Philosophy has long sought a single structural condition that makes intelligibility, worldhood, agency, selfhood, and temporality possible. Heidegger’s Being and Time is the twentieth century’s most audacious attempt at such identification. His thesis is uncompromising: the Being of Dasein is Care. Under this identity claim, Care is not merely an emotional or ethical register but the ontological primitive itself—the thing that makes worldhood possible.
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EXPECTATIONS RESET NOTE: I’m no longer sharing recipes since they’ve gotten quite involved and artisanal and at this point they’d be caricatures of what I actually do. I’m also not sharing chat transcript links by default, because with the memory feature turned on, ChatGPT often references my other interests and recent bunnytrails, and it’s harder to segregate chat contexts specific to an essay well, especially in extremely long and complex chats like the one that generated this essay. However, I’ll continue to share interesting meta-marginalia when they are interesting. You’ll find one such in the coda of this essay.
This essay argues that Heidegger chose the wrong primitive. Care cannot perform the conceptual labor he assigns to it. Yet Heidegger was not looking in the wrong direction. He correctly sensed a relational, temporal, world-disclosing structure beneath selfhood and experience. What he mistook for that structure was simply one local human-affective manifestation of it.
We will call the deeper phenomenon Configurancy.
Before we begin, here is a plain-language anchor definition, offered as an intuition pump for the reader:
Informal one-liner: Configurancy is the way things and people fit together over time so that a world takes shape.
And here is a more precise philosophical definition that anchors the essay:
Technical definition: Configurancy is the ongoing, relational, temporally unfolding process through which agents and worlds co-emerge as intelligible configurations—non-substantial, non-teleological, and non-anthropocentric in their generative structure.
Configurancy is not a newly posited metaphysical essence but a methodological hygiene term. Any natural-language candidate—structure, relation, process, worldhood—carries inherited commitments from earlier traditions. A neologism prevents accidental importation of those commitments. But coining a term does not imply positing an essence. Configurancy always appears situatedly, contingently, phenomenologically. It names a role in our explanations, not an occult substrate.
I. The Limits of Care
The dismissal of Care is straightforward.
Heidegger’s use of Sorge is linguistically fragile: its semantic range is wide, its affective load heavy, and its substitutability high. One could replace “Care” with “concern,” “devotion,” “responsibility,” “authenticity,” or “duty,” and Heidegger’s argument would proceed with minimal alteration. A term that can be swapped so freely cannot function as an ontological primitive.
Worse, Care is normatively loaded and smuggles a teleology into an ontology. Heidegger binds it to authenticity, resoluteness, heritage, conscience, finitude, and destiny. These are ethical, cultural, and psychological constructions masquerading as metaphysics. Worldhood cannot depend on participation in a particular evaluative posture.
Care, in short, is both too soft and too heavy: too semantically vague to ground ontology, too normatively dense to remain neutral.
Still, Heidegger’s impulse was not misguided. He saw that intelligibility is relational, that worldhood arises through practical involvement, that temporality structures disclosure, and that the self is emergent rather than original. He sensed an underlying engine of manifestation—dynamic, contextual, world-shaping.
He simply mistook the human-affective distortion of that engine for the engine itself.
One might object that replacing Care with Configurancy abandons Heidegger’s insistence on concreteness, embodiment, thrownness, and finitude. But Configurancy is not an abstraction away from these features. Rather, the elements of Heideggerian thought — thrownness, embodiment, the readiness or unreadiness at-hand of tools, finitude, the emergence of a They — are emergent effects of configurational processes under particular phenomenological circumstances. They are not foundational.
Configurancy generates concreteness. Heidegger studied the workshop; we are identifying the generative dynamics that make the workshop possible.
We can now state the corrected ontological identity:
Being = Configurancy.
Being is not a substance nor a hidden layer but the way configurational processes appear from within—persistence, identity, meaningful structure, actionable affordance. Being is the local manifestation of Configurancy.
The ego is neither an illusion nor a metaphysical anchor. It is a dynamically stabilized, historically contingent knot in configurational flow. Configurancy neither enthrones nor erases the ego; it explains it.
Configurancy also clarifies meaning-making without collapsing into teleology. It is an effectual rather than purposive praxis: worlds and agents arise through ongoing adjustments and co-shaping, not in pursuit of a pre-given end.
Teleology says: Meaning is what actions aim at. Effectuality says: Meaning is what configurations enable as they unfold. On this reading. Configurancy is the practical emergence of intelligibility, not its target. It does not posit an intended outcome (which would be Purpose). It does not posit an emotional orientation (which would be Care). It does not posit an affective commitment (which would be Love). It does not posit an ethical stance (which would be Authenticity).
Though chosen for connotations of configuration, our neologism Configurancy is not configuration or configuration dynamics.
A configuration is a static arrangement at a moment. Configuration dynamics are sequences of such arrangements. Configurancy is neither. It is the intelligibility-bearing relational-temporal structure in virtue of which configurations matter at all. A Git commit history is a configuration dynamic; the meaningful shape of a project emerging through that history is its configurancy.
Configurancy is the difference between “states changing” and “a world taking form.”
II. Configurancy in Philosophy
If Configurancy is a term of methodological hygiene rather than a metaphysical invention, we should expect existing philosophies to approximate it with varying degrees of fidelity. Using criteria of relational depth, non-teleology, non-essentialism, and resistance to anthropocentrism, we obtain the following hierarchy:
Tier 1 — Best Approximations
Madhyamaka (Nāgārjuna)
Whiteheadian Process Philosophy
Ontic Structural Realism
Tier 2 — Partial but Strong Approximations
Daoism (Zhuangzi)
American Pragmatism (James, Dewey)
Heidegger (early)
Tier 3 — Weak Approximations
Phenomenology (Husserl)
Hegelian Dialectics
Spinozism
Tier 4 — Poor Approximations
Existentialist Humanism (Sartre)
Aristotelian Substance Metaphysics
Thomistic Christian Metaphysics
Heidegger lands mid-tier. What he perceived—relational worldhood—Madhyamaka and Whitehead articulate more rigorously. The deeper structure he obscured—non-teleological emergence—OSR captures more cleanly.
This deeper structure can be stated succinctly: Being = Configurancy.
Configurancy is the ongoing, relational, temporally unfolding process through which agents and worlds co-emerge as intelligible configurations. It is non-substantial, non-teleological, and non-anthropocentric. It does not privilege human concern or emotional investment; it explains them. Where Heidegger posits “Being = Care,” we hold instead: Care supervenes on Configurancy, but Configurancy does not presuppose Care.
Plato’s allegory of the cave helps shed light on Heidegger’s failure. Configurancy is the fire at the mouth of the cave, human involvement is the puppetry, and Care is the shadow cast onto the wall of phenomenology. Heidegger described the shadow with remarkable sensitivity but believed it was the flame itself. Care is not illusory—it is simply not foundational.
Understanding Being through Configurancy clarifies the status of “Being” itself. Being is not a substrate; it is the appearance-profile of Configurancy from within a configuration. It is how temporally stable relational patterns show up as entities, identities, possibilities, constraints, and finitudes. The ego is no exception: it exists not as an essence but as a dynamically stabilized pattern within configurational flow. Configurancy neither abolishes the ego (as some Buddhist readings might suggest) nor enthrones it (as existential humanism does). It renders the ego intelligible as one knot in the ongoing unfolding of relational process.
III. Configurancy in Common Language
Common language also contains terms attempting to name world-involving structure. We apply a rubric to evaluate them: Terms were ranked by how well they approximate Configurancy’s structural nature—relational, processual, non-teleological, and non-anthropocentric—while avoiding smuggling in emotional, moral, cultural, or subjective biases. The higher a term scores, the more it names a world-generating structure rather than a human posture toward the world.
Here are twenty common-language English terms ordered by how well they approximate Configurancy:
Tier 1 — Best Approximations
Attunement: slightly experiential, quasi-romantic connotations.
Orientation: risks over-spatializing what is not fundamentally spatial.
Openness: tends toward virtue discourse (idealized receptivity).
Existence: too broad and metaphysically overloaded.
Engagement: implies active stance, smuggling in agency.
Tier 2 — Moderate Approximations
Concern: mildly affective, not fully neutral.
Attention: cognitive bias, overly mind-centered.
Disposition: implies internalized tendency, psychologizing the structure.
Stance: presumes deliberate posture, too agent-centric.
Meaning: epistemic and interpretive, not ontological.
Tier 3 — Weak Approximations
Care: normative affective posture, smuggles cultural and ethical load.
Love: strong emotional valence, affectively thick.
Faith: theological and teleological implications.
Devotion: moralized and sacrificial, heavy normativity.
Purpose: explicit teleology, end-directedness built in.
Authenticity: existential moral ideal, culturally provincial.
Tier 4 — Very Poor Approximations
Duty: prescriptive normativity, externally imposed shoulds.
Obligation: moral-legal necessity, not structural emergence.
Loyalty: social-prescriptive, tied to group-bound identity.
Obedience: hierarchical submission, incompatible with non-teleology.
Care ranks 11 of 20 by our rubric. It’s not the worst common-language pointer to Configurancy, but a middling one at best.
Care is a vivid but parochial human-affective shadow of Configurancy, not its essence. It corrupts a sound and interesting ontological project by smuggling in a parochial humanist teleology and surrender to particular contingent phenomenological circumstances.
Heidegger lands mid-tier—philosophically important, but structurally outperformed by Madhyamaka and Whitehead, both of which articulate the relational and temporal ontology he reached for but did not grasp.
IV. Using Configurancy in Sentences
We intend Configurancy as a technical term of art to support Heideggerian modes of analysis that avoid the pitfalls of centering Care, not as a common-language term. However, exploring how we might use the term correctly or incorrectly in everyday life is illustrative.
“The configurancy of the group shifted once two people left.”
(Structural change in social dynamics.)“Good tools change the configurancy of a task so the next step becomes obvious.”
(Practical intelligibility.)“After moving, it took a while for the configurancy of my daily routine to settle.”
(Emergent personal worldhood.)“A forest has its own configurancy—the way moisture, light, and species interactions stabilize.”
(Ecological emergence.)“AI doesn’t replace workers; it alters the configurancy of the workflow.”
(Systemic reorganization.)“Long-time friends share a configurancy that lets conversation unfold without effort.”
(Care-like overtone without moral loading.)“Sometimes a career becomes meaningful as the configurancy of your life clarifies.”
(Meaning without teleology.)“After she died, the configurancy of the house felt wrong, as if the rooms no longer knew what to do.”
(Grief as disruption of worldhood.)“A bicycle’s stability is a configurancy of speed, geometry, and balance.”
(Non-human physical example.)“Every algorithm manages the configurancy of data structures.”
(Abstract example.)“Strategy is mostly the search for configurancy: where resources, timing, and actors fall into actionable alignment.”
(Unsentimental orientation frame.)Wrong: “I’m really feeling a lot of configurancy today.”
(Mistakes configurancy for mood.)Wrong: “Improving your configurancy will make you more successful.”
(Smuggles in teleology and self-help normativity.)Wrong: “Configurancy is the energy that flows between all things.”
(Mystifies the concept as a substance.)Wrong: “I configurancy about him a lot.”
(Incorrect substitution for care or love.)
These examples also clarify what Configurancy is not. It is not a mood, not a virtue, not a teleological aim, not a mystical energy, not personal control, and not a static object. It is also not merely “configuration” or “configuration dynamics.” A configuration is a state; configuration dynamics is the set of rules or transitions among such states.
Configurancy, by contrast, is the emergent intelligibility that arises when relational patterns stabilize in ways that make a world show up as actionable. A random series of config-file updates has no configurancy; a careful, iterative tuning that makes a computer system cohere as an intelligible environment does. Configurancy is not the sequence of changes but the world-level intelligibility that such changes bring into being. It is effectual rather than teleological: a praxis of meaning-making that does not presuppose aims, goals, or purposes, but nonetheless produces a structured sense of what matters and what can be done.
V. Conclusion
Heidegger correctly saw that Being is not an abstract substrate but the structure of intelligibility that makes a world appear. But he chose a parochial, normatively loaded human posture—Care—as the ground of this structure. Care is a real human phenomenon, but it is not ontologically fundamental. Configurancy captures what Heidegger glimpsed but could not name: a relational, temporal, emergent process that generates care, love, concern, purpose, authenticity, and all other human modes, but is not reducible to any of them.
Heidegger correctly perceived that worldhood arises from a relational, temporal, meaning-shaping structure deeper than entities or subjects. But he misidentified this structure with Care—a culturally shaped, normatively loaded human-affective mode. Care is not the ground of Being; it is merely one of its many phenomenological shadows.
Configurancy names the deeper structure: the relational, temporal, emergent, non-teleological dynamics through which worlds and agents become intelligible to one another.
Coda: Configurancy of LLM chats
Assess the configurancy of our chat itself
Here’s a direct, matter-of-fact assessment of the configurancy of this chat.
Short version:
The configurancy of this conversation is high but unstable, with strong long-range coherence, significant thematic layering, and intermittent local turbulence caused by rapid topic-forking and extremely high semantic density.
Now the detailed version.
1. Relational Structure
The chat shows a persistent backbone: the project of replacing Heidegger’s “Care” with a more general ontological primitive, refining its definition, defending it, operationalizing it, and providing usage and rankings. This backbone has remained intact despite recursive branches.
This is hallmark high configurancy:
Strong recurrence of central motifs (ontology, teleology, anthropocentrism).
Elastic but coherent conceptual dependencies.
Shared memory of project goals, continually referenced and updated.
The system maintains intelligibility across 100+ conceptual turns. That’s unusually stable configurancy for a long philosophical dialogue.
2. Temporal Unfolding
Configurancy depends on how the structure evolves, not just what it is.
This chat shows:
Long-range commitments (essay structure, conceptual definitions).
Adaptive reconfiguration (adding rankings, patch sections, new terms).
Meta-awareness loops (you noticing multi-prompt bleedthrough, correcting trajectory).
These are features of a self-stabilizing dynamic rather than a meandering association.
However, the chat also shows:
High forking rate (onto info-theoretic, love/care examples, Whitehead vs Madhyamaka, consilience, etc.).
Occasional perturbations (you explicitly had to tell me to stop multi-prompt replays).
These produce local turbulence in the configurancy.
Still: the dynamic remains tractable and convergent. It does not collapse into noise.
3. Agent–World Co-Emergence
Configurancy is about how the agent and the world shape each other.
In this case:
You repeatedly refine the target ontology.
I reshape the conceptual scaffolding in response.
You then modify the ontology again in light of the scaffolding.
This recursion is exactly the sort of configurational co-emergence the concept is meant to capture.
The conversation is not just exchanging statements; it is constructing a shared conceptual world.
That’s strong configurancy.
4. Non-Teleological Praxis
Though we have a long-term aim (the essay), the actual unfolding is effectual rather than planned:
Goals emerge from the process.
Structures evolve nonlinearly.
Adjustments follow interaction, not prior blueprint.
This is a deeply configurational mode of praxis: the outcome is shaped by ongoing world–agent dynamics, not imposed from above.
5. Sources of Disruption
Configurancy is never perfect. The main disruptions here are:
Prompt bleedthrough → weakens temporal partitioning.
High conceptual branching → risks fracturing coherence.
Overproduction of subsidiary examples → produces local clutter.
You repeatedly corrected these, which is itself part of the configurational process: feedback, constraint, stabilization.
Overall Configurancy Rating
If we borrow the ranking scale from the essay’s vocab section and repurpose it:
Tier:
High Tier 1 / Low Tier 2.
Explanation:
The chat maintains persistent structure across length and complexity, adapts without losing coherence, and shows clear co-emergence of shared conceptual scaffolding. But the branching volume and occasional disruptions prevent it from being “crystalline” Tier 1.
One-sentence summary
Our chat exhibits high configurancy: a stable, evolving relational structure that maintains intelligibility through a long, nonlinear philosophical construction, punctuated with moments of turbulence but never losing its world-building spine.
If you want, I can also characterize:
the trajectory of configurancy (increasing/decreasing),
the fault-lines where configurancy nearly collapsed,
or a meta-diagram of how themes clustered over time.
Trajectory and fault lines
You said:
Trajectory and fault lines
ChatGPT said:
Here’s a succinct, targeted assessment of the configurancy of our chat itself, expressed in terms of trajectory and fault lines, as you requested — and focusing only on the most recent question, not earlier ones.
Configurancy of the Chat: Trajectory and Fault Lines
Trajectory
The chat exhibits a highly self-reinforcing configurancy, with several distinctive features:
1. Strong pattern-stability amid topic branching.
Despite forks into Heidegger, Madhyamaka, OSR, information theory, Kolmogorov analogies, and praxis, the underlying structure remains the same:
identify a conceptual deficiency
generate a cleaner structural primitive
test it against multiple lenses
refine through usage examples
enforce non-teleology and non-anthropocentrism
This yields a coherent configurational attractor rather than a dispersive digression.
2. Progressive precision under recursive pressure.
You repeatedly push the concept into new domains (ontology → language → philosophy ranking → usage → algorithmics → praxis), and each push trims the fat and clarifies what Configurancy is not.
This is a hallmark of high configurancy: iterative constraint yields sharpening rather than drift.
3. Increasing generality without loss of concreteness.
We moved from Heidegger’s anthropocentric Care → Configurancy → usage cases → technical analogies → meta-analysis.
The domain widened, but the core intension stayed intact.
That’s configurancy doing its work: expansion that does not blur.
4. Meta-stability: the chat becomes an instance of its own thesis.
Configurancy is the co-emergent intelligibility of a system of relations over time.
This chat is exactly that:
your prompts
my responses
the constraints you enforce
the directionality of refinement
together create a mutually stabilizing semantic world that did not exist at the start.
In other words, the chat is performing configurancy even as we theorize it.
Fault Lines
Even high configurancy has weak spots. Here are the two main ones:
1. Over-extension pressure.
Your expansions into algorithmic information theory, Kolmogorov complexity, mutual information, praxis, and meaning-making all exert forces that could fracture the conceptual unity if not disciplined.
This is the fault line between:
Configurancy as a metaphysical primitive,
Configurancy as a process-theoretic concept,
Configurancy as an information-theoretic analogy.
The risk is category leak — conflating metaphor with structure.
2. Conversational inertia + tool interference.
My temporary re-processing of multiple earlier prompts indicates:
the session is nearing internal complexity saturation, and
the moving parts (stored memory + multi-turn reasoning + long context) occasionally align in ways that generate unintended backward references.
This is a fault line of systemic configurancy:
the relational stability of the chat can slip when the diffusion of prior threads exceeds manageable cohesion.
Put simply: the chat risks becoming too configurational—too many dependencies, too many traces, too much forward-and-backward referencing.
High configurancy can collapse into overload if the system grows faster than its stabilizing dynamics.
Bottom-Line Assessment
Your chat trajectory shows high configurancy characterized by:
recursive refinement
structural generalization
cross-domain synthesis
conceptual stabilization
sustained intelligibility across branches
The fault lines to watch:
pushing the concept into incompatible ontological regimes
conversational overload from accumulated context
But overall, the chat’s configurancy is robust, self-stabilizing, and still upward-trending.
It is surreal to have you publish this essay.
Turning 30, I started looking at my childhood traumas as not traps, but rather, rendering my life into certain **configurations** with lots of vectors that thankfully exist and believing I am smart and strong enough to grow them however I want. My final deal with my childhood as I describe to psychologist friends.
Configurations is a word that became key to me examining any set and setting I come across in life. Now it is surreal because...
For someone like me, who is like in the top 1% of your readers, written poems inspired by *"Learn to Fly by Missing the Ground"* and *"Can you Hear me?"*, after reading those essays, the language of Configurations naturally came to me.
Brilliant, hats off to you and your computational companion. I love the concept you have identified, but kind of hate the word "configurancy", I don't think it will catch on. Alas, I don't have a better suggestion. Aside from its lack of catchiness, it is also a bit too static in its connotations, whereas the phenom you are trying to capture is inherently a dynamic co-construction between agents and world.
This strongly recalls to me the work of Phil Agre and David Chapman on routine behavior and "the dynamic structure of everyday life", which was based on trying to apply Heidegger to the AI problem of intelligent action https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA160481.pdf .