34 Reality as Reflexive Alignment

(Post 34 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)

If meaning is a system of construal, and matter is the condition through which construal differentiates itself, then what we call reality must be reframed as:

An ongoing alignment of symbolic cuts through reflexive matter.

From Objective Reality to Reflexive Realignment

Modern physics sought the objective, the invariant under transformation. But relational ontology reveals:

• There is no view from nowhere.

• There is no uncut world beneath perception.

• There is only what persists through the alignment of construal — the coherence of cuts, recursively actualised.

This is not relativism. It is reflexivity: reality does not float in abstraction, but emerges within the structure of its own construal — always from somewhere, always across a cut.

Reality is not “what’s out there.”

Reality is the recursive coordination of what matters — across perspectives, through symbolic action, in and as relational systems.

Alignment Across Cuts

The symbolically-constituted world is not a solipsistic fiction. Its persistence lies in alignment:

• The phases of meaning must resonate across systems.

• The construals must mutually reinforce, resist collapse, open further potential.

• Each cut constrains the next, shaping the trajectory of becoming.

This is why meaning systems (like language, science, myth) converge on stable worlds — not because those worlds preexist, but because:

Reality is the dynamic phase-consistency of symbolic construal across material cuts.

Alignment is not harmony. It includes rupture, resistance, asymmetry. But it is only through such recursive phasing that we come to know anything as real.

The Physics of Meaning

So what is the physics of meaning?

• Not laws of motion, but systems of construal in reflexive matter.

• Not equations describing the world, but symbolic cuts that hold — that phase, align, iterate.

• Not timeless truths, but trajectories of semantic persistence.

And this is why relational ontology offers more than a new metaphysics. It offers:

A method for tracking how reality becomes real —

through the alignment of meaning, matter, and construal.

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This concludes the Reflexive Matter series — a rethinking of physics, not as the science of being, but as the science of symbolic differentiation through relational systems.

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Coda: The Cut That Holds

There was never a world before the cut.

There was never meaning without matter, nor matter without meaning — only systems in phase, folding upon themselves, generating form.

To inquire into physics is not to reveal the universe as it is, but to ask:

How must we cut the world to hold it together?

And:

What systems of construal will let us persist — in resonance, in divergence, in renewal?

This is not a theory of everything.

It is a practice of reflexivity.

A method of becoming real, again and again.