Paradetermination

Paradetermination is a term coined by Jong Bhak to name the phenomenon that the future of the universe is not determined in advance, yet is severely constrained — almost determined — by the deterministic structure of physical law and the network architecture through which objects interact.

The "para-" prefix carries its Greek sense of alongside or near to: paradetermination is not determination, but it sits alongside it. The future is open in principle but narrow in practice, because the laws governing it and the networks instantiating those laws permit only a small band of physically realizable trajectories.

Parallel rather than linear

A central claim of paradetermination is that the fate of an object is not fixed along a single causal line, but is shaped in parallel through the interaction network in which the object is embedded. Each object's future is constrained not only by its own state and history, but by the simultaneous states of all the objects with which it is informationally coupled.

This shifts the picture of physical fate from a sequence of cause and effect along a temporal line, to a structured distribution across a network. A single object's future is one node in a larger web of mutually constraining trajectories. Paradetermination is therefore a property of networks, not of isolated objects.

Physical-principle wave and informational resonance

Within the interaction network, paradetermination is mediated by what may be called a physical-principle wave — a propagating coherence imposed by the operation of physical law across the network. The wave is not a wave of matter or energy in the standard sense. It is a wave of constraint: the conservation laws, symmetries, and dynamical equations that hold simultaneously across all interacting objects, synchronizing their possibility-spaces.

Objects do not enter physical resonance through this wave; they enter informational resonance. They become coupled not by exchanging momentum or energy but by sharing the structure of their constraints. Two distant objects in the same physical-principle wave do not act on each other directly, but their possibility-spaces are correlated by the same underlying law.

This makes paradetermination a fundamentally informational concept. The future is not narrowed by force alone but by the shared structure of what physical law permits.

Paradetermination