Wild Structure

David Morris's name for quantum mechanical systems read as Merleau-Pontian structures operating in wild being — structures that generate their own time-orders rather than presupposing them. The qualifier "wild" applied to structure (not just to "being" or "life") is the diagnostic move: it marks structures whose discontinuities and law-like behaviors arise from changes that ontologically generate, institute, the orders they turn out to have followed (Morris 2024, p. 168). The cardinal exemplars are Wheeler's delayed-choice photon and the recently demonstrated time-crystals.

A wild structure is not a classical *Structure of Behaviour*-style structure (soap bubble, oil drop, crystal). Classical SB-structures redistribute their forces in spatial forms via continuous physical flows — what looks like "discontinuity" to us is observer-side, not ontologically anchored. Wild structures are different: their orderings, continuities, and ruptures arise from changes not governed by the orders they end up manifesting. The discontinuity is in nature, not in our perception of it.

Key Points

  • A wild structure is a structure in which time-orders are generated, not presupposed. What makes structures "wild" is that they redistribute change-dynamics as time-forms (in the first place), rather than redistributing forces as spatial forms.
  • The ontological substrate is melting-time (temps fondant). Wild structures arise out of an indeterminate, undifferentiated change-substrate that is not yet a time-order. They are how temps fondant manifests itself as ordered, apparent time.
  • Empirical anchors: Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment (the photon-as-smoky-dragon between tail and mouth) and time-crystals (quantum systems that spontaneously break time-symmetry, oscillating at a multiple of the pump period from their immanent law).
  • Discontinuity is ontological, not epistemic. Where classical SB-structures show discontinuity only at the observer's articulation of laws (the redistribution operates via continuous physical flows), wild structures show discontinuity in the operations of nature itself — "leaps or crises" not foreordained in advance.
  • Carries an impuissance, not a puissance. Wild structures' indeterminate-being substrate is not absence (void, nothing) but a positive power of not-yet-being-determinate-change. This impuissance is what enables structures to be "wild" — to generate orders rather than presupposing them.
  • Implements MP's paradox of expression in physical matter. What in human creative expression is the paradox that the beginning's drive becomes clear only at the end is, in physical matter, the "delayed choice" of QM phenomena. Wild structure is the ontological form of expression in matter.

What the Concept Does

Wild structure performs three argumentative jobs in morris-2024-wild-structure-melting-time:

  1. It rotates the Structure of Behaviour concept of structure from spatial to temporal. SB's structures (soap bubbles, oil drops) redistribute their forces in spatial forms. Morris argues that MP's mature ontology requires rotating this redistribution into the temporal: wild structures distribute change-dynamics as time-forms. The "wild" qualifier marks the rotation: spatial-redistribution structures are "tame" (continuity of physical flows; observer-side discontinuity); temporal-redistribution structures are "wild" (ontological discontinuity; nature itself leaps).

  2. It applies MP's late "wild being" ontology to physics. The standard reception of MP's être sauvage anchors it in life, language, and Lebenswelt (the wiki's wild-being page is heavy on these registers). The Lefort folder title — "The Ontology of Wild Being (in particular life)" — suggests "in particular life" was a narrowing, not a universal scope. Morris's wild structure extends wild being to physics. The extension is conceptual, not metaphorical: quantum systems are literally MP-structures arising in MP's wild being.

  3. It permits a non-spatial-realist interpretation of QM. Wavefunction realism (states, pilot waves, many-worlds) treats the wavefunction as describing real entities running spatially alongside the apparatus. QBism treats it as describing only subjective expectations. Wild structure offers a third option: the wavefunction indirectly indicates a wild structure that is real in time — generating its time-form from change-dynamics, not running spatially elsewhere.

What It Rejects

  • Wavefunction realism's spatial doubles. Pilot waves, many-worlds, quantum states distributed in space alongside the apparatus — Morris's wild structure rejects all of these as flattenings of guiding-branching into invisible spatial parallels.
  • QBism's purely-subjective ontological reticence. QBism is right that the wavefunction does not describe spatial states. But QBism is wrong (per Morris) to leave it there — the wavefunction does indirectly indicate something real, namely the wild structure that generates the experimental phenomena.
  • Backward-in-time signaling. Adding the second beam splitter "after" the photon would have already passed the first does not require signals traveling backward in time. The wild structure is a temporal-distributive processioning (see processioning) over the entire time of the experimental trial; the appearance of "delayed choice" is what processioning looks like from a frame that presupposes pre-given time-orders.
  • Determinate-identity ontologies (including Smolin's residual Leibnizianism). Wild structures rest on indeterminate being, not on monads-as-determinate-identities. Smolin's "maximize difference" presupposes determinate identities to compare; Morris's imperfecting-expression dispenses with that presupposition.
  • Classical SB-structures as the model for QM phenomena. Soap bubbles and oil drops are continuity-of-flow structures whose discontinuity is observer-side. They are bridges (in the sense of *Structure of Behaviour*) but they are not wild; the rotation from spatial to temporal is what makes a structure wild.

Stakes

If wild structure is accepted, three things change:

First, the standard wavefunction-realism-vs-QBism dichotomy in philosophy of QM is dissolved. Both positions presuppose that ontological options are spatial options — either the wavefunction is real in space (realism) or it is not real at all in any robust sense (QBism). Wild structure offers a third axis: the wavefunction indirectly indicates a temporal reality, a wild structure generating time-forms locally. This dissolution depends on accepting that ontology can be temporal in a strong sense — that time-forms are not the medium in which ontology unfolds but the manifestation of underlying change-dynamics.

Second, MP's Structure of Behaviour concept of structure is rotated forward into late MP's ontology. The wiki currently has spontaneous-structuration as one bridge from SB into mature MP (via the 1949-52 Sorbonne lectures); wild structure offers another bridge, this time directly into philosophy of physics and into wild-being. The two bridges (spontaneous-structuration as developmental/biological; wild structure as physical) jointly map how MP's structure-concept generalizes from SB to the late ontology.

Third, MP's institution is given a physical register. IP 36/7's "time is the model of institution itself" — read by Morris as authorizing wild structures to institute the orders they manifest — extends institution beyond personal/biological/cultural domains into physical-ontological domains. Quantum systems institute time. The institution-extraction is non-trivial: institution wasn't a metaphor MP used loosely; it was a structural concept defined against constitution. Wild structures meet that structural definition.

The risks: wild structure rests on Morris's analogical reading of QM phenomena through MP's structural framework. Whether the analogy is demonstrative or merely suggestive is contestable. The cellular-automata "achronic cosmoi" thought experiments show conceptual cogency; they do not show that the actual physical world is a wild-structure-generating cosmos.

Problem-Space

Wild structure addresses the problem of how nature itself can be discontinuous, not merely articulable through laws that look discontinuous to observers. Classical mechanics, classical statistical mechanics, and even most interpretations of quantum mechanics treat discontinuity as observer-side: the equations are continuous, the laws are continuous, the apparent discontinuity arises from how we articulate the dynamics in distinct laws or distinct probabilistic outcomes. Wild structure rejects that observer-side localization: the discontinuity is in nature itself, in the operations of leap-and-rupture by which structures generate their own orders.

This problem-space is a generalization of the SB problem (how can structure operate in nature as the discontinuous norm-generating origin of sense, independent of our perception?) into philosophy of physics. The recurrence under different vocabularies — SB's "principle of discontinuity," IP's "institution" as discontinuous eruption, V&I's "wild being" as ontological ground, Wheeler's "volcanic time" and "law without law," Smolin's "unfreezing" of background structures — would warrant a future problem-space-tagged concept page if more sources independently articulate the same problem. For now, wild structure is the most explicit physics-side articulation in the wiki.

Connections

  • is a kind of MP-structure (SB sense) but rotated from spatial to temporal redistribution.
  • operates in wild-being — wild structures arise from wild being. Morris's wild structure extends wild being to philosophy of physics.
  • generates ontogenesis-of-time — wild structures' redistribution of change-dynamics as time-forms is the local ontogenesis of time.
  • operates through processioning — the temporal-distributive structure of wild structures' dynamics.
  • redistributes out of melting-time — the indeterminate change-substrate from which wild structures generate their time-forms.
  • exhibits imperfecting-expression — the principle of wild structures' generative dynamics; they manifest spatio-temporal forms with imperfections (entanglement, non-locality) constitutive of indeterminate being's expressive latitude.
  • implements MP's institution in physical matter — wild structures institute the time-orders they manifest, per IP 36/7's "time is the model of institution itself."
  • implements MP's paradox of expression in physical matter — see primordial-expression for the human-creative side.
  • contrasts with classical SB-structures — soap bubbles, oil drops, crystals. Classical structures redistribute spatially via continuous flows; wild structures redistribute temporally via ontologically discontinuous leaps.
  • exemplified by Wheeler's delayed-choice photon — see Wheeler for the experimental setup and the smoky-dragon image. Morris reads the photon "in between" tail and mouth as MP's indeterminate being.
  • exemplified by time-crystals — quantum systems that spontaneously break time-symmetry, oscillating at a multiple of the pump period from their immanent law.
  • converges with Smolin's temporal naturalism — but rejects Smolin's residual Leibnizian determinate-identity presupposition.
  • deformation of *Structure of Behaviour*'s structure-concept — the SB structure rotated into late MP's ontology and into philosophy of physics.

Open Questions

  • Cross-source attestation. Morris is currently the wiki's only source for the term "wild structure." Other late-MP scholars engaging philosophy of physics (or other physicists writing on MP) would either confirm the move or disconfirm it. Berghofer and Wiltsche 2024 (Phenomenology and QBism, cited in Morris note 4) is the most likely cluster of sources to confirm.
  • Relation to spontaneous-structuration. Spontaneous-structuration (Morris's MP-side concept-cluster, developed in the 1949-52 Sorbonne lectures) is structurally close to wild structure: both are MP's name for structure that generates rather than presupposing its order. Whether wild structure is the physical-ontological counterpart of spontaneous-structuration's biological-developmental counterpart, or whether the two concepts are doing different work, is open.
  • Time-crystals as MP-structures: how literal? The article's reading of time-crystals as wild structures rests on the spontaneous-symmetry-breaking of time-symmetry under pumping at period $P$. The pump itself comes from outside — this is not "wild" in the sense of uncaused. What makes time-crystals "wild" is that the period of oscillation is not determined by the pump's period but by the system's immanent law. Whether this reading captures the full physics is a question for physicists; Morris's philosophical reading is at least conceptually coherent.
  • Born rule. Morris's note 11 ties wild structures to the Born rule: "this leap and disparity between the now and the past gives reality to the Born rule." How wild-structure dynamics generate the squared-amplitude probability rule of QM is not developed in the article body. This is a load-bearing technical claim that would need separate development.

Synthetic Claims

  • candidate claim, see claims#quantum-systems-exhibit-merleau-pontian-wild-structure — Morris's structural-parallel reading of QM phenomena (Wheeler's delayed-choice photon, time-crystals) as exhibiting Merleau-Pontian wild structure. Quantum systems do not merely resemble MP-style structures — on Morris's reading they literally are wild structures arising in MP's wild being, generating their own time-orders from indeterminate change. Held at candidate; cross-domain attestation pending (Berghofer-Wiltsche 2024 Phenomenology and QBism would be the first corroborating cluster).
  • candidate claim, see claims#sb-ch3-contains-wild-structure-germ — the Structure of Behaviour (1942) Ch III material on the principle of discontinuity contains the germ of what Morris 2024 develops as wild structure. The wiki's reading reframes the cross-source relation: wild structure does not correct SB's 1942 vector but reactivates it — the SB Ch III raw 1360 passages on structure as discontinuous norm-generating origin of sense are the early-MP form of what late MP (and Morris reading late MP) names wild structure in the philosophy-of-physics register. Held at candidate because the reactivation reading depends on Morris's own line and on a reading of SB 1942 that the standard SB reception does not foreground.

Sources

  • morris-2024-wild-structure-melting-time — the article that develops the concept. The phrase "wild structure" appears at title (English / French / Italian abstracts), §1 p. 159, §5 p. 165, §6 p. 168.
  • Indirect anchors via Morris:
    • *Structure of Behaviour* passages on structure (SB 148/137, 153/142, 155/143). On the reactivates-rather-than-corrects reading authorized by claims#sb-ch3-contains-wild-structure-germ (candidate), wild structure does not stand outside SB's 1942 vector but takes up the SB Ch III principle-of-discontinuity material (raw 1360 cluster) into the philosophy-of-physics register late MP could not himself articulate.
    • merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity 36/7 (time as model of institution).
    • Wheeler on delayed choice and the smoky dragon.
    • Wilczek 2019 on time-crystals (Ball 2018b, 2018c).