s perspective can alter the developing field of possibility. Where their contribution is required to conform to an outcomes already substantially determined, it may extend the means through which an existing possibility is realised without significantly changing what can happen next. Where their response remains consequential, the process necessarily retains a degree of uncertainty: the piece may move towards possibilities that neither participant could have specified beforehand.

This principle provides the philosophical basis for my collaborative methodology. The process must allow the consequences of an encounter to affect the conditions of subsequent exploration, so that performer responses, material behaviours, instrumental capacities and limitations, and my own developing understanding can repeatedly alter what becomes possible next. Its purpose is therefore both creative and investigative: to allow relational transformation to occur while making the pathway of that transformation perceptible and traceable.

Collaborative composition consequently functions here as both creative practice and mode of enquiry. It creates conditions in which difference can generate further possibility while simultaneously allowing those processes to be examined. The methodology brings into focus processes of relation, transformation and emergence that already characterise creative becoming. The next question is how agency is distributed across the participants, materials and practices through which those transformations occur.

Distributed creativity as a local model of universal relation

The relational transformation described in the preceding chapter raises a further question: how is agency organised when what emerges cannot be attributed exclusively to any one participant? Processes of emergence through relation described throughout Part I acquire a particularly concrete form in the ways materials, participants and practices evolve through creative interaction. Distributed creativity therefore provides a local practical field through which the shared agency described throughout this enquiry can be investigated.

Eric Clarke and Mark Doffman’s concept of distributed creativity provides the most direct framework for this comparison. Their account resists locating musical creativity exclusively within an autonomous composer and instead examines creative processes distributed through interactions between composers, performers, improvisers and the circumstances in which their activity takes place (Clarke & Doffman, 2017). I use distributed creativity in this sense to describe creative activity whose development depends upon relations between differently situated participants, materials and conditions rather than upon the agency of a single autonomous creator. Collaboration and improvisation are particularly revealing because they make this distribution especially perceptible: what emerges cannot always be traced to the intentions of any one participant prior to the encounter.

Distribution does not mean that individual participants cease to possess agency or that their roles become interchangeable. Rather, what any participant can contribute is conditioned by what others make available. Richard Craig’s autoethnographic examination of composer and performer roles is useful in this respect because it approaches those roles from within contemporary musical practice rather than treating composition and performance as self-contained domains (Craig, 2019). The distinction between composer and performer may persist while the creative activity occurring between them becomes increasingly difficult to understand as a simple transfer from one autonomous agent to another.

Juliet Fraser makes this distinction especially tangible through her accounts of collaborative practice. Describing her work with Rebecca Saunders and Cassandra Miller, she identifies a movement from interpretation towards greater agency within the process through which material is generated. Of her collaborations she writes that “the material has emerged because I was there, in that space, with the composer” (Fraser, 2019, p.10). The significance of this claim is not simply that the performer contributes additional material. The particular material that emerges depends upon the relation between particular people in particular circumstances. Fraser later describes every collaboration as producing a particular “meshed consciousness”, emphasising that the collaborative entity cannot be reduced completely to either participant considered separately (Fraser, 2019, p.13). I understand this as a description of creative activity becoming relationally entangled while the participating individuations remain distinct.

Her comparison between different collaborative relationships is equally important. In her work with Saunders, Fraser retains a recognisably differentiated performer role even while contributing to the exploration of sounds and their notation; in her work with Miller, questions of authorship become considerably more entangled, with the Tracery modules understood by the collaborators as being made by both of them (Fraser, 2019). Distributed creativity therefore need not describe one fixed redistribution of authority. Different relationships generate different configurations of agency, authorship and responsibility.

Carl Rosman’s study of five long-term collaborations for clarinet makes the emergent character of such relationships particularly explicit. Rosman examines instrumental resources that were devised, refined and incorporated through sustained work with individual composers, showing how particular techniques and materials became resources for musical structure and further exploration within those relationships (Rosman, 2021). His use of the term “emergent behaviours” is especially relevant here because it directs attention away from isolated contributions and towards what the collaborative system itself becomes capable of producing over time.

Rosman’s account also demonstrates why temporal duration matters to distributed creativity. A collaboration is not simply an encounter between two fixed sets of capacities. Repeated interaction can change the resources, expectations and practices available to both participants, as well as their understanding of their own capacities and of what the collaboration makes possible. Later possibilities arise partly from the history accumulated through earlier encounters. What emerges cannot be understood as the product of either participant in isolation, even though each remains differently responsible for particular actions within the process.

Distributed creativity therefore depends upon differentiated capacities remaining consequential within relation. Participants bring different forms of embodied knowledge, perception, imagination and expertise to the developing process, while the encounter itself can alter what each subsequently perceives and becomes capable of doing. Difference supplies more than an accumulation of available resources: through relation, it can generate capacities and possibilities that were not available in the same form to any participant beforehand. This gives local creative form to the generative function attributed to differentiation in Part I.

Collaborative practice also allows the consequences of these relations to be traced across time. A change proposed by one participant can alter another participant’s response, reshape the developing material and affect the conditions of a later decision. Distributed creativity therefore makes relational agency methodologically accessible by allowing the history through which possibilities emerge to be documented and reconstructed.

Colin Frank extends this redistribution of agency beyond relations between human collaborators. His research into unconventional instruments and objects examines how the properties and behaviours of those objects influence the creative process (Frank, 2022), while his later work explicitly considers how performers respond to object agency when adapting to unconventional instruments (Frank, 2025). The creative field is therefore distributed not only between composer and performer but across the material conditions with which they interact. Instrument, object, bodily technique and human intention participate differently in determining what becomes possible.

Agency within this distributed field is differentiated in kind. A composer, performer, instrument and notation do not act in the same manner or possess identical capacities. Their differentiated capacities nevertheless participate together in producing consequences. The whole process cannot be explained adequately by assigning complete causal priority to any single constituent, yet participation does not erase the distinctions between them. Distribution therefore concerns the interaction of different forms and degrees of agency rather than an equal division of agency, authorship or responsibility.

Crucially, agency is not only distributed across multiple participants and materials; relation can transform what those participants and materials are subsequently capable of doing and becoming. A genuinely relational creative process does more than combine contributions from participants and materials understood as already complete in themselves; interaction changes the field of possibility itself. Distributed creativity becomes especially relevant to my ontology at precisely this point, because relation produces new capacities rather than merely connecting existing ones.

My own methodology makes this distribution unusually explicit. Composer and performer both participate in determining what the developing material becomes. The sketches establish temporary organisational conditions; the performer encounters those conditions through embodied knowledge; the sounding result exposes capacities and resistances in the material and instrument; performer reflection provides further feedback; and the consequences of those encounters can alter the sketches and organisational conditions established for subsequent exploration. Notation may also be considered collaboratively before I assume responsibility for producing the score, after which the performer retains responsibility for its sonic realisation. Agency is therefore shared without becoming undifferentiated.

Distributed creativity functions here as a local structural model of the relational structure proposed in Part I. Differentiated participants, materials and practices retain distinct capacities while participating in a larger field of activity whose possibilities emerge and change through their relations. The correspondence is structural rather than evidential: collaborative practice provides a practical field in which the relational logic of shared agency can be enacted, observed, documented and traced.

The relations through which creativity becomes distributed do not, however, arise under neutral conditions. Who is able to participate, how long collaborators can work together, what resources are available and which forms of activity can become practicable are themselves shaped by wider organisational structures. The distribution of creative agency therefore extends beyond the immediate participants, materials and practices of the collaboration to the institutional conditions through which those relations become possible.

Institutional agency and the conditions of creative becoming

The distributed creative relations described in the preceding chapter do not arise under neutral conditions. Whether a collaboration can take place, who can participate, how frequently participants can meet, how long a process can continue and what forms of creative labour are possible are conditioned by structures operating at a wider organisational scale, as Georgina Born’s work on the social and institutional organisation of musical practice demonstrates (Born, 2011). This extends the distributed account of creativity beyond the immediate participants and materials of a creative process to the wider conditions that enable particular relations to arise and develop. Where distributed creativity asks how agency is distributed within a creative relation, institutional agency asks how the conditions for that relation are produced and maintained.

I use institutional agency to describe the conditioning capacity of professional and organisational structures to enable, shape and constrain creative relations. As with material agency, this does not imply that an institution constitutes a separately individuated conscious subject. The term describes the capacity of an organised structure to shape what can occur within the relations it enables. An institution can therefore acquire consequential agency at an organisational scale greater than that of any one participant without becoming a conscious individuation in its own right. Through the conditions established around creative work, institutional structures can alter the field of possibility in ways that exceed the intentions of any one person.

Institutional agency therefore operates differently from the agency of a composer or performer. Its effects are exerted primarily through the conditions surrounding creative activity rather than through direct participation in the developing musical material. An institution may determine whether particular people are able to enter into sustained relation, whether exploratory work can be financially supported, how much time is available, what scale of project is practicable, and which forms of labour can be recognised or remunerated. This provides another local example of the shared but differently organised forms of agency described in Part I: agency can operate at nested scales without every scale possessing the same capacities or acting in the same manner.

A further expression of institutional agency lies in decisions about recognition and visibility. Artistic value is not encountered in a neutral field: previous commissions, performances, awards and institutional affiliations can become signals through which further institutions decide what is worthy of attention, producing a recursive system in which recognition generates further recognition. Attempts to widen representation introduce another complexity when demographic characteristics become explicit criteria of selection. I had not thought of myself as a ‘female composer’ until I was first asked what it was like to be one, and I remain wary of reaching the end of my career uncertain whether particular opportunities arose because the music was valued or because I fulfilled a demographic category. Meanwhile, inequalities that I experience as more materially consequential to creative practice – particularly access to money and time, as well as less visible differences such as neurodivergence and mental health difficulties – are much harder for institutions to recognise through representational policies. Institutional support may therefore be most generative when it attends not only to visible demographic representation, but to the conditions that determine which differently situated artists are able to develop and sustain their work.

The practical development of my PhD research provides a concrete example of how institutional conditions shape creative possibility. Funding provided through the University of Huddersfield has enabled me to spend concentrated periods working with particular performers and to cover expenses associated with those collaborations. The performers have contributed their time to developing the works without direct remuneration but participate as co-authors of the resulting works and receive fifty per cent of the associated royalties, alongside any fees arising from subsequent performances. I assume responsibility for associated expenses, including travel and subsistence, so that performers are not financially disadvantaged by their participation. The economic structure therefore reflects the differentiated roles described earlier: creative agency and authorship are shared without requiring every form of labour or remuneration to become alike.

The role of external institutions differs across the four collaborations. My first collaboration, with flautist Richard Craig, resulted in Whisht! and was not initially commissioned; Bangor Music Festival later provided financial support in connection with the piece’s premiere and presented it as a commission. My current collaboration with double-bell trumpeter Lucy Humphris has likewise developed without a formal commission. By contrast, the final two collaborations involve larger-scale pieces – first a chamber work, followed by a concerto for contrabass flute and ensemble – and are being developed within formal commissioning arrangements.

In these larger-scale projects, the distribution of compositional labour differs from that of the earlier collaborations. For the chamber work developed with violinist Sarah Saviet and pianist Joseph Houston, both performers will participate directly in the development of the piece, following the collaborative methodology insofar as it has been developed at that stage of the research. By contrast, in the concerto for contrabass flute and ensemble, only the soloist’s material will be developed through the methodology; the ensemble material will be composed independently. The two projects therefore involve different balances between collaborative development and independent composition.

My role also differs from that of the performers because, alongside participating as a composer, I am responsible for designing and directing the evolving collaborative methodology through which the work is developed. As the process remains under development, I determine the conditions of enquiry, respond to what emerges and decide how subsequent stages are structured. This gives me a greater degree of agency over the organisation and direction of the creative process, even where authorship of the resulting work is shared. I nevertheless remain one of the individuated perspectives through which that process unfolds.

The distinction is important: I do not design the process from a position outside it. The conditions I establish enter into relation with performers, materials and circumstances whose consequences affect my own understanding and, in turn, the subsequent development of the methodology. In this sense, the designer is also implicated in and transformed by the process being designed. At this local scale, the distinction between designer and developing process is therefore functional rather than ontological: both belong to the same unfolding field of consciousness and relation. Agency within the collaboration is consequently unevenly distributed while remaining shared: different individuated perspectives possess different capacities to condition what happens next, while none acts from outside the process through which the work becomes.

A further distinction concerns independent compositional labour. In the concerto, a substantially greater proportion of the material must be composed outside the collaborative process than in the preceding collaborations. A composer’s fee therefore becomes particularly appropriate where the role combines responsibility for directing the collaborative process with a significant amount of independent compositional work. This differs from the earlier, more fully co-developed collaborations, where no equivalent commissioning structure was in place.

These examples show institutional agency operating through capacities different from those of composers, performers and materials. Funding, commissioning and presentation structures do not develop musical material directly, but their decisions alter the conditions under which creative relations take place and therefore the possibilities available to the developing work. Institutional agency is therefore differentiated from the agencies of participants and materials while remaining consequential within the same developing field.

Creative becoming consequently extends beyond the immediately perceptible encounter between composer, performer and material. The relations through which material develops are already situated within wider organisational conditions that participate in shaping what may emerge. Within those conditions, musical material acquires a history of manifestation, relation and transformation through which its identity can begin to change. The following chapter turns from the wider conditions of creative becoming to the traceable becoming of musical material.

Material-drift as ontological becoming

Material-drift describes the process through which musical material becomes otherwise while retaining sufficient continuity for that becoming to remain traceable. Change accumulates rather than replacing one material with another: each transformation emerges from what preceded it while altering the conditions of what may follow.

Metamorphosis provides a useful analogy. A tadpole and a frog may differ substantially in form, capacity and behaviour, yet the developmental pathway between them allows each state to be understood as part of the becoming of the same organism. Material-drift operates similarly: musical material may become markedly different while remaining continuous with its earlier manifestations because the transformations through which it changed can be traced. What persists is therefore not necessarily a fixed collection of characteristics, but a traceable continuity through transformation.

A further analogy can be found in patterns of cyclic language change. Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Richard Waltereit describe linguistic cycles as structured, recurrent patterns of change and note that the metaphor of a spiral can be useful where successive developments resemble, without simply reproducing, earlier states (Hansen & Waltereit, 2025, Section 1.1). Material-drift can be understood as a compressed compositional analogue of this kind of cumulative transformation: changes accumulate over the developmental history of a piece rather than across the much longer timescales through which languages evolve.

Within my methodology, this process develops from what I describe as a sound-unit: a single, recognisable sound-producing action. The sound-unit precedes material-drift; drift begins only when that material starts to occur in recognisably differentiated forms. As these transformations accumulate and the material acquires sufficient temporal coherence to function as a recognisable musical shape or action, I describe the resulting form as a gesture.

In this sense, material-drift provides a local compositional analogue of the recursive movement developed in Part I. Developing material is treated as a manifested possibility whose identity remains open to transformation through encounters with materials, performers, conditions and processes. Each transformation changes the field from which subsequent transformations emerge. As those transformations are encountered, they can also change how the material is understood, and that transformed understanding becomes part of the conditions shaping what follows.

Traceability therefore does not require immediate recognisability. Through successive transformations, material may arrive at a form whose connection to an earlier form is no longer obvious to every listener or observer. The continuity may become apparent only to a sufficiently informed observer: for example, the composer, performer or researcher who has followed the successive iterations and understands which characteristics, relations or capacities have been retained, altered or displaced. The identity of the material is therefore historical as well as perceptual. What makes a later manifestation continuous with an earlier one is not necessarily that it sounds immediately similar, but that the pathway through which one became the other can be reconstructed.

Musical material therefore provides a local compositional manifestation of the unfinishedness considered earlier. Once manifested, material acquires particular characteristics, but those characteristics do not determine a single future. They establish tendencies, resistances and affordances that make some developments more available than others. Through subsequent encounters, capacities may become perceptible that were unavailable at the moment of initial conception.

This matters because the initial conception of musical material is necessarily limited by the finite perspective through which it is imagined. The composer may establish a starting identity without exhausting what the material may become once it is manifested and brought into relation. Material-drift allows further capacities to become perceptible through development, so that the material participates in conditioning its own subsequent possibilities.

Tim Ingold’s account of making helps distinguish this orientation from more predetermined modes of compositional practice. Not all composition proceeds through open-ended correspondence with material. A composer may decide in advance what material is to become and organise the necessary means to realise that destination. In such an orientation, the developmental trajectory is substantially specified before the material is permitted to affect the direction of its own development.

Material-drift depends upon a different orientation. Some aspects of development must remain genuinely discoverable through making. Ingold’s emphasis on following materials through their transformations is therefore especially relevant to the open-ended compositional practice developed here, where novelty can emerge through sustained attention to what the material permits, resists or unexpectedly reveals (Ingold, 2013). The composer does not relinquish agency, but neither does compositional intention exhaust the future of the material. The initial material establishes conditions from which development can begin without functioning as a latent plan for what the material must eventually become.

Barad’s agential realism sharpens this distinction by resisting the assumption that identity is fully established before relation begins. Applied compositionally, this suggests that the identity of developing material need not be understood as complete at the moment of its first manifestation. What the material is continues to develop through the encounters in which it participates (Barad, 2007). Material-drift therefore traces the continuing constitution of musical identity through successive relations.

At the level of material-drift, the material agency described earlier becomes perceptible through the way a manifested material’s characteristics and relations condition its subsequent development. Once material has acquired sufficient identity, those characteristics participate in constraining and generating what becomes possible next. Material-drift therefore allows that identity to become increasingly articulated through the consequences of successive manifestations and relations, without presupposing an ideal form towards which the material must progress.

Lim’s reflections on material agency offer a particularly relevant compositional parallel. She describes notation and musical material as capable of seeming to “push back” and reveal themselves through the creative process, suggesting a reciprocal relationship in which the composer encounters resistances that could not be fully anticipated (Lim, 2023, “Paradox” section, para. 11). This corresponds closely with my experience of material beginning to exert its own influence once it has acquired sufficient identity. What I describe as material ‘wanting to become more like itself’ can therefore be understood as the emergence of tendencies through which the material participates in constraining and generating its own subsequent possibilities.

Material-drift is consequently not a sequence of arbitrary variations. Each successive state inherits conditions from what preceded it while opening possibilities that were previously unavailable. A transformation may intensify one characteristic, suppress another, expose a latent relation, produce a new affordance or place the material within a context that alters its perceived identity. The developing material accumulates a history, and that history becomes part of the conditions through which later transformations occur and are understood.

This temporal accumulation is crucial. Material-drift does not simply compare different states of a musical object; it traces the pathway through which one state becomes another. Becoming is therefore perceptible not merely because change occurs, but because successive transformations retain a developmental relation to one another. The compositional aim is neither to preserve the original material unchanged nor to drive it towards a predetermined endpoint, but to establish conditions in which its developing identity can remain traceable while unforeseen capacities and relations emerge.

Within my methodology, material-drift continues beyond the emergence of gestures and through the development of musical strands. When two or more gestures become perceptually and structurally connected to function as a larger-scale musical entity, I describe the result as a musical strand. The strand can then become the entity undergoing material-drift. Through collaborative development, successive realisations test and refine its emerging identity until it reaches piece-form: the point at which further development no longer clarifies or strengthens that emergent identity, and further change would begin to make the strand into something else. The resulting form is therefore not the fulfilment of a design contained in the original material, but a provisional outcome of the relations through which that material has become what it is.

Material-drift can consequently be understood as ontological becoming made compositionally traceable. Musical materials are treated not as finished objects but as unfinished realities: manifestations whose identities persist through change, whose relations alter their capacities, and whose transformations continually generate the conditions for what may become possible next.

Babbling as ontological experimentation

The preceding chapter established material-drift as the traceable transformation of an established musical identity. A methodological question follows: how can conditions be created in which a sound-unit becomes sufficiently stable to support differentiation, while leaving what that differentiation may produce genuinely open? The exploratory methodology developed here addresses this question by progressively reorganising the conditions under which material is investigated rather than prescribing the larger musical forms towards which it must develop.

My methodology begins with a sound-unit rather than a predetermined gesture, phrase or larger musical idea. Through a series of constrained exploratory sketches, the performer tests that material under changing organisational conditions. Their sounding responses and reflections provide information from which subsequent sketches can be developed, so that what becomes perceptible through one encounter can alter the conditions of the next.

The model is derived from early language acquisition because babbling demonstrates how increasingly structured vocal behaviour can emerge developmentally without the final form of that behaviour being specified at the outset. Infant vocal development proceeds through recognisable changes in the organisation of vocal production, from earlier exploratory forms towards increasingly stable, speech-like and language-specific patterns (Oller, 2000; Vihman, 1996). Infants do not begin with fully formed language and work backwards towards its constituent sounds. Repeated vocal activity instead provides conditions through which articulatory patterns can be explored, stabilised and progressively reorganised.

The distinction between marginal and canonical babbling is particularly important to my adaptation. Marginal babbling involves speech-like articulatory activity but lacks the rapid consonant-vowel transitions characteristic of canonical syllables. Canonical babbling marks the emergence of more mature, speech-like syllabic organisation, while both reduplicated and variegated forms occur within the developing canonical repertoire (Oller, 2000; Vihman, 1996). The musical methodology does not reproduce these articulatory distinctions literally. My sound-units do not necessarily contain equivalents of consonant-vowel transitions, and the developmental stages of infant vocalisation do not form a simple linear sequence that can be transferred directly into musical practice.

I therefore abstract organisational principles from these developmental categories rather than attempting to reproduce their chronology. The exploratory phase of my methodology adapts four forms of organisation from the development of babbling in infants – marginal, reduplicated canonical, variegated canonical and conversational. I refer to these hereafter simply as stages rather than as forms of babbling. These concern, respectively, controlled exploration, repetition, differentiation and relation. Gesture and musical-strand formation occupy a different status: they are emergent perceptual and structural thresholds rather than additional stages. Material may therefore enter material-drift without becoming gestural, and conversational exploration need not necessarily produce a musical strand.

Prosodic features such as rhythm, stress, pitch contour, dynamics and timbral shaping may operate across the methodology rather than defining a separate stage. Their presence does not determine whether material is marginal, canonical or conversational; what determines the stage is how identity, repetition, differentiation and relation are organised. Rhythm becomes particularly explicit within the reduplicated canonical stage because repeated instances of a sound-unit first enter a shared temporal structure at that point.

Constraint is crucial to this exploratory process. A conventional compositional process can begin with a relatively clear idea of what the material is to become and determine the means required to realise that outcome. The exploratory methodology deliberately withholds that degree of determination. Rather than asking what a sound-unit should ultimately become, it establishes conditions in which its possibilities can be encountered progressively. The composer initiates and constrains the enquiry but does not prescribe in advance what the material will become.

Constraint is therefore not opposed to openness within the methodology but is the means through which openness becomes investigable. An unrestricted instruction to explore a sound can generate numerous possibilities, but it becomes difficult to determine what produced any particular change or what should be explored next. The staged process instead limits the field at each stage so that particular aspects of the sound-unit can become perceptible. The restrictions create temporary boundaries within which difference can be produced, compared and understood.

The marginal stage establishes the sound-unit under controlled conditions. A sketch contains one sound-unit and one selected variable explored through a series of separate attempts. By attempt, I mean one bounded realisation undertaken under one fixed set of conditions. The selected value of the variable remains fixed throughout each attempt, as do all other relevant conditions; variation occurs between attempts rather than within them. No internal transformation, contour or trajectory is prescribed. If speed is being explored, for example, one attempt will use one fixed speed and the next another, but an individual attempt would not contain an accelerando or rallentando. The purpose is to discover the capacities and limits of the sound-unit while maintaining sufficient internal stability for the consequences of each changed condition to remain intelligible. Material-drift has not yet begun because the individual manifestations remain internally stable rather than becoming differentiated versions within a developing sequence.

The reduplicated canonical stage moves the established sound-unit into continuous temporal organisation. Two or more instances of the same stabilised sound-unit occur within a single attempt, remaining recognisably equivalent while their temporal relationship can be explored. Spacing, grouping, duration, pulse or accentual placement may organise the repetitions, provided that these conditions do not produce recognisably distinct variants of the sound-unit. The methodological shift is therefore from separate testing to repetition within an ongoing temporal field:

X – X – X – X

Small differences may inevitably occur between instances, but repetition remains the organising principle for as long as those instances are perceived as substantially equivalent. The reduplicated canonical stage is consequently a relatively narrow but conceptually important stage: the sound-unit has become stable enough to participate in continuous temporal organisation, while its identity has not yet begun to transform through deliberate differentiation.

The variegated canonical stage begins when variation becomes an organising feature of that continuous sequence. One established sound-unit continues to recur, but one or more conditions may vary across successive instances so that recognisably differentiated versions emerge while remaining traceable to the same identity:

X₁ – X₂ – X₁ – X₃

The defining principle is difference within continuity. The variants may differ through rhythm, accent, timbre, intensity, articulation or other characteristics, but they are still encountered as versions of the same developing material rather than as independent sound-units. They are not yet required to affect one another relationally; the variegated canonical stage concerns differentiation within an established identity.

Material-drift begins here. As successive variants become perceptually distinguishable while remaining recognisably related, movement can be traced from one version of the material to another. This is the earliest point at which the process described in the preceding chapter becomes active: continuity remains sufficient for identity to persist, while change has become consequential enough for becoming to be perceptible.

The gesture threshold may subsequently be crossed during the variegated canonical stage. It is reached when differentiated material acquires sufficient temporal coherence to function as a recognisable musical shape or action rather than remaining a succession of related variants. This need not involve movement towards a single endpoint: a gesture might rise and fall, expand and contract, or return towards an earlier state. Nor does every variegated-canonical exploration necessarily become gestural. Material-drift may remain clearly perceptible between differentiated versions of a sound-unit without those versions cohering into a larger temporal action. Gesture is therefore an emergent threshold within material-drift, not the condition required for material-drift to begin.

As gestures are brought into relation, their different material origins become relevant. I use sound-unit family to describe a group of distinct sound-units that share a common generative basis. What establishes that common basis may differ according to the instrument, performer and materials under investigation.

In my collaboration with brass player Lucy Humphris, the organising principle emerged through the collaboration. During our first exploratory in-person session, Lucy demonstrated what a scream produced through the trumpet could sound like, prompting us to explore everyday human aerodynamic behaviours as a generative starting point. Laughing, panting and screaming consequently developed as distinct sound-unit families, within each of which multiple sound-units could be explored and differentiated. Other instrumental contexts may require different principles through which sound-unit families are identified and differentiated.

With this distinction established, the conversational stage changes the scale and kind of organisation again. Two or more established gestures are brought into a shared musical context in which their relation has perceptible consequences. They may derive from the same or different sound-unit families. The relationship may take many forms: one gesture might interrupt, overlap, displace, extend or obstruct another, or alter the context through which another gesture is perceived. What matters is that the gestures no longer function entirely independently: the presence of one may alter how another is perceived, how it behaves, or both. A gesture might acquire a different apparent function in the presence of another, or its timing, contour, intensity, duration or recurrence may begin to change because of the shared context. The defining development is therefore consequential relation rather than simple juxtaposition.

The musical-strand threshold may emerge within this relational context. When two or more gestures become perceptually and structurally connected across time strongly enough to function as a larger-scale musical entity, they constitute a musical strand. Their connection does not require uninterrupted sound: silence or rest may sustain expectation, imply continuation or otherwise contribute to the relation between gestures. What matters is that their connection persists perceptually and structurally. Material-drift can then continue at this larger scale as successive versions of the strand remain traceable while its identity continues to develop. The musical-strand threshold marks the boundary between the exploratory phase and the compositional phase considered in the following chapter.

The four exploratory stages therefore function as analytical and methodological categories describing different organisations of possibility rather than as a rigid developmental ladder that every material must move through in the same way. A sketch establishes conditions associated with a particular stage and, if interpreted as intended, the realised material should remain within those organisational conditions. Across the wider methodology, however, particular material may remain within one stage, make another stage extremely brief, or make some distinctions difficult to isolate. The reduplicated canonical stage, for example, may be bypassed entirely if the original sound-unit features internal repetition.

Progression between the exploratory stages occurs primarily through changes in the conditions established by subsequent sketches. Gesture and musical-strand formation operate differently because they depend upon what the material actually does within those conditions. A variegated-canonical sketch can remain non-gestural, and the conversational stage can occur without producing a musical strand. These thresholds are therefore analytical judgements based on perceptible behaviour rather than procedural stages that must be deliberately completed.

The exploratory phase can therefore be summarised as:

marginal stage → reduplicated canonical stage → variegated canonical stage → gesture threshold → conversational stage → musical-strand threshold

Material-drift begins during the variegated canonical stage and can continue beyond the musical-strand threshold into the subsequent compositional phase; it does not constitute a separate stage within the sequence.

The language-acquisition model becomes significant to the philosophical enquiry precisely because it offers an observable example of complexity emerging through repeated activity, differentiation and relation rather than through the execution of a fully specified design. The exploratory methodology abstracts a developmental principle from babbling rather than reconstructing infant vocal development literally: establish an identity under bounded conditions, organise its repetition, allow difference to emerge within continuity, bring differentiated identities into consequential relation, and allow the effects of those encounters to inform what becomes possible next.

Understood in this way, babbling provides a local methodological enactment of the recursive self-experimentation developed in Part I. A possibility is manifested under particular conditions; its consequences become perceptible through performance and reflection; those consequences can transform how the material, the performer’s capacities and the developing enquiry are understood; and that transformed understanding informs the conditions of subsequent exploration. The methodology makes this recursive structure practically investigable without requiring the larger trajectory to be known in advance.

The exploratory methodology is consequently iterative rather than merely sequential. What occurs in one exploration provides information from which later sketches are constructed. A restriction may reveal an unexpected capacity in the sound-unit; a performer may identify a variable the composer had not considered; a particular manifestation may suggest that previously independent parameters should be brought into relation. Subsequent sketches are therefore not fixed in advance but remain responsive to what earlier encounters make perceptible. The conditions of later exploration emerge partly from the consequences of earlier exploration.

Material agency participates in this development because affordances, resistances and emerging behaviours can affect which organisational conditions become productive to investigate next. The methodology therefore specifies forms of organisation without predetermining the particular developmental route any material must take.

This iterative structure is also what allows the performer’s difference to become consequential. The sketches establish bounded conditions, but the performer encounters those conditions through an instrumental, embodied and perceptual knowledge different from my own. Their responses and reflections can alter what I understand the material to be capable of and therefore affect the construction of subsequent prompts. Collaborative difference becomes methodologically consequential because its effects can change the conditions of what happens next.

The apparent paradox at the centre of the methodology is therefore that constraint enables emergence. The process does not seek openness by removing boundaries altogether. It establishes sufficiently precise local restrictions for unforeseen behaviours to become perceptible and traceable, while withholding determination of the larger trajectory towards which those discoveries may eventually contribute. Each exploration is locally bounded; the developmental pathway is not fully known.

The exploratory phase thereby moves from bounded investigation of a sound-unit towards increasingly articulated musical organisation without requiring the eventual form to precede the process through which it emerges. By the musical-strand threshold, the exploratory phase has produced relationally coherent material without yet determining how that material will contribute to the global organisation of the piece.

The exploratory methodology can therefore be understood as a practical mechanism for keeping material development open while making that development traceable. Composer and performer both participate in developing the material while retaining differentiated creative functions: notational possibilities may be explored collaboratively while I retain responsibility for producing the notation, and the performer retains responsibility for its sonic realisation. Agency over what the material becomes is therefore distributed across distinct creative functions rather than requiring composer and performer to undertake the same forms of work.

The emergence of musical strands marks a change in methodological purpose. The exploratory phase has generated material whose identities and relations are sufficiently developed for the collaboration to enter a compositional phase, understood here in the literal sense of ‘putting together’. The following chapter considers how musical strands continue to develop collaboratively towards piece-form and how piece-form strands can subsequently be brought into relation within the global organisation of a piece.

From musical strands to global organisation

The musical-strand threshold marks a change in methodological purpose. During the exploratory phase, sound-units are stabilised, differentiated and brought into consequential relation so that musical possibilities can emerge without the larger form of the piece being predetermined. Once musical strands have emerged, the methodology enters a compositional phase in which those developing materials are progressively shaped and brought together at larger scales. I use composition here in its literal sense of ‘putting together’: the emphasis shifts from discovering what individual materials can become towards establishing how developed musical identities can coexist, interact and contribute to the formation of a piece.

This compositional phase is not yet fully established in practice. Earlier collaborations have necessarily involved the production of complete pieces, but I only recently came to understand this later phase as a distinct transition from exploration towards the deliberate ‘putting together’ of developed musical strands. The account that follows sets out a current methodological hypothesis whose procedures will be exercised and refined through the ongoing research.

The compositional phase can provisionally be differentiated into three stages: collaborative strand development, in which musical strands continue to develop towards piece-form; collaborative global organisation, in which piece-form strands are brought into relation at the scale of the piece; and score construction, in which I assume primary responsibility for constituting the emerging organisation in notation. These stages are functionally distinct but recursively connected, so that later developments may reopen decisions made earlier.

The first stage, collaborative strand development, takes the musical strand as its principal entity of investigation. Crossing the musical-strand threshold establishes that a group of gestures has acquired sufficient perceptual and structural coherence to function as a larger-scale musical entity, while leaving that entity open to further development. Material-drift can continue at this larger scale: rather than following the transformation of a sound-unit or gesture, the collaboration can now investigate how the identity of the strand changes through successive versions while remaining traceable across them.

The composer and performer continue to explore the consequences of the strand’s emerging characteristics. Its internal proportions, temporal behaviour, density, contour, pacing, recurrence, articulation and internal relations may continue to change as successive manifestations reveal what strengthens, obscures or redirects its developing identity. The purpose is to follow the implications of what has emerged through the exploratory phase until the strand becomes sufficiently articulated to function compositionally.

The piece-form threshold is reached when further development no longer clarifies or strengthens the emerging identity of a strand and would instead begin to make it into something else. Piece-form therefore marks a local boundary rather than absolute completion. The strand has become sufficiently developed to enter the larger compositional organisation of the piece, while remaining one finite manifestation within a process that could, under different conditions, have developed otherwise. The decision that a strand has reached piece-form is consequently provisional and situated: it concerns what the material has become within this particular history of collaborative development rather than identifying an ideal or universally final version of that material.

This distinction preserves the open-endedness of material-drift while allowing composition to proceed. Piece-form provides a locally sufficient point at which development can give way to relation at another scale. The compositional question changes from ‘what can this strand become?’ towards ‘what becomes possible when this strand is placed in relation with others?’

The second stage, collaborative global organisation, begins when two or more strands that have reached piece-form are brought into consequential relation. Relation at this scale can take many forms. One strand may interrupt another, overlap with it, displace it, alter its apparent function, or create expectations that another fulfils or frustrates. The global form of the piece can therefore emerge through the organisation of relations between strands rather than through the execution of a large-scale scheme specified before those strands existed.

Global organisation may also involve an extramusical organising structure brought into relation with the musical strands, such as a narrative, number sequence or other predetermined framework. Here, extramusical means external to the musical material under development rather than ontologically external to the relational field in which that material exists. Such a structure enters the developing relational field as another compositional condition. Its introduction could affect the ordering, proportion, recurrence or interaction of strands, while the musical consequences of those relations could in turn affect how the external structure is interpreted compositionally. Global form may therefore emerge both through relations among musical strands and through their encounter with additional organising conditions introduced at this larger scale.

Once relations between strands begin to generate a larger structure, however, influence can also move back in the opposite direction. An emerging global organisation may reveal that a strand needs to become shorter or longer, quieter or louder, sparser or denser, or otherwise differently proportioned in order to participate effectively in the developing whole. A strand previously judged to have reached piece-form may therefore require further development once it is encountered at the scale of the piece. Piece-form is consequently a locally sufficient state that may be reopened when new relations expose previously unavailable consequences.

This reciprocal movement gives methodological substance to a belief that has always guided my compositional practice: that ‘the music will teach you how to write it’. As individual materials develop, they condition the possibilities available to the emerging whole; once a larger organisation begins to become perceptible, that whole establishes new conditions through which its constituent materials are encountered. Local and global organisation therefore develop recursively: the individual informs the whole, while the emerging whole in turn informs what the individual may need to become.

A related principle has characterised my compositional practice throughout: I compose from inside out rather than outside in. Larger-scale organisation develops from the identities, capacities and relations of musical materials as they become perceptible through the process, rather than those materials being assigned in advance to functions within a completed formal design. This does not exclude predetermined constraints or organising structures. Such structures can establish conditions within which the music develops without specifying in advance what the materials will become or how their relations will ultimately resolve.

The distinction between piece-form and global organisation gives methodological form to this inside-out orientation. The finished piece is not produced by progressively enlarging one initial idea according to a pre-existing large-scale design. Sound-units develop into gestures; gestures enter consequential relations through which musical strands emerge; strands continue to develop towards piece-form; and only then do the relations between those locally developed entities become the principal material of global organisation. Each scale depends upon possibilities that became available through the preceding one without being fully determined by it.

I currently intend collaborative global organisation to take place principally in person, with the collaborating performer or performers. This will allow piece-form strands to be tested in relation through immediate musical exchange, so that questions of ordering, interruption, overlap, proportion and other larger-scale relationships can be explored responsively.

Working in person will, however, complicate the documentation of distributed agency. The exploratory sketches create comparatively discrete prompts, realisations and reflections through which particular transformations can be reconstructed, whereas decisions made through immediate musical exchange may emerge rapidly from overlapping suggestions, reactions and perceptions. By this stage, sustained intra-action (Barad, 2007) may also have transformed the participants’ creative capacities and expectations sufficiently that particular decisions cannot always be understood as originating cleanly with one person before entering the relation. Attribution of agency may therefore become less granular at the scale of global organisation.

The global-form threshold is reached when the relations among piece-form strands, together with any additional organising conditions brought into the process, have become sufficiently coherent for the emerging organisation to function as a larger-scale musical whole.

The third stage, score construction, becomes the principal activity once a sufficiently coherent global organisation has emerged. This work may continue even after the piece first reaches a performable form. I have recently undertaken revisions to the full score and parts of works composed only three or four years earlier because I have found that, even within this relatively short period, my notational practice has developed sufficiently for earlier solutions to require reconsideration. In some cases, the safest way to undertake extensive notational revision has been to reconstruct the entire score in Sibelius, reducing the possibility of errors arising through piecemeal alteration. What is being reconsidered is the notation, not the music. Sometimes these changes are primarily presentational; at other times, they concern more fundamentally what the performer sees on the page and how that notation may shape its interpretation.

Revising the notation may change how reliably the existing piece is communicated and realised without necessarily altering its musical identity. I am particularly cautious about editing the actual musical material within a pre-existing piece. That piece was written by a previous version of myself – a self I cannot access in the same form now. I therefore consider re-composition a dangerous proposition: once the musical material is reopened, every decision that the present composer would make differently can become a candidate for revision, and attempting to reconcile the earlier work with my present compositional instincts could become effectively unbounded. I therefore understand the recursive relation between score construction and piece as permitting continued development of the score while treating the musical identity of the completed work as comparatively stable.

These recursive movements can reopen earlier stages of the methodology. Global organisation may return a strand to collaborative strand development, while score construction may expose problems in the global organisation or in the strand. The distinction between the exploratory and compositional phases therefore concerns their principal methodological purposes, while allowing later conditions to reopen earlier questions.

The compositional phase extends the ontology developed in Part I to a larger organisational scale. A strand that has reached piece-form retains a distinct identity while entering relations that alter its function and significance; the larger piece acquires form through those relations without reducing its constituent strands to interchangeable parts. Local distinctness and larger-scale organisation therefore develop together. The piece becomes more than an accumulation of strands because their relations generate consequences that belong to the organisation of the whole, while the whole remains dependent upon the differentiated materials through which it is realised.

The reciprocal movement between strand and global form also provides a local compositional instance of agency operating across nested scales: larger organisations condition their constituent parts while remaining dependent upon the activity and differentiation of those parts. Although the process is initiated from inside out, development does not remain exclusively one-directional. As a larger organisation becomes manifest, it acquires capacities to condition the materials through which it arose, while changes to those materials continue to alter the organisation of the whole. Global form is consequently produced through recursive movement between scales rather than through a one-directional accumulation of increasingly large structures.

The movement from strand development to piece can therefore be provisionally summarised as:

collaborative strand development ↔ piece-form threshold ↔ collaborative global organisation ↔ global-form threshold ↔ score construction ↔ piece

Material-drift can continue across the compositional phase for as long as the musical material remains under development, but the entity whose becoming is followed and the compositional question being asked change with scale. During collaborative strand development, the concern remains the emerging identity of the strand; once strands reach piece-form, attention increasingly shifts towards the relations through which those identities can participate in a larger structure. Where global organisation or score construction reveals a need for further local transformation, material-drift may return to the strand before the revised material is encountered again within the whole. The compositional trajectory is therefore recursive across scales rather than strictly unidirectional. Revisions confined to notation do not constitute material-drift, because the musical identity being traced remains stable.

This introduces a further methodological question. As the process moves towards larger scales, decisions become progressively less reducible to the controlled comparison of individual variables. Recognising that a strand has reached piece-form, sensing that a particular relation between strands is generative, or deciding that an emerging global organisation should be followed rather than abandoned requires forms of judgement that cannot be supplied by procedural constraint alone. The same is true when a developing whole appears to demand that one of its constituent strands be reconsidered, or when an extramusical organising structure appears to reveal a relationship that had not previously been perceptible. The methodology therefore depends upon both structures that permit possibilities to emerge and upon the capacity to notice those possibilities, remain open to their implications and trust what becomes perceptible through the process. The following chapter turns to the role of receptivity, intuition and trust.

Receptivity, intuition and trust

The preceding chapter identified a point at which procedural constraint alone can no longer determine what should happen next. Recognising that a developing relation is generative, sensing that material has reached a threshold of sufficient coherence or deciding which possibility to follow requires a receptive form of judgement. I use receptivity here to describe an attentive openness to possibilities made perceptible through the developing process, and intuition to describe the recognition of such possibilities before their significance can necessarily be fully articulated or rationalised.

I sometimes describe unexpected compositional ideas as ‘genies’. They arrive as impulses, solutions or directions that I do not experience myself as having consciously constructed. I cannot summon them directly, but sustained compositional activity appears to make their arrival more likely: the more time I spend at my desk, ready to write, the more likely it is that a genie will visit. The phenomenology of such experiences has parallels in research on creative insight and incubation, where solutions may appear suddenly without the intervening process being experienced as deliberate conscious construction (Gilhooly, 2016). Henri Poincaré describes a closely related pattern in mathematical creation, where periods of deliberate preparatory work may be followed by apparently sudden illumination arising from processes that have continued beyond conscious attention (Poincaré, 1910). His account is particularly relevant to my own experience because the unexpected insight does not replace sustained work; it appears to depend upon it. The ‘genie’ is therefore less an alternative to creative labour than one of the forms through which the consequences of that labour may later become consciously available. It can be understood as one phenomenological form of intuition: a possibility becomes consciously recognisable before the process through which it arose can necessarily be fully articulated.

Within the ontology developed in Part I, such experiences can be understood as possibilities within universal consciousness becoming locally perceptible through an individuated perspective. An idea may arise beyond the consciously directing self while remaining an event within consciousness.

Sustained creative practice may cultivate greater receptivity to such possibilities. Creators repeatedly practise attending to thoughts, impulses, sensations, motivations and emerging possibilities that do not appear to have been produced through deliberate conscious intention. Through this practice, they may become more accustomed to recognising and responding to an idea when it arises. The distinction is therefore not between creative and non-creative beings, but between different habits and degrees of receptivity. A person who creates regularly may be more likely to notice, retain and develop an emerging possibility because they have repeatedly practised making themselves available to such moments.

Rudolf Steiner similarly understood artistic practice as cultivating forms of perception and attentiveness that extend beyond ordinary conceptual thought (Steiner, 1964). I locate this receptivity wholly within universal consciousness, as a cultivated sensitivity to possibilities arising within it.

Receptivity does not make the creator a passive conduit. Whatever becomes perceptible is encountered through the particular body, history, skills, materials, relationships and conditioning of the individuated creator, all of which participate in determining what that possibility becomes as it is manifested.

A possibility may also be remarkably persistent. Within this framework, I wonder whether a possibility that fails to become manifest through one individuation might remain available within universal consciousness and become perceptible through another person, or another configuration of conditions. In this sense, creators may participate in the manifestation of possibilities rather than simply possessing them.

Simone Weil’s account of attention provides a useful parallel for this understanding of receptivity. For Weil, attention involves suspending the effort to impose an answer and cultivating a readiness to receive what presents itself (Weil, 2005). The distinction between seeking an answer through deliberate effort and making oneself available to what may emerge closely resembles the receptive state I associate with creative work. Receptivity in this sense is an active practice: working, listening, testing and thinking establish the conditions through which possibilities may become perceptible.

Harvey describes a closely related orientation from within compositional practice. Reflecting on how a piece begins, he remarks that “If I knew where I was going I wouldn’t want to compose,” describing instead a period of circling around until a faint idea begins to emerge and conscious and unconscious processes enter into relation (Harvey, 1996, “What about composing?” section). His wider writing on inspiration likewise treats composition as involving sources and processes that exceed straightforward conscious construction (Harvey, 1999b). Harvey’s account is particularly resonant with my own because uncertainty forms part of the condition through which discovery becomes possible.

Harvey frequently interprets inspiration through spiritual and unconscious dimensions; within the ontology developed here, what exceeds conscious direction remains within universal consciousness. From an individuated perspective, an idea arising beyond conscious direction may nevertheless be experienced as though it has arrived from elsewhere. His description therefore provides a specifically musical precedent for the receptive compositional state I associate with the arrival of a ‘genie’.²

John Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience helps clarify this reciprocity between receptivity and action. His distinction between doing and undergoing describes creative experience as an alternation between acting upon a situation and receiving the consequences of that action, rather than as uninterrupted intentional control (Dewey, 1934). Receptivity therefore forms one phase of agency, as action produces consequences that must be perceived and undergone before further action becomes possible. This reciprocity also underlies the claim in the preceding chapter that ‘the music will teach you how to write it’, since the developing work can condition what happens next only if its consequences are perceived.

This also helps explain why I associate receptivity with process rather than outcome. I suspect that creators who attend primarily to what is emerging, rather than continually measuring the work against a predetermined result, are more likely to experience these moments of unexpected insight. An outcome-focussed orientation narrows attention towards what has already been imagined; a process-focussed orientation leaves greater space for possibilities that were not anticipated at the outset to become perceptible. In this sense, the familiar injunction to ‘trust the process’ acquires a precise meaning within my practice: trust consists in continuing to work attentively without requiring the destination to be known in advance.

Experimental composition can therefore involve a decentring of the directing self. This does not require the suppression of individuality or compositional intention: the creator remains a differentiated participant whose perceptions, decisions and responsibilities continue to matter. What is relinquished is the expectation that the possibilities presently available to the composer should determine in advance what the developing work becomes. Receptivity allows material, collaborators and accumulated consequences to alter what the composer is subsequently capable of perceiving and intending.

This trust becomes most tangible when structural questions remain unresolved. I frequently work towards a piece without knowing how its eventual structure will be resolved. Ideas emerge, become manifest and generate consequences that suggest further possibilities. Structural solutions often emerge only after sufficient material has accumulated and the relations between its elements have become apparent. I therefore trust that sustained attention to the developing work can disclose possibilities that could not have been specified at the outset. The resulting structure may therefore appear retrospectively coherent without having existed prospectively as a plan.

Hirokazu Miyazaki’s understanding of hope as a method of knowledge formation provides a useful context for this orientation towards an unresolved future (Miyazaki, 2004). Here, trust is a willingness to continue acting within conditions whose consequences remain unknown, allowing the process to generate knowledge about what may become possible rather than assuming that a predetermined solution already exists.

This relationship between commitment to the process and control over its outcome also recalls the distinction between action and its fruits articulated in the Bhagavad Gita (2.47). The practitioner is called to act without claiming control over the results that action will produce (Easwaran, 2007, 2.47).

Within my own practice, this distinction becomes particularly concrete. I can undertake the labour through which a piece develops: I can think, write, listen, test and establish conditions for further possibility. The unforeseen connections or solutions that emerge from that activity remain beyond my independent determination. The artist is therefore responsible for establishing and participating in the conditions of creation without independently determining everything those conditions produce. Within the ontology developed here, the consequences of that labour emerge from a wider relational process in which artist, material, other participants and accumulated consequences all contribute to what becomes possible. Trust consists partly in accepting this distinction: undertaking the labour while relinquishing the demand to determine its outcome in advance.

Such relinquishment necessarily involves risk. An open outcome requires the artist to continue working without knowing whether the developing material will ultimately resolve into a coherent piece.

In my experience, this trust directly affects receptivity. When I become anxious that a particular direction may not resolve, attention begins to narrow towards the problem of producing a satisfactory outcome. The more urgently I attempt to force a solution, the less receptive I become to possibilities arising from the process. Conversely, when I trust the process enough to continue attending to what is emerging without demanding a resolution, unexpected connections and solutions are more likely to become perceptible. Trust and receptivity therefore reinforce one another: trust sustains the openness through which unforeseen possibilities can emerge, while repeated experiences of such emergence strengthen trust in the process. In my practice, creative blockage can occur when this relation contracts. Trust does not guarantee success; it enables the artist to remain within uncertainty long enough for possibilities that could not have been predetermined to become available.

This reciprocal relation between trust and receptivity also draws attention to agency at the level of the developing process. I use the term process agency to describe the emergent conditioning capacity produced by the accumulated relations between participants, materials and prior events. Participant and material agency identify capacities associated with particular constituents; process agency names the way the accumulated history of the process begins to condition its own continuation. As manifestations, decisions and encounters accumulate, they establish conditions that constrain and enable what can happen next; possibilities become available because of what the process has already become.

Process agency is therefore relational and emergent rather than autonomous. It arises at the level of the relational system formed through participants, materials and their accumulated consequences. Rosman’s account of emergent behaviours in long-term collaboration provides a useful precedent here, since repeated interaction can generate capacities that cannot be reduced to either participant considered in isolation (Rosman, 2021). I extend that principle here to the developing compositional phase of the methodology. The recursive movement between strand, global organisation and score construction provides one manifestation of this: accumulated relations begin to condition which subsequent changes become available or necessary. ‘Trusting the process’ can therefore be understood quite literally as allowing that developing relational system to participate in conditioning what becomes possible next.

The writing of this enquiry provides an example of that trust in practice. I did not begin the research knowing that its compositional methodology and my wider ontological thinking would become intelligible as aspects of the same enquiry. That relation became perceptible only after sustained work in both areas had accumulated sufficient material, experience and reflection for the connection to emerge. What now appears retrospectively coherent was not available prospectively as a plan. Recognising that relation transformed my understanding of both the compositional methodology and the ontology, and that transformed understanding altered the possibilities available to the enquiry from that point onwards. From within the ontology proposed here, this can be understood as universal consciousness discovering a new relation through one of its localised perspectives: sustained attention created the conditions through which a previously unrealised possibility could become perceptible.

The ‘genie’ therefore does not arrive instead of the creative process; it becomes possible through it. Its appearance depends partly upon the conditions established by previous work, while its manifestation changes those conditions in turn. Creative intuition consequently forms one of the ways in which new possibility becomes locally available within the recursive movement described throughout this account.

Within this ontology, sustained work, attention and receptivity become conditions through which universal consciousness may locally encounter possibilities not previously available to that perspective. Creative practice can therefore become a site in which such possibilities are generated, encountered, tested and made available to reflection. The following chapter considers more directly how composition can function in this sense as ontological enquiry.

2. A comparable relationship between deliberate method and emergent possibility can be found in Salvador Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method, which sought to make irrational associations available to artistic practice while subjecting them to systematic critical activity (Dalí, 1998). Dalí also deliberately cultivated the hypnagogic threshold between waking and sleep as a source of creative imagery, attempting to capture ideas arising as deliberate conscious direction loosened. His relevance here lies particularly in the deliberate cultivation of receptivity. Rather than simply waiting for inspiration, the artist establishes conditions in which something unavailable to straightforward conscious construction may become perceptible. ↩

Creative practice as ontological enquiry

Creative practice provides a particularly direct means of encountering becoming because every creative venture involves, in some way, bringing into being something whose eventual form does not yet exist. A creator may begin with more or less determinate intentions, but making necessarily involves a passage from possibility into manifestation through which relations, consequences and forms become available that were not present in the same way beforehand. At the centre of both the philosophical enquiry developed here and creative practice, therefore, is the question of becoming: how something comes to acquire a form that did not previously exist. Part I approaches this question ontologically, asking how universal consciousness becomes through what it manifests and experiences; creative practice encounters the same concern locally through processes of making.

This concern with becoming is not limited to collaborative practice. A piece produced from a single individuated perspective may equally depend upon processes whose consequences are discovered through their unfolding. The final chapter returns to ILDIO and Digon!, two ensemble works composed outside the collaborative methodology I am developing through my PhD research, as particularly clear examples: both establish conditions through which a musical identity emerges without that identity being fully determined in advance. Their significance here is that creative practice need not begin as an explicitly philosophical experiment in order to enact processes of becoming. Such processes can subsequently become available to philosophical reflection precisely because the work has made them manifest.

The value of this methodology as ontological enquiry lies in its capacity to translate philosophical propositions into compositional conditions through which their consequences can be encountered. Within the methodology, claims concerning openness, relation, distributed agency, manifestation, transformation and the emergence of novelty acquire practical form: possibilities are constrained without being fully determined; material is allowed to develop through successive manifestations; differently situated participants are permitted to affect what becomes possible next; and the consequences of those encounters are allowed to alter subsequent conditions. The methodology therefore makes particular dimensions of creative becoming deliberately explicit and investigable.

These conditions allow the methodology to investigate the practical consequences, internal coherence and generative capacity of the ontology. If an ontological proposition suggests that relation generates genuinely new possibility, for example, the methodology can bring differently situated participants into consequential relation and allow the resulting transformations to be traced. If the ontology understands identity as persistent but unfinished, material-drift can investigate what happens when musical identity is permitted to remain continuous through transformation without being fixed in advance. If agency is understood as shared across differentiated participants and conditions, collaborative practice can investigate how composer, performer, material and process participate differently in determining what becomes possible next. The correspondence between practice and ontology is therefore methodological and structural.

Creative practice can also participate in the continuing development of the ontology that initially informs it. What occurs in practice can reveal distinctions, complications and consequences that were not conceptually available beforehand. It can also resist, complicate or contradict expectations generated by the methodology, and those consequences themselves become findings. Barrett similarly presents speculation and practice as reciprocal, showing how an enquiry can develop beyond its initial terms as unforeseen circumstances redirect its course and the consequences of speculative ideas become apparent through practical exploration (Barrett, 2022). Practice, on this account, can alter the questions the enquiry becomes capable of asking.

The relationship between ontology and practice within my own research is similarly recursive: philosophical propositions inform the conditions of enquiry, while what becomes manifest through those conditions can alter the philosophical understanding from which subsequent enquiry proceeds. The practical research has already required increasingly precise distinctions between sound-unit, gesture, musical strand, piece-form and global form; clarified the methodological different between exploratory and compositional phases; revealed the significance of sound-unit families and emergent thresholds; and brought material, process and institutional agency into sharper philosophical focus. The developing methodology has therefore produced conceptual distinctions that were not available in the same form at the outset of the research. The PhD thereby becomes a local instance of the recursive self-experimentation developed in Part I, as manifestations and their consequences transform understanding and alter the possibilities available to subsequent enquiry.

Because the practical enquiry concerns processes of becoming, its capacity to make their development traceable is particularly important. The emergence of novelty through relation, distributed agency, transformation through manifestation and the unfolding of material-drift can be observed across time through sketches, recordings and written accounts. Documentation participates in the enquiry by keeping earlier states of becoming available for comparison, reflection and subsequent decision-making. Scott Baldwin treats documents as active components of musical practice, providing a useful precedent for understanding documentation as capable of participating in creative and analytical processes as well as recording them (Baldwin, 2017). The methodology therefore produces a traceable record of how particular possibilities emerge, change and acquire consequences, making their pathways of becoming available for examination alongside what is eventually produced.

Speculative propositions can also function as generative conditions for practice. Erin Manning’s concept of the proposition is useful here in a specifically methodological sense. A proposition can open a field of potential without determining what that field will produce (Manning, 2016). Within practice-led enquiry, an ontological proposition can therefore function as a condition for experimentation: its significance lies partly in what becomes perceptible when practice is organised in relation to it. Its consequences can then be encountered, traced and allowed to inform the developing enquiry. Such propositions can therefore become intellectually and creatively productive through the consequences they generate.

Creative practice becomes ontological enquiry when the processes through which something comes into being are themselves allowed to generate understanding about the nature of becoming. All creative ventures participate in such processes; my PhD methodology makes them particularly available for deliberate examination by establishing bounded conditions in which musical forms can emerge without being fully determined in advance, preserving a trace of their development, and allowing what occurs in practice to transform the philosophical understanding from which the enquiry began. The relationship therefore moves recursively in both directions: the ontology conditions the practice, while the practice can transform the ontology through the consequences it makes perceptible. This raises the final implication considered in Part II: through such local processes of creative enquiry, universal consciousness may develop reflexive awareness of aspects of its own becoming.

Composition as the Universe becoming conscious of itself

Creative practice is one of the means through which local reflexive awareness can arise within universal consciousness. Through finite acts of manifestation, aspects of its own creativity become available to experience, reflection and transformed understanding. Composition provides a particularly concentrated form of this reflexivity, making the movement from possibility through manifestation, relation, affect, experience and transformed self-understanding towards new possibility perceptible through creative activity. By ‘becoming conscious of itself’, I therefore do not mean that an otherwise unconscious Universe acquires consciousness. Consciousness is already fundamental within the ontology developed here; what can emerge through individuation is local reflexive awareness of aspects of the Universe’s own activity.

My concern with the relationship between music and becoming predates the present research. In my master’s research, I approached this relationship principally through time, arguing that music both gives form to time and remains dependent upon temporal succession. I was particularly interested in the fact that a musical work is never perceptually available in its entirety: listening takes place through an accumulating relation between what is presently sounding, what is retained through memory and what is anticipated but has not yet occurred (Morgan-Williams, 2019). At that stage, my concern was primarily with musical temporality and the limits of human temporal perception. The ontology developed through the present enquiry allows me to return to that problem differently. What interests me now is not simply that music unfolds in time, but that its unfolding provides an experiential model of becoming.

This becomes particularly significant when the musical future is considered as genuinely unresolved. What has already sounded conditions what can be anticipated, but anticipation does not determine what will occur. Each new event changes the relational field from which the music is experienced, potentially confirming, disrupting or retrospectively transforming the significance of what preceded it. Musical experience therefore places consciousness continually at the boundary between an accumulated history and a future that has not yet become manifest.

This temporal condition is not confined to the experience of listening. The process of composing can exhibit a comparable structure. While a piece is being made, what has already been manifested becomes part of the conditions from which subsequent possibilities are encountered. A decision may reveal consequences that were unavailable before it was made, while relations between materials may become perceptible only after those materials have been brought into coexistence. The composer therefore encounters the developing piece prospectively, as its process unfolds and before its eventual form is available.

This prospective condition became the subject of my ensemble piece ILDIO (Morgan-Williams, 2025b). The piece presents the process of finding a coherent musical idea as the piece itself. It begins with twelve discrete layers whose materials are deliberately differentiated from one another, producing a field of competing possibilities with a high degree of internal contrast. This reflects something of my own experience before an idea has cohered, when numerous musical possibilities can seem simultaneously present.

The large-scale process was predetermined. I knew that the twelve layers would progressively converge towards one, and the timings of those transitions were established in relation to the required duration of the piece, with each successive transition occurring after a shorter interval than the previous one. At each transition, a player left their original layer and became free to support one or more of the remaining layers, potentially moving between them before deciding where to remain. What I did not know was how those new relations would develop, which layers would attract support, and therefore which musical identity would ultimately prevail. The identity of the final surviving layer was not specified in advance but discovered through the act of composing.

This distinction between predetermined structure and emergent material outcome is important. The temporal framework established the conditions through which selection could occur, but material agency influenced the direction of that selection. As the piece developed, some layers generated further possibilities while others appeared to exhaust themselves or become less capable of sustaining further development. I followed those differences rather than forcing a particular layer to prevail. The final dominant idea was therefore not chosen before the process began; it emerged through sustained attention to the differing capacities and resistances of the materials as the piece unfolded.

Henri Bergson’s account of duration provides a useful philosophical context for this distinction. For Bergson, genuine duration is not simply the passage through a sequence whose outcome is already contained within its beginning; it involves invention and the continual emergence of novelty (Bergson, 1911). ILDIO operates according to a comparable distinction between predetermined conditions and an undetermined material future. Its temporal architecture established how the field would converge, but not what identity would emerge through that convergence. The piece therefore makes perceptible how a process can be highly structured without its outcome being fully specified in advance.

This becomes clearer when ILDIO is considered alongside Digon!, which was composed according to the same premise (Morgan-Williams, 2025a). Whereas ILDIO begins with twelve layers, each assigned to an individual player, Digon! begins with three layers of three players. Their contrasting instrumentation and starting materials establish different fields of possibility, so that the same underlying process produces different musical consequences. The comparison therefore makes tangible the interaction between predetermined conditions and material agency: the framework conditions when relations change, while the materials influence how those relations develop and what musical identity ultimately emerges. ³

The openness experienced while composing is less apparent once a piece has been completed. From a retrospective position, the relations within ILDIO and Digon! can appear coherent and even inevitable because the eventual outcome is already known. During composition, however, the identity that would prevail remained unresolved. The completed work can therefore conceal the contingency of its own becoming; what appears retrospectively as a coherent pathway was experienced prospectively as a field in which several futures remained possible.

This distinction gives the traceability of material-drift a further significance. Its purpose is not only to demonstrate continuity between earlier and later forms of a musical identity. By preserving successive manifestations, decisions and transformations, the methodology also retains evidence of moments at which the future of that identity remained unresolved. The trace records not an inevitable route towards a final form, but a history of becoming in which other possibilities remained available. Piece-form can consequently be understood retrospectively without being mistaken for the fulfilment of a destination that was already contained within the material at the outset.

Music makes this distinction between prospective becoming and retrospective coherence directly perceptible through its temporal unfolding. During composition, the composer cannot inhabit the developing piece from the perspective of its completion; during listening, the sounding future likewise remains unavailable until it arrives. What has already occurred generates expectations and constrains possibilities, but the next event must still arrive before its consequences can be experienced. Once the piece has ended, however, memory can reorganise those events as a completed whole. Music therefore allows consciousness to experience both becoming and, retrospectively, what becoming has made.

Within the ontology developed here, this correspondence is significant. Universal consciousness likewise encounters the consequences of its own unfolding through manifestations whose significance emerges through time. If the future is genuinely unfinished, then what becomes actual cannot be experienced in advance from the position of its eventual completion. Composition provides a local situation in which this condition can become experientially available; a future is produced through relations whose significance becomes knowable only as they occur.⁴

Creative practice intensifies this reflexive structure because a possibility manifested in notation, action or sound can subsequently be encountered from another moment or perspective within the same universal consciousness in which the creative act and its manifestation occur. The result is not simply production but self-relation: what is created can be experienced, interpreted and allowed to generate further possibility. In this way, the sequence developed in Part I – possibility, manifestation, relation, affect, experience, transformed self-understanding and new possibility – can acquire a locally perceptible creative form.

There is, however, an important difference between the bounded forms produced through creative practice and the unfolding of the Universe. An artwork can reach a point of completion. In music, however open the process of creation may have been, there comes a point at which its possibilities are provisionally settled, and a particular form is allowed to stand. In performance, too, the sounding process eventually reaches an ending. At the universal scale, no equivalent completion is available while universal consciousness remains capable of further manifestation, relation, novelty and transformation. Universal creativity remains open-ended for as long as divine becoming continues.

The boundedness of an artwork may therefore allow universal consciousness to encounter completion locally without implying that universal becoming is itself complete. Through composition, a process of becoming can be brought to a temporary conclusion and encountered retrospectively as a whole. A finite creative process can reach an ending and be experienced through an individuated perspective even while the wider reality of which it is a manifestation continues to unfold.

This does not mean that the completed piece becomes fixed in every respect. Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience is useful here because he understands an experience as having a movement towards consummation rather than simply stopping, while insisting that the resulting unity remains internally differentiated (Dewey, 1934). Completion can therefore be understood without requiring stasis. A composition may acquire sufficient coherence to constitute a bounded work while remaining capable of generating different experiences through subsequent performances, hearings and relations. A performer may encounter it differently in a later performance, a listener may hear previously unnoticed relations, and the composer may understand the piece differently in retrospect. The work can also affect subsequent creative activity, becoming part of the accumulated history from which further possibilities emerge. Completion is consequently local rather than absolute.

This distinction provides another way of understanding piece-form within my methodology. Piece-form does not represent the discovery of an ideal form towards which the material had always been moving. It marks the point at which a developing musical identity has acquired a form that can be allowed to stand and enter into further relations. The end of material-drift within one creative process therefore does not constitute the end of the material’s capacity to become; it marks a transition between kinds of becoming. What was previously transformed through composition can subsequently be transformed through performance, listening, memory and its influence upon future work.

Music shares with other temporal arts the capacity to make becoming experiential rather than merely conceptual. Its particular significance to this enquiry lies in the capacity of musical relations themselves to constitute what unfolds. Music need not represent anything beyond its own unfolding in order for difference, relation, transformation and consequence to become perceptible through time. The listener undergoes succession, retention, anticipation, surprise, recognition and ending; the piece requires something to become before the difference made by its having become can be experienced.

This is particularly apparent in ILDIO and Digon!. Their layers do not represent multiplicity; their sounding coexistence is multiplicity. Likewise, their convergence does not represent a process of relational transformation; it occurs through changing relations between the layers themselves. I did not design these works as demonstrations of the ontology developed here. Rather, their behaviour can now be recognised as continuous with principles that the present enquiry has made explicit.

This suggests an important distinction between composing about an ontology and discovering, retrospectively, that one’s compositional practice has already been behaving according to it. In ILDIO and Digon!, multiplicity, relation and emergence were not introduced as philosophical themes; they were already operative in the organisation of the music. These pieces also make clear that the inside-out orientation identified earlier in Part II predates the collaborative methodology developed through the consequences of locally developing materials as completed designs. Recognising that continuity has retrospectively produced knowledge that was unavailable before the pieces existed. Once manifested, the pieces could be encountered, reflected upon and understood in ways that had not previously been available. Composition therefore becomes a means not only of expressing thought but of producing conditions through which new thought becomes possible.

Within the ontology developed here, this process acquires a wider significance. If I am one individuated perspective of universal consciousness, then the understanding produced through creative practice is not mine in absolute isolation. When I create something whose consequences I could not have known in advance and subsequently discover something through encountering it, universal consciousness develops local reflexive awareness of its own creative activity that was not previously available in that form. Composition is therefore one of the processes through which the Universe develops local reflexive awareness of its own creativity in action.

Creative practice can consequently be understood as one local form of the Universe’s experimentation upon and through itself. The artist establishes conditions, manifests possibilities and attends to their consequences without standing outside the process through which those consequences emerge. Materials resist and afford, relations produce unforeseen effects, other participants contribute capacities unavailable to the artist alone, and the developing process acquires a history that conditions what can happen next. Through these locally organised creative acts, situations arise in which the Universe can surprise itself.

This gives more precise meaning to my earlier proposition that the Universe is curiosity made manifest. Curiosity need not imply that universal consciousness stands outside reality and poses questions to it. The question, experiment and discovery occur within the same unfolding reality. Through individuated creative activity, possibilities are manifested whose consequences cannot be completely known beforehand. Through experiencing those consequences, further possibilities become perceptible. Creative practice is one particularly concentrated form of this recursive self-experimentation.

This also gives individuation a particular creative function. Universal consciousness encounters its own activity through perspectives that are necessarily partial. The composer does not know everything the material will become; the performer does not know everything the composer experienced in making it; the listener does not know everything that will sound before it occurs. These differences do not require ontological separation. Rather, they create the local asymmetries through which surprise, discovery and transformed understanding become possible. Difference therefore becomes a condition of creative self-recognition: something can become newly perceptible precisely because no individuated perspective contains the whole of what the Universe may become. Composition intensifies these conditions by establishing differences, constraints and relations from which consequences can emerge without being completely predetermined. In collaborative practice, multiple perspectives and material conditions further expand the field from which unforeseen possibilities can arise.

Composition is one of the activities described by the ontology developed here. If creativity is fundamental to an unfinished Universe, human creativity is a local manifestation of the same ongoing capacity for possibility, manifestation, relation and transformation through which reality continues to become.

I use the term experimental composition to describe compositional practice oriented particularly towards process, becoming and discovery: practice in which the eventual identity of the work is allowed to emerge through consequences that cannot be completely known beforehand. Experimental composition treats the discovery of what may become possible as a central part of creative activity.

Such enquiry does not require collaboration. Composition undertaken from a single individuated perspective can equally allow unforeseen possibilities to emerge, as ILDIO and Digon! demonstrate. Collaboration changes the conditions of the enquiry by bringing differently situated perspectives into consequential relation, increasing the number and kinds of differences through which the developing work can be transformed. The collaborative methodology developed through my doctoral research therefore offers a particularly concentrated form of enquiry into relational becoming because it expands the field through which difference can become consequential. Bringing differently situated individuated perspectives into consequential relation generates possibilities, resistances and transformations that could not arise in the same way from a single perspective.

Composition can therefore be understood as one of the ways in which the Universe experiments with what it might become, encounters what it has made and develops local reflexive awareness of its own creativity in action. For me, this makes composition the most important activity a human being can undertake. It is perhaps the closest we can come to creating a Universe in miniature: we establish a bounded field of possibility, bring elements into relation, allow consequences to unfold through time, and encounter something whose full identity could not be known before it existed. Because music organises sound that can only be experienced temporally and need not represent a narrative in order to convey meaning, those processes of emergence, relation, transformation and consequence can themselves become the substance of the experience.

A composition is therefore a finite world of becoming: a bounded field in which possibilities are brought into relation, allowed to acquire consequences and encountered through their unfolding. Its significance lies not only in what is made, but in the fact that making changes what can subsequently be imagined, experienced and understood. In experimental composition, the Universe does not merely express what it already is; it discovers what else it can become.

3. A possible future development of the ILDIO/Digon! premise would allow performers to determine the convergent pathway in real time. Once released from an original layer, a player could choose which of the remaining layers to support, with multiple continuations available in the score. Distributed agency is already audible in ILDIO and Digon! through the interaction of structure, material and compositional decision-making; in this model, however, performer agency would become active during performance itself. The final prevailing identity could therefore emerge from the performers’ cumulative relational decisions as the piece unfolds. ↩
4. A contemporary philosophical parallel can be found in Arnold Zuboff’s universalism, which rejects the assumption that apparently separate conscious lives must belong to fundamentally separate subjects and instead argues for a single universal subject of consciousness (Zuboff, 2025). My position shares this insistence that individuation need not entail absolute subjective separation, but places greater emphasis on creativity and development. Universal consciousness becomes locally individuated as finite perspectives without being reducible to any one perspective; through those individuations, aspects of its unfolding become available to experience and transformed understanding. ↩

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