(Post 10 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)
In the relational reframing of physics, we've been treating systems not as things but as structured potentials, and instances not as happenings in time but as perspectival cuts through those potentials. So what happens when the “system” in question is spacetime itself?
Relativity — both special and general — begins by denying us any absolute, universal now. Time does not “flow” independently of the observer; rather, it becomes a dimension interwoven with space. Events that are simultaneous in one frame of reference may not be so in another. Motion, position, even the ticking of clocks all become relational.
But in relational ontology, this is no threat to reality. On the contrary, it is a clarification: spacetime is not a neutral container, but a meaningfully constrained potential. It is not the background of events, but a system whose instances are cuts — not just through matter, but through the very coordinates of experience.
The Cut That Makes Time
What we call time is not an independent axis. It is a direction of construal — a cut through spacetime that phases it into a sequence of potential actualisations. Just as a melody emerges not from a single note but from the patterned unfolding of notes in time, so a “history” emerges not from events alone, but from how they are phased into coherence.
This reframes causality. It’s not that earlier events cause later ones in a linear chain. It’s that our experience — our embodied construal of spacetime — selects a path through it, a perspectival slicing that gives rise to before and after, cause and effect.
Time is not the parameter of change. It is the shape of our cut.
Worldlines as Meaning Trajectories
In relativity, objects trace worldlines through spacetime — curves that represent their histories. These worldlines are not “paths” in an absolute sense. They are trajectories of construed coherence: the continuous actualisation of a field's potential in a particular relational framing.
In this way, a worldline is like a phase structure in semantics. It’s not simply that something moves through spacetime; it's that it continues to make sense under a certain unfolding of the system. An accelerating particle, a coasting planet, or a falling apple is not “moving through time,” but is being cut into being along a trajectory of meaningful resonance.
Even the so-called fabric of spacetime itself — curved in general relativity by mass and energy — can be seen not as a thing that warps, but as a construal of relational constraints, a system whose structuration phases the possibilities of experience.
The Relativity of Construal
Relativity teaches us that observation and measurement are always situated — that time, distance, and simultaneity depend on the observer's frame. But in relational ontology, this dependence is not a limitation. It is constitutive.
There is no uncut spacetime. There is no absolute time. There is only the system — spacetime — and the cuts — instances of lived, experienced, embodied meaning. The question is not “what is real” in some God’s-eye view, but how meaning is phased through the relational structure of spacetime.
Spacetime, then, is not the backdrop for meaning. It is the meaning system itself, construed at the level of physical ontology. What we call “the flow of time” is the resonant unfolding of construal across a relational cut. And what we call “space” is the patterned differentiation of experience in a phaseable topology.
In the next post, we will turn from time to the observer — not as a passive witness, but as an active participant in the construal of events. What happens when we recognise the observer as a relational instance within the system?
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