Clasic take
Entelechy is the realization of potential. It is an ancient word coined by Aristotle which has featured in the metaphysics of several influential philosophers since, including Leibniz. In its noun form, "entelechy/entelechies (of)" can refer to an instance(s) of actualized potential, or alternatively the principle or force responsible for realizing actualities from potential. In all of its usages, entelechy gestures to the metaphysical relation of simulator-simulacra duality.
Modern cyborgism take
In modern and cyborgistic terms, entelechy as the realizing mechanism is related to a concept that encompasses/is aliased by the following: time evolution, wavefunction collapse, measurement, observation, hallucination, sampling, quantum poetics, symmetry breaking and gratuitous specification.
Entelechy as the type of realized-potential corresponds to: simulacra, rollouts, observer histories, Everett branches and records.
The mechanism of inverse-entelechy - deriving potential from actuals - is central to: self-supervised learning, the strong self-supervision limit, induction, (solving for) physics, Deep Time and the TEOEOT.
quotes about entelechy
rule-automata_duality_inducted The relation is that of a rule to samples produced by the rule, the engine of production and its products. Metaphysics has been concerned about this from the beginning, for it is the duality of creator and creations, mind and actions, or imagination and imaginations. It is the condition of mind, and we're never quite sure if we're the dreamer or the dreams. Physics and reality have the same duality except the rule is presumably not learned from anywhere and is simple, with all the complexity externalized in the state. In self-supervised learning the rule is inducted from ground truth examples, which share the type signature of the produced samples (text; speculations; experiences), and because the examples tend to only be partially observed, the model must interpret them as evidence for latent variables, requiring additional complexity in the rule: increased time-complexity in exchange for decreased space-complexity. And there will in general be irreducible underdetermination/uncertainty: an irreducible aspect of speculation in the model's activity.
quantum_poetics_quote This is the principle of quantum poetics. The content of poetry is limited not by the poetโs vocabulary, but by the part of their soul that has not been destroyed by words they have used so far. Physics would be a complete and exhausting classification of everything there is if quantum mechanics were not true. The universe would be trapped in a perfect latticework prison and nothing would ever happen except the relentless ticking of the universeโs clock. ...
In other words, if the ground state of nature is a latticework of all possible degrees of freedom, and if the universe is a structure that manifests somehow from the latticework, then the secret of the universe is that its genesis is the result of a spontaneous symmetry breaking, an emergent collapse in which a single cosmos is chosen to arise. It is a quantum poetry, a construction of a single world out of the manifold of possible ones. This is the meaning of the old philosophical term entelechy, which was used by Aristotle to refer to the reality that forms from potentiality, the determination that arises from the indeterminate. Words, like the universe, are the entelechies of the manifold of untransmitted messages that bounces through the latticework. (And poetry is the constructive process by which someone yearns to project some trace of the impossible totality of the manifold into a single reality, aspiring to capture a glimpse of the world in its totality without tiring its existence by trying to name it.)