The Mirage of Unification: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Construal

For more than half a century, physics has been haunted by a tantalising dream: to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics. From string theory to loop quantum gravity, the hunt for “quantum gravity” has consumed immense intellectual and institutional resources. Yet despite dazzling mathematics, the prize has remained elusive.

From a relational ontological perspective, this failure is no accident. It is not that the theories are incomplete fragments awaiting a technical synthesis. It is that the very quest for unification rests on a mistaken premise: that both relativity and quantum mechanics are rival representations of some hidden substrate of reality, and that unification means reducing them to a single overarching physical theory.

Relational ontology tells a different story.

• Relativity construes actuality as the alignment of construals across frames of motion. Einstein’s equivalence principle — the impossibility of distinguishing acceleration from gravity — shows that “the same” phenomenon arises only as a reflexive cut of construal. Motion and gravitation are not different forces beneath appearances; they are perspectival alignments within the system of spacetime.

• Quantum mechanics construes actuality as the alignment of construals across fields of possibility. The infamous “collapse” of the wavefunction is nothing more (and nothing less) than a reflexive cut: potential becomes actual, not by revealing what “was already there,” but by construal actualising one path of meaning over others.

Both theories, in their own symbolic mode, are already unified — not at the level of physics, but at the level of ontology. Each shows how actuality is reflexively constituted by construal within a structured potential.

Seen this way, the dream of “quantum gravity” is a mirage. The search for a single physical theory that merges relativity and quantum mechanics is chasing shadows cast by an ontological confusion. What appears as incompatibility in physics dissolves in ontology: the two theories are not competing windows onto the same substrate, but parallel symbolic architectures construing the reflexivity of reality in different dimensions.

The true unification has been here all along. It lies in recognising that meaning, possibility, and actuality are not layered upon a pre-existing reality, but constitutive of it. Physics, at its most profound, is not a catalogue of objects and forces but a symbolic exploration of how construal and actuality co-emerge.

In this light, the unifying framework is not “quantum gravity,” but relational ontology itself.