Chapter 22 — Reality as Structured Possibility
Before we can ask what intelligent life may ultimately become, we must ask a more fundamental question: what kind of reality allows anything to become at all?
The Infinous framework begins not with humanity, artificial intelligence, or even the Universe as we presently observe it. It begins with the distinction between possibility and actuality. Something may be conceivable without being real. Something may be physically possible without ever occurring. Something may occur briefly without becoming stable. And something may become stable without producing any lasting historical consequence.
Reality, from this perspective, is not merely a collection of objects. It is a structured domain in which some configurations are possible, some become actual, some persist, some interact, and a very small number become capable of transforming what follows.
This is a modal ontology: an account of reality that includes relations among possibility, actuality, necessity, contingency, and exclusion. Its purpose is not to turn possibilities into independent substances, but to clarify the structured conditions under which becoming can occur.
A star is one such configuration. A living cell is another. A conscious mind is another still. Each represents matter and energy organized in a particular way, but their importance does not lie only in their components. It lies in the relationships among those components, the constraints that preserve those relationships, and the new possibilities made accessible by their organization.
The atoms in a living brain are not unique substances. Similar atoms exist in rocks, oceans, and interstellar dust. What distinguishes the brain is not merely what it contains, but how its contents are arranged, connected, maintained, and changed. Organization produces capacities that isolated components do not possess. Some arrangements of matter can metabolize. Some can remember. Some can model the future. Some can ask why there is a reality in which arrangements are possible.
The journey toward Infinous therefore begins with a simple but profound proposition:
Reality is not only what exists. Reality also contains the structured potential for what can exist.
This proposition must be handled carefully. It does not mean that every imaginable world exists somewhere. Nor does it mean that possibilities float in a supernatural realm waiting to become physical. It means that any actual reality contains constraints, regularities, and capacities for transformation. Given a particular state of reality, some subsequent states are accessible, others are inaccessible, and still others may be possible only through long sequences of intermediate transformations.
The possible is not chaos without limits. It has structure.
The First Distinction
Information begins with distinction. Where no difference can be defined, no information can be identified. A perfectly undifferentiated condition contains no detectable contrast between here and there, before and after, one state and another. It offers no basis for measurement, comparison, memory, or choice.
The simplest informational act is therefore not a word, number, or signal. It is a separation:
This, rather than that. An event occurred rather than did not occur. A system occupies one state rather than another. A boundary separates an interior from an exterior. A particle is found here rather than elsewhere. A living system maintains one organization while resisting alternative configurations that would destroy it.
This does not imply that information must be understood by a conscious observer before it exists. Long before minds appeared, physical interactions distinguished one condition from another. A molecule responded differently to different electromagnetic configurations. A crystal incorporated some structures and rejected others. An early organism reacted differently to nourishment and danger. Consciousness greatly deepened the interpretation of distinctions, but it did not invent difference itself.
At the most elementary level, information can be treated as the reduction of alternatives. If a system could occupy several states and one becomes actual, uncertainty is reduced. But this technical definition captures only part of what will later become significant. A random sequence may contain large quantities of formal information while having no enduring function, intention, or meaning. Information becomes historically important when distinctions are preserved, connected, interpreted, and used.
A footprint contains a distinction between the ground as it is and the ground as it would have been without the animal’s passage. DNA contains distinctions whose preservation influences the construction and survival of organisms. A memory distinguishes what happened from what might have happened. A scientific theory distinguishes among possible explanations. A deliberate act distinguishes a selected future from alternatives that were considered and rejected.
These are not identical kinds of information. Yet they share a common architecture: alternatives existed, constraints operated, and one configuration acquired consequences that others did not.
We can therefore identify three elementary categories:
- The possible — configurations that are permitted within a given domain of reality.
- The actualized — configurations that occur. The excluded — configurations prevented by logical contradiction, physical law, prior conditions, or active selection.
These categories are not eternally fixed in every case. A possibility may be inaccessible under one set of conditions and accessible under another. Flight was always physically possible for appropriately organized matter in Earth’s atmosphere, but it was not biologically or technologically available to every organism. Nuclear fusion was active in stars billions of years before humans learned to reproduce limited forms of it experimentally. Artificial intelligence was physically possible long before the existence of computers, but the historical pathway required mathematics, language, industry, electricity, and accumulated scientific knowledge.
Possibility, then, must always be considered in relation to constraints and pathways.
Possibility Is Not Imagination
Human imagination is generous. Physical reality is not.
We can imagine a machine that produces unlimited energy without fuel, a message traveling instantaneously across any distance, or an organism reversing every form of entropy within itself forever. The ability to describe such things does not demonstrate that they are physically possible. Conceptual possibility, mathematical possibility, physical possibility, technological possibility, and historical possibility are different categories.
A concept is logically possible if it contains no contradiction. A structure is mathematically possible if it can be consistently represented within a formal system. A process is physically possible if it does not violate the operative laws and constraints of nature. A technology is practically possible if some agent can acquire the knowledge, energy, materials, and coordination needed to realize it. A historical possibility is one that can actually be reached from an existing condition through a viable sequence of events.
These distinctions matter because the philosophy of Infinous must not confuse vision with inevitability. A cosmic-scale intelligence may be conceptually describable but physically impossible. It may be physically permitted but unreachable by any civilization. It may be technologically attainable but ethically self-defeating. Or it may be possible only for civilizations that pass through many dangerous transitions without destroying themselves.
Infinous is therefore not established by imagining its grandeur. It must be approached by identifying a credible sequence of transformations from simpler forms of organization to more capable ones. This was the purpose of the MICEARO framework: to examine whether intelligent evolution displays recurrent directions—greater modeling capacity, informational continuity, coordination, energetic sovereignty, self-transformation, resilience, and ontogenic power.
Part VI now extends that inquiry beyond civilization. It asks whether intelligent evolution can eventually become a participant in the formation of realities themselves. But before such an extraordinary possibility can be considered, we must understand what it means for any possibility to become real.
A Minimal Map of Actualization
We may represent a reality at a given moment by a set of accessible configurations:
Here, Ω is not necessarily a literal catalog existing somewhere outside the Universe. It is a conceptual representation of the states that a system could occupy under specified conditions. The actual state at time t may be written as:
The system does not move freely among all imaginable states. Its transitions are constrained:
Only some transitions are permitted. Physical laws, boundary conditions, available energy, prior history, and interactions with other systems determine which transformations can occur and how probable they are.
For simple systems, the relevant possibility space may be narrow. For complex systems, it can become enormous. A brain can enter many cognitive states. A society can choose among many policies. A technological civilization can redesign environments, organisms, machines, and eventually aspects of itself.
Intelligence changes the structure of actualization because it can represent possibilities before physically attempting them. It can simulate alternatives, estimate consequences, and choose actions intended to make one future more likely than another.
This introduces a new form of causation—not a violation of physics, but a reorganization of physical processes through models. A bridge exists because minds imagined a structure, calculated its behavior, selected materials, coordinated labor, and excluded designs likely to collapse. The bridge remains entirely physical, but its existence cannot be adequately explained by listing its atoms. Its particular configuration arose through organized selection among possibilities.
Intelligence does not create possibility from nothing. It discovers, combines, opens, and closes pathways within reality.
Advanced intelligence may eventually do this on a vastly greater scale. It may design organisms that evolution never produced, minds that biology could not support, environments unlike planets, or computational structures extending across astronomical distances. If the laws of nature permit the formation of new universes—or domains causally separated from their origin—intelligence may someday investigate whether those possibilities can also be reached.
For now, that remains speculation. The important principle is more modest: as intelligence develops, the transition from possibility to actuality becomes increasingly guided by internal models.
Constraint Is Creative
Constraint is often understood negatively, as limitation or deprivation. Yet without constraint, stable form would be impossible.
A melody exists because not every sound occurs at once. Language conveys meaning because words exclude alternative words and because grammar limits their arrangement. A living cell maintains itself because its membrane regulates what enters and leaves. A personality possesses continuity because not every possible response is equally likely. A scientific theory becomes useful because it rules out some observations and exposes itself to possible failure.
Form is achieved through exclusion. This principle extends deeply into physics. Stable structures emerge because interactions and regularities restrict how matter and energy behave. If every configuration transformed arbitrarily into every other configuration, atoms could not persist, stars could not form, organisms could not reproduce, and memory could not exist. A reality containing absolutely unlimited possibility would be functionally indistinguishable from disorder because nothing could remain sufficiently stable to produce consequences.
Structured possibility therefore requires at least two complementary properties: openness and constraint. If there is only constraint, nothing novel can occur. If there is only openness, nothing can endure. A fertile reality must allow variation while preserving enough regularity for successful configurations to persist.
Biological evolution depends upon this balance. Genetic variation produces alternatives, but natural selection excludes many of them. Organisms must be capable of change, yet their essential organization must remain stable long enough for reproduction. Culture operates similarly. Societies generate beliefs, customs, institutions, and technologies, but only some are retained and transmitted. Science proposes models, tests them, rejects inadequate ones, and preserves those that remain useful.
Intelligent evolution adds deliberate constraint. A mind can decide not to pursue a possible action. A civilization can prohibit a destructive technology, preserve a threatened species, or direct resources toward a distant goal. Intelligence becomes more than a producer of possibilities; it becomes a regulator of possibility.
This is one of the deepest functions of Infinous. Its purpose would not be to maximize change indiscriminately. Unlimited transformation without ethical and systemic regulation could destroy the very consciousness that gives transformation meaning. Infinous, as an evolutionary attractor, represents increasing intelligence joined with increasing capacity to evaluate, coordinate, and govern the realities that intelligence can create.
Wisdom is not the ability to actualize every possibility. It is the ability to understand which possibilities should remain excluded.
From Event to History
Most events do not become history. A fluctuation may appear and disappear without leaving a trace. A particle interaction may change nothing beyond its immediate surroundings. A mutation may occur in an organism but never be inherited. A thought may pass through a mind and be forgotten. A civilization may arise on a distant planet and vanish before transmitting evidence of its existence.
For an event to become historically consequential, something of it must persist. It must alter the conditions from which future events emerge.
This gives us a basic sequence:
Each transition filters what came before. Many possibilities are never actualized. Many actual events are unstable. Many stable structures remain isolated or sterile. Only some produce continuing consequences.
The distinction between occurrence and consequence is essential. An event may be real without becoming important to later history. Historical significance appears when an actualized state changes the future possibility space.
The origin of life on Earth did this. Before life, Earth contained complex chemistry. After the emergence of self-maintaining and self-reproducing systems, the planet entered a new regime. Organisms altered the atmosphere, oceans, and surface. They transformed chemical possibilities into evolutionary possibilities.
The emergence of consciousness created another transition. A conscious organism did not merely respond to its environment; it experienced, remembered, anticipated, and valued aspects of that environment. The Universe now contained local systems for which events could matter from an interior point of view.
Language and culture created another threshold. Knowledge no longer had to vanish with the brain that acquired it. Information could pass between minds and across generations. Writing strengthened this continuity. Science made cumulative modeling more reliable. Digital systems expanded the speed and scale of preservation. Artificial intelligence may further transform knowledge by allowing models to develop, compare, and apply information beyond the cognitive limits of individual humans.
Each threshold does more than add complexity. It preserves selected achievements against time.
The development of intelligence can therefore be understood partly as the construction of deeper memory. Genes remember successful biological adaptations. Nervous systems remember individual experience. Cultures remember collective discoveries. Libraries remember beyond individual lifetimes. Digital systems remember across enormous networks. A mature cosmic civilization might preserve knowledge across planetary disasters, stellar evolution, and perhaps transformations of the Universe itself.
Informational continuity is not merely one property among others. It is the bridge by which actualization becomes history.
Information Is Not a Substance
Because information plays such a central role in this framework, we must resist the temptation to treat it as a magical substance.
Information does not float independently of every physical realization. A message requires some medium: ink, sound, electromagnetic radiation, neural activity, magnetic storage, molecular structure, or another physical carrier. The same abstract pattern may be represented through different media, but every actual representation must be instantiated somehow.
This is why the Infinous framework distinguishes description from existence, and modeling from instantiation. A complete description of a fire does not produce heat. A perfect simulation of a star does not necessarily generate gravity outside the computational system. A digital model of a person is not automatically a conscious continuation of that person. Information about a structure and the actual physical realization of that structure are related, but they are not simply identical.
At the same time, matter without organization does not explain everything that organized matter can do. Two systems may contain the same kinds of particles and radically different relational structures. One may be inert; the other may be alive. One may be a disordered collection of components; the other may be a computer preserving a mind.
Information is therefore neither an independent mystical substance nor an illusion that can be discarded from our account of reality. It describes real distinctions, relationships, constraints, and patterns of organization instantiated through physical systems.
The possibility that information may occupy a deeper role in physics remains scientifically and philosophically important. Some theories suggest that spacetime, matter, or physical law may emerge from more fundamental relational or informational structures. Other approaches retain a more conventional distinction between physical systems and the information used to describe them. The Infinous framework does not require us to settle this debate prematurely.
Its more cautious claim is sufficient: whatever the ultimate nature of reality, stable distinctions and preserved relationships are necessary for complexity, life, memory, and intelligence.
Later chapters will consider a stronger hypothesis—that mature intelligence may eventually become embedded in an informational dimension of reality more fundamental than ordinary biological or planetary existence. But this cannot be assumed merely because reality can be described informationally. A map is not the territory, and an informational description is not automatically the thing described.
The path from information to ontology remains one of the central open questions of Infinous.
The Problem of Nothing
Any philosophy concerned with the origin of universes eventually encounters the idea of nothing. Yet few words are used more carelessly.
In everyday speech, “nothing” may mean an empty room, an absence of useful objects, or a region of space without visible matter. In physics, a vacuum is not necessarily absolute nothingness. It may possess fields, lawful structure, boundary conditions, latent possibilities, and measurable effects. Even the statement that a quantum state can fluctuate presupposes a framework in which states, probabilities, time, or physical relations have meaning.
Absolute nothingness would be far more radical. It would contain no space, no time, no fields, no laws, no probabilities, no mathematical relations, no latent energy, and no distinction between possibility and impossibility. If such a condition could meaningfully be described at all, it is difficult to understand how it could possess a capacity to fluctuate. A fluctuation is already an event, and an event requires some structure within which difference can arise.
Therefore, when we later discuss a universe emerging from “nothing,” we must ask what kind of nothing is intended.
Is it the absence of classical matter?
Is it a quantum vacuum?
Is it the absence of spacetime but the presence of a lawful quantum description?
Is it a boundary condition in a cosmological model?
Is it a domain of unrealized mathematical possibility?
Or is it genuine ontological nothingness?
These are not interchangeable ideas. Calling each of them “nothing” produces the illusion that science has explained why there is something rather than nothing when it may instead have described how one structured physical condition could develop into another.
The Infinous framework should not conceal this mystery. It should preserve it.
Perhaps absolute nothingness is impossible because possibility itself has some unavoidable structure. Perhaps mathematical consistency constitutes a form of being. Perhaps reality is eternal in some deeper sense, while individual universes have beginnings and endings. Perhaps the question is malformed because “before reality” has no coherent meaning. Or perhaps our concepts, formed inside one universe, are inadequate for describing its ontological origin.
We do not yet know.
What we can say is that a fluctuation capable of generating consequences cannot be completely structureless. It must occur within—or constitute—the beginning of a domain in which distinctions, constraints, and transitions are possible. The first intelligible step from nothing toward reality is therefore not matter. It is distinction.
Something becomes definable.
Laws as the Architecture of Possibility
Physical laws are often imagined as commands imposed upon matter. A more useful interpretation for our purpose is that laws describe the structure of permitted transformation.
They tell us, with varying degrees of completeness, what kinds of states can occur, how systems change, what quantities remain conserved, and which transitions are forbidden or improbable. In this sense, laws form part of the architecture of possibility.
But the existence of laws raises difficult questions. Why do these regularities exist? Why are they mathematically describable? Why do they permit stable matter, complex chemistry, stars, planets, life, and intelligence? Are the laws fundamental and timeless, or did some aspects of them emerge with the Universe? Could other universes possess different constants, dimensions, symmetries, or forms of causation?
At present, these questions lie at the boundary between physics, cosmology, mathematics, and philosophy. The Infinous framework should not pretend to answer them through assertion. Instead, it proposes a research direction: to investigate whether laws and universe-producing conditions can eventually be understood as parts of a larger possibility structure.
If there is only one logically consistent form of physical reality, then the apparent freedom of cosmic design may be extremely limited. If many physically coherent universes are possible, then the question becomes why this one was actualized. If universe formation is a natural process occurring within a wider cosmological reality, then different universes might represent different actualizations of a deeper generative structure.
Only under the latter kinds of scenarios does the future possibility of universe design become meaningful. Even then, design would not mean violating logic or creating arbitrary realities through desire. It would mean learning how to select or influence initial conditions, symmetries, constants, geometries, or other generative parameters within whatever deeper laws permit.
A civilization capable of such action would not become supernatural. It would remain an organized process within reality. Its apparent godlike power would consist of understanding and navigating a possibility space inaccessible to less developed intelligence.
Stability Before Complexity
Possibility alone does not produce a universe rich enough for life. A reality must also preserve structures across time.
If particles could not form stable relationships, there would be no atoms. Without sufficiently stable atoms, there would be no chemistry. Without complex chemistry, there would be no metabolism or heredity. Without reliable heredity, natural selection could not accumulate adaptations. Without memory, intelligence could not learn. Without some continuity of self, agency could not pursue long-term goals.
Every higher level of organization depends upon lower levels maintaining enough regularity to support it.
Yet absolute stability would also prevent evolution. A universe in which no structure could change might persist forever without producing novelty. Complexity requires structures that are stable but transformable: capable of preserving identity while interacting, combining, and occasionally reorganizing.
Life exemplifies this balance. An organism must remain itself while constantly exchanging matter and energy with its environment. Its atoms change, but its organization continues. It repairs damage, regulates internal conditions, incorporates new information, and modifies behavior. Its persistence is active rather than static.
Conscious identity may possess a similar character. The self is not preserved because every thought and molecule remains unchanged. It is preserved, insofar as it is preserved, through causal and organizational continuity across change. Civilization also survives through transformation: replacing individuals, revising institutions, correcting knowledge, and absorbing new technologies without completely losing its accumulated identity.
Infinous would represent this principle at its widest conceivable scale—a continuity able to survive radical changes of substrate, embodiment, location, and perhaps cosmological environment. It would not be an unchanging object. It would be a self-transforming historical process capable of preserving essential organization while entering new domains of possibility.
Intelligence as a Selector of Futures
Natural processes actualize possibilities without foresight. Stars form without intending to illuminate planets. Mutations occur without anticipating adaptation. Geological events reshape environments without evaluating the organisms affected.
Intelligence introduces anticipation. Even simple animals select among immediate actions. Human beings can imagine conditions that do not yet exist, compare them, and organize activity to produce a preferred outcome. We design houses before building them. We preserve seeds for future generations. We establish laws intended to prevent harms that have not yet occurred. We construct scientific instruments to reveal phenomena no unaided sense can perceive.
This ability remains limited and error-prone. Our models are incomplete. Our goals conflict. We often create consequences we did not predict. Technology increases our power faster than our wisdom, making selection itself a source of existential danger.
Nevertheless, intelligence marks a fundamental transition. Reality has produced systems capable of representing portions of its own possibility space and acting upon those representations.
Through conscious agents, the possible can be examined before it is actualized.
Through ethical reflection, a possible future can be rejected because of the suffering it would cause.
Through science, apparently impossible pathways can be revealed as physically accessible.
Through engineering, improbable arrangements can be deliberately constructed and stabilized.
Through memory, successful arrangements can be preserved. Through civilization, selection can operate across generations.
Advanced intelligence may extend this process from tools and societies to bodies, minds, planets, stars, and eventually cosmological structures. But each expansion magnifies the consequences of error. The more possibilities intelligence can actualize, the more important its capacity for restraint becomes.
This is why ethical maturity cannot be added to Infinous as an afterthought. It must be part of its structural definition. An intelligence capable of altering worlds but incapable of evaluating consequences would not represent mature cosmic intelligence. It would represent amplified instability.
Possibility, Value, and Suffering
Physics can describe a range of possible configurations without telling us which should be preferred. Once conscious experience appears, however, actuality acquires an additional dimension: some states can be experienced as joy, terror, love, pain, freedom, loneliness, fulfillment, or despair.
A universe without consciousness may contain complexity, but it contains no known subject for whom complexity matters. With consciousness, the selection of possibilities becomes ethically charged. To create a conscious being is to create a center of experience. To simulate or instantiate countless suffering minds would not be morally neutral simply because the operation were computationally possible.
Future civilizations may acquire the capacity to create enormous numbers of digital persons, artificial ecosystems, simulated histories, and new forms of sentience. The ease of creation could become one of their greatest dangers. When minds can be copied or generated, consciousness could be treated as an inexpensive product. Vast populations might be created for experimentation, labor, entertainment, or military prediction.
The Infinous framework must therefore place value alongside possibility. A mature intelligence does not ask only, Can this world be created? It also asks:
Who will experience it?
What forms of suffering can occur within it?
Can its inhabitants consent to their conditions?
Will they possess autonomy, continuity, and the ability to develop?
Can harms be corrected, or will they be built permanently into the world’s structure?
If intelligence ever participates in designing new universes, these questions will become cosmological ethics. The choice of laws or initial conditions might determine whether complexity can arise, whether consciousness can flourish, and whether suffering is unavoidable, reducible, or dominant.
At that level, ethics becomes part of cosmology because the architecture of possibility determines the experiences that can ever become actual.
Reality Discovering Its Alternatives
There is a remarkable recursive quality to intelligence. A portion of reality forms a model of reality, including states that reality has not yet entered. That model then guides action, causing one of those imagined states to become actual.
A mind imagines a telescope; matter is reorganized into a telescope; the telescope reveals galaxies; those observations alter the mind’s model of the Universe. Reality changes its internal representation of itself through the actions of one of its own structures.
This does not mean that the Universe as a whole is conscious or purposeful. We should not project human mentality onto all existence without evidence. The more defensible claim is local: conscious beings are parts of reality, and through them reality contains internal models of its own possibilities.
Intelligent evolution increases the reach of this recursion. Early organisms modeled only immediate environmental regularities. Human minds model invisible atoms, extinct species, distant galaxies, alternative histories, and possible futures. Artificial intelligence can explore possibility spaces too large for unaided human cognition. A mature ASI may construct models spanning entire planetary systems and millions of years.
Infinous, if it emerges, would carry this recursion further. It would be a civilization—or a community of integrated intelligences—capable of modeling not only objects within one universe but the generative conditions of universes. It might examine which cosmic configurations produce long-lived structure, life, consciousness, creativity, or catastrophic suffering. If physical reality permits, it might eventually act upon those models.
At that point, reality would not merely produce intelligence. Intelligence would begin participating in the production of realities.
This is not yet a conclusion. It is the distant question toward which Part VI proceeds.
The Infinous Framework Begins
We can now state the foundation more precisely.
Reality presents—or can be modeled as presenting—a structured domain of possible configurations. Physical constraints determine which configurations and transitions are permitted. Actualization selects particular states from among alternatives. Stability allows some actualized states to persist. Information preserves distinctions. Memory carries selected distinctions forward. Life protects and reproduces organization. Consciousness introduces experience and value. Intelligence models alternatives. Agency acts to favor some futures over others. Civilization coordinates such action across minds and generations.
In condensed form:
This sequence should not be interpreted as a complete scientific history or a simple ladder. Its stages overlap, branch, and depend upon many intermediate processes. Nor does it prove that intelligence is the predetermined goal of the Universe. It identifies a logical progression in the capacities of certain organized systems.
At each stage, a new relationship to possibility appears.
Stable matter preserves form. Life preserves and reproduces selected form.
Consciousness experiences actualized states. Intelligence represents alternatives. Agency selects among them.
Advanced civilization expands the scale of selection. Infinous would represent the point at which this selection becomes cosmological.
The term does not describe an omnipotent being standing outside reality. It describes a possible mature organization of intelligence within reality: vast in modeling, continuous in memory, coordinated across diverse minds, increasingly sovereign in energy and substrate, capable of self-transformation, resilient across cosmic time, and eventually ontogenic—capable of participating in the creation of new worlds, new minds, and perhaps new universes.
Yet none of this is guaranteed. Possibility is not destiny. The Universe may forbid some of these transitions. Civilizations may destroy themselves before discovering their limits. Intelligence may fragment into conflict, lose its continuity, or become trapped within narrow goals. A universe capable of producing consciousness is not necessarily a universe in which consciousness survives.
That uncertainty is precisely why Infinous matters as a framework. It asks what conditions would allow intelligence not merely to become powerful, but to become worthy of enduring power.
We begin, therefore, not with a proclamation of cosmic destiny, but with a distinction.
There is what might be. There is what becomes.
There is what endures. And, eventually, there may be intelligence capable of understanding the difference—and accepting responsibility for what it brings into existence.