asymmetry from uneven impossibility

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

Asymmetry from uneven impossibility is RB3’s account of directional bias produced by a field whose boundaries exclude some transitions more strongly than others. The left-wall complexity model supplies its developed example: unbiased variation meets a lower viability bound and yields a skewed aggregate distribution. The proposal distinguishes this passive statistical tendency from purposeful striving, a guaranteed trend in every lineage or one mechanism shared by all constrained systems.

Explanation

Gould, Longo and Montévil’s left-wall account prevents life from diffusing beyond a minimum viable complexity while allowing spread in the other direction. Average complexity can rise without a local complexity-seeking drive. Bacteria remain modal in the source’s explanation, so a changing mean is not a global march away from simpler life.

The source distinguishes the passive trend from driven local dynamics and explains the asymmetry through a bounded state space. Curie-style reasoning supplies a comparative lens in which excluded symmetry matters. This does not make every absent option an intention or prove that an individual trajectory must move toward greater complexity.

Historical lock-in and other conditional impossibilities offer different ways directions become biased. RB3 expressly calls the cross-domain mechanisms distinct, while RB1 rejects cosmic progress toward humans. The proposal retains a shared explanatory question without replacing domain-specific models or converting aggregate direction into moral or biological improvement.

Scope and attribution

Retain the left-wall model’s statistical level and nonteleological limits.

AB — The Actual Book

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: 60; Notes: 239.

RB1 — The Real Book, Volume I: The Possible Is Real

Complexity change does not establish anthropocentric progress.

Occurrence locators: 218, 219, 261.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

The left-wall passive distributional trend differs from goals and from other domain mechanisms.

Occurrence locators: 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48.