23 The Event Horizon of Meaning: Construal as Irreversible Cut

(Post 23 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)

In physics, an event horizon marks a boundary beyond which events cannot influence an outside observer. But what if we reframe this through the lens of construal? What if every act of construal is an event horizon — an irreversible commitment to a particular phase of meaning?

The Cut as Commitment

In relational ontology, construal is not a neutral operation. It is a cut — a perspectival shift that reshapes the entire system of potential. When a construal is made, it collapses the indeterminate potential of meaning into a determinate instance. And this collapse is not something that can be undone.

Once an instance is enacted, the system has changed. The potential from which the instance arose is no longer available in its original form. This is why construal is directional: it leaves a trace, a residue, a changed horizon.

There Is No Way Back

This has deep consequences for how we understand knowledge, agency, and time.

You cannot simply rewind and choose a different construal. Even if you revise your interpretation, that revision is another cut, not a cancellation. The system has evolved. Its potential is now shaped by that history.

Meaning is therefore irreversible — not because it obeys the arrow of time, but because each construal restructures the potential for further construal.

This is what we mean by the event horizon of meaning. Once the cut is made, there is no path back to the pre-construal state. What we can do is fold forward — creating new construals that incorporate, reinterpret, or repurpose earlier ones.

Reflexivity Deepens the Irreversibility

The more reflexive a system becomes, the more entangled its present construals are with its history of cuts. This is not a defect. It is the engine of meaning’s evolution.

A purely reactive system could reset. A meaning-making system cannot. Its coherence depends on the ongoing negotiation of its own past — not erasure, but transformation.

The consequence is that each act of meaning bears ethical weight. Construal is not simply descriptive; it is constitutive. It changes what is possible — for us, and for those we are in relation with.