(Post 7 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)
Physics tells us that time is not what it seems. In relativity, time is woven into space, forming a unified four-dimensional manifold. Events are located not just in space but in spacetime, and what we experience as the “flow” of time becomes a matter of perspective. A clock’s rate can change depending on how it moves or how deep it sits in a gravitational well. Simultaneity dissolves. The universal “now” of Newtonian imagination gives way to a landscape in which slices through time are themselves frame-dependent.
From the standpoint of relational ontology, however, something even deeper becomes visible. For if all being is construed — if phenomena are not discovered but enacted in the cut between potential and instance — then time is not a pre-existing dimension waiting to be traversed. Rather, time is a mode of construal. It is a way of cutting through spacetime.
The Cut That Folds
The act of construing a spacetime event is not simply a matter of reading off coordinates. It is an act of configuration — of phasing a field of potential into a meaningful trajectory. This is not a subjective “illusion” superimposed on an objective block universe. Rather, the very structure of spacetime is constituted through this ongoing act of cutting.
Relativity offers us a striking opportunity here: since the geometry of spacetime is not fixed in advance, but depends on how motion, energy, and gravity are construed in relation to one another, each observer’s perspective is not merely a viewpoint on reality, but a way of configuring reality.
In this sense, the “relativity of simultaneity” is not a threat to coherence — it is the very condition for a relational world. There is no absolute cut; every construal is local, perspectival, and enacted. Yet it is precisely this perspectivality that sustains coherence, because it ensures that meaning is always made in context, not from nowhere.
Worldlines as Meaning Trajectories
A worldline is not just the path of a particle through spacetime. It is the inscription of a history — an actualised phase of construal, carved from a system of possibilities. Every worldline is an instance of meaning.
This turns the metaphysical stakes of relativity inside out. In the block universe view, all events exist timelessly, and the experience of time’s flow is merely a psychological artefact. But from a relational perspective, that “artefact” is the ground of being: there is no block unless it is enacted. Time’s flow is not an illusion. It is the condition for any instance of meaning to appear at all.
What relativity reveals, then, is not that time is unreal, but that its apparent objectivity is always already relationally constituted. The metric field — the very shape of spacetime — is a cut in potential, reflexively shaped by the very instances that emerge within it.
The General Relativity of Meaning
Einstein’s great insight was not just that gravity bends spacetime, but that matter and geometry co-determine one another. The field equations are relational at their core. The distribution of energy shapes the geometry, and the geometry shapes how energy moves.
In relational ontology, this is not merely a physical description — it is a metaphenomenal principle. Meaning and construal are co-constitutive. The shape of time is not fixed; it emerges from how reality is phased. Just as mass tells spacetime how to curve, construal tells experience how to unfold. Time, then, is not a container for meaning. It is an effect of meaning — and one that, like gravity, loops back to shape its own conditions of possibility.
In the next post, we’ll bring these insights into sharper focus by revisiting the question of reality. What does it mean to say something is “real” in a world constituted through construal? Can we retain the concept of reality at all — or must we rethink it from the ground up?
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