fragment on contingent histories

Anything that can be said to have temporal extent must be incident to germinal and terminal nodes. The cardinality of germinal- and terminalsets neatly characterizes metaphysical accounts of plurality and singularity. Perhaps more importantly, the existence of germinal and terminal paths characterizes particular claims about reachability — namely which singular states are within the terminal line of one singular state of note. In this way germinality and terminality neatly replace genealogy and teleology.

The previous formalism had latticelike values as an elementary (in the new newspeak: germinal) building block of axiologies. After some ruminative murmurs, axiologies melted into and exploded in the thousand-colored event known as General Axiology. In the new formalism this is a little twee: axiologies are terminal lines equipped with some ad hoc final-causalistic structure, and the problem of “swimming upwards” towards General Axiology is best characterized as the problem of avoiding backwards spillage towards germinal lines.