28 Reflexive Coherence: The Emergence of Apparent Continuity

(Post 28 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)

We often take continuity for granted: a world that unfolds smoothly in space and time, with persistent objects, stable identities, and causal flows. But under relational ontology, this continuity is not given. It is constructed — or more precisely, it is co-construed.

No Continuity Without Cuts

In a system understood as pure potential, there is no continuity. There is only a vast possibility space, structured but uninstantiated. Continuity enters only through cuts — through actualisations that differentiate one construal from another.

But continuity is not a property of individual construals. It emerges from reflexive alignment across construals. A sequence of cuts forms a coherent phase not because time or space is continuous in itself, but because the phenomenal relations encoded in each cut cohere across instances.

Think of this as a kind of reflexive resonance: each construal partially presupposes, conditions, and completes others. Continuity is the result of a pattern holding across perspectival instantiations.

Coherence is Relational, Not Absolute

This coherence is not imposed by an external framework. It is not that we “live in spacetime” and things “move around” in it. Rather, spacetime itself is a reflexive effect of this ongoing coherence — a symbolic construal of the way meaning stabilises across a network of relational cuts.

This gives us a new way to understand apparent continuity:

• It is not ontologically primitive, but emergent.

• It is not objective, but intersubjectively patterned.

• It is not static, but contingent on construal and sustained by alignment.

In this view, continuity is a phenomenal achievement — a structure of meaning, not of matter.

The Stability of the World as a Social Phase

Under this interpretation, even the apparent stability of objects over time is not a brute physical fact. It is a social-semiotic phase, maintained by recurring construals across actors, communities, and histories.

What persists is not the object, but the coherence of patterns that constrain how we cut the world. Stability, like continuity, is a function of collective construal.

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This prepares us for a major ontological shift: seeing not just matter and meaning as reflexively co-constituted, but seeing identity itself as emergent from patterns of construal.