Your interpretation and the questions you posed evoked for me a couple of philosophical analogues to Jazz: Hartshorne’s nonstrict identity and Peirce’s semeiotic (as inspired by our mutual friend, Scotus). To wit, over against any epistemic essentialism or nominalism, or ontological substance or process approach, the obverse sides of the same coin of the dualistic realm, which has no purchase here in jazzy New Orleans, nonstrict identity suggests that a reality’s past, but not its future, is an essential aspect of its identity (due to Hartshorne’s notion of asymmetric temporal relations). In some sense, then, we can say that the Principle of Identity sometimes holds and sometimes folds. Similarly, in Peirce’s pragmatic logic, both Noncontradiction and Excluded Middle alternately hold or fold based on the modal categories of the possible (NC folds, EM holds), the actual (NC & EM hold) and the necessary, which due to ontological vagueness yields to the probable (NC holds, EM folds). Such is the nature of interpretation. The practical upshot of all of this philosophical wonkishness is that neither the static essentialistic, substantialistic nor the dynamic nominalistic, process approaches could account for novelty in our emergentistic reality, while the Peircean account can because it grapples with both epistemic indeterminacy and ontological vagueness. And novelty is central. But why?

In an aesthetic teleology, the appropriation of novelty and the shedding of monotony accounts for the emergence of beauty. In far from equilibrium thermodynamics, the greater the number of bifurcations and permutations in the formation of a dissipative structure, which runs an increasing risk of disintegration, the more fragile it is. The more fragile, however, the more beautiful. We employ, therefore, various risk-amplification and risk-attenuation strategies ordered toward the end of value-augmentation. Too many risks with the Lennon-McCartney score and the dissipative structure will disintegrate into the unrecognizable. Take no risks at all and we surrender to montony, ignoring our aesthetic sensibilities.

Your permutations were beautiful. Bravo! Encore!

Don’t take me too seriously here. My synthesis was more poetry than prose, open to interpretation … …