8 What Is Real? Meaning, Matter, and the Mirage of Objectivity

(Post 8 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)

“Be realistic,” they say. “Face the facts.” But in a relational ontology, reality itself is not a brute given. It is not a stable background against which events unfold, nor an independent substrate awaiting perception. Rather, reality is a function of construal — a consequence of the cuts we make across fields of potential.

This does not mean “anything goes.” On the contrary: the constraints on what can be construed as real are systemic, patterned, and meaningful. But it does mean that objectivity, in the traditional sense — a detached view from nowhere — is no longer a viable metaphysical foundation.

The Mirage of the Given

Physics has long wrestled with the idea of the “real.” Quantum mechanics fractured the classical image of a world composed of independently existing particles with definite properties. Instead, we encounter a world where what is depends on how we interact with it — how we measure, describe, or configure it.

This has led to interpretive confusion. Some cling to hidden variables, trying to salvage a pre-construal reality. Others embrace observer-dependence but hesitate to call it real. But relational ontology offers a third way: to embrace the constitutive power of construal, not as a distortion of reality, but as its very condition.

The “mirage” is not the phenomena. The mirage is the idea that phenomena exist independently of meaning.

Matter, Meaning, and Mutual Actualisation

In the relational view, reality is not matter plus meaning. It is matter-as-meaning — a system of potential actualised in instance. When we say a particle exists, or a field propagates, or a clock ticks, what we are describing is a phase of a meaningful system. And when that system is actualised, it is not merely observed. It is instantiated in a particular construal — one that selects a cut through the phase space of possibility.

This is not idealism. It is not solipsism. It is relational realism: the recognition that being is not behind or beyond meaning, but emerges through its enactment. Reality is real — but only ever as phased.

What this allows us to do is hold onto scientific integrity — predictivity, coherence, explanatory power — while recognising that the world we model is never the world uncut. There is no “unconstrued” reality to which our theories asymptotically approach. Instead, every theory is a theory of the instance — a model of how potential might be cut.

The Cut Is the Real

When we speak of reality, then, we are not naming an object but a function. We are not asking “What exists?” in some ontologically prior sense. We are asking: What patterns of construal sustain a coherent phase of meaning? What systems of distinction and relation allow us to coordinate, predict, and experience?

In this view, a phenomenon is not real because it corresponds to an independent object. It is real because it is coherent within a phase-space of construal. This applies just as much to atoms and galaxies as to customs and currencies. The “material” world is not more real than the “social” or the “semiotic” — because all are cuts through structured potentials.

There is no neutral bedrock. No pure ontology. There is only the ongoing reflexive motion of matter and meaning co-instantiating reality.

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In the next post, we’ll turn this lens toward quantum field theory — not to explain its formalism, but to ask: What does it mean to treat the world as fields rather than particles? And how does this shift open up a new understanding of emergence, instantiation, and semantic pattern?