Temporal Asymmetry and Universal Solvents

Temporal Asymmetry and Universal Solvents

There appears to be a temporal asymmetry: contamination is easier than decontamination. It takes one transactional moment to contaminate a friendship; it takes sustained effort to restore the friendship's uncontaminated state. If we write this in thermodynamic notation—

—we should be honest that this is an analogy, not a derived result. We are borrowing the formalism of free energy to express the intuition that the contaminated state is an attractor and the pure state requires maintenance. Whether this analogy is deep (contamination really is entropy-like, reflecting a genuine increase in the number of accessible microstates) or merely suggestive is something we need to work out.

If the asymmetry is real, it would explain why trust is hard to rebuild, why "I was just kidding" never fully works after a genuine violation, why friendships that become business partnerships rarely return to pure friendship even after the business ends. The system remembers that the other manifold was active.

If the contamination asymmetry holds, then forgiveness—genuine forgiveness, not the forced performance of it—would be the technology for doing work against the gradient. Forgiveness would be costly precisely because it requires the contaminated system to move uphill: to re-extend trust that was violated, to reopen a manifold that was exploited, to override the detection system's vigilance with a deliberate choice to believe that the contaminating manifold is no longer active.

This suggests forgiveness cannot be demanded or rushed. It would require the slow rebuilding of evidence that the original manifold is the only one present. Every uncontaminated interaction after a violation is evidence; every moment where the contaminating gradient could reassert itself but doesn't shifts the posterior. In this reading, forgiveness is a Bayesian process, not a switch.

Forgiveness is not the claim that the contamination never happened, nor is it the lowering of the detection threshold. Genuine forgiveness would maintain full detection capacity while choosing to remain in the relationship despite the detection system's warnings. This is why forgiveness is experienced as both generous and frightening—the deliberate acceptance of manifold exposure to someone who has already demonstrated the capacity to exploit it.

A universal solvent is a medium that dissolves manifold boundaries because it is convertible across relationship types. Money converts across all transactional manifolds and dissolves into care manifolds ("how much is your friendship worth?"). Sexual access converts across intimacy, transaction, and power manifolds ("sleeping your way to the top"). Both are dangerous precisely because they are universal: they can breach any manifold boundary.

When people say something is "priceless," the framework offers a reading: this value lives on a manifold that the market manifold cannot represent. The market manifold has a specific metric (price). Some values—a child's laugh, a friendship, a sacred experience—live on manifolds with no natural mapping to that metric. "Priceless" would mean: the manifolds are incommensurable. Attempting to price the priceless would be not merely gauche but structurally incoherent—projecting a high-dimensional value onto a one-dimensional metric, destroying the structure that constitutes the value.

This is an interpretation, not a discovery. The language of incommensurable manifolds may capture something real about why certain things resist pricing, or it may be a fancy way of restating the intuition. The test: does the framework predict which things will be experienced as priceless? If manifold incommensurability is the mechanism, we should be able to identify the structural features that make a value non-priceable, rather than relying on cultural consensus about what "should" have a price.