Episode 6.25: Three kinds of completion: the natural; the assisted; and the creative.

Some things that happen in the universe happen automatically: there’s nothing we can do about them and there’s nothing we need to do about them. A second kind of thing that happens is something which would happen eventually but to which we give as you might say a helping hand to make it happen a little more quickly or perhaps a little more according to the way we would like it to happen. The third is when but for our intervention the thing that we occasion, the thing that we act as an agent for, would never happen at all. We relate these three things to different kinds of rewrite rules and see the parallels between the two.