CONCEPT
Being and Becoming
Prigogine's philosophical distinction between the classical worldview of static states and the creative worldview of irreversible processes — the deepest reframing of what the AI-collaborative builder is actually doing.
In 1980, Prigogine published From Being to Becoming, a title that was itself a philosophical declaration. The classical scientific worldview — from Newton through Laplace to quantum mechanics — was a worldview of being. Fundamental laws described states from which past and future could be deduced. Time was a parameter, not generative. The universe was a collection of things that existed; it was not a process that was happening. Prigogine argued this worldview, while internally consistent, was incapable of describing the universe we actually inhabit — a universe of creative evolution, irreversible processes producing genuine novelty, futures open in ways determinism cannot accommodate.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The builder at the terminal is engaged in an act of becoming. The misunderstanding goes like this: the builder produces artifacts (code, products, books). The artifacts are the point. The builder's value is measured by their quality and quantity. This is the being framework applied to creative work: the builder is