Myth as an Ongoing Journey of Relational Meaning: 6 The Hero’s Journey as Symbolic Cut

“The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experiences available… The call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration.”

— Joseph Campbell

Campbell’s “monomyth” — the so-called Hero’s Journey — has become a cultural cliché, used to template everything from Hollywood blockbusters to personal growth seminars. But beneath its formulaic popularity lies a deeper function: not the transmission of timeless narrative, but the symbolic cutting of a reality system into phase.

From a relational-ontological standpoint, the Hero’s Journey is not a tale to be told but a symbolic operation: a cut in the topology of construal that enables new alignments of meaning, identity, and possibility.

The Cut: From Stability to Instability

Every symbolic system maintains a coherence — a reflexive alignment between collective values, ontological assumptions, and lived practices. The Hero’s Journey begins when that coherence is ruptured.

• The Call to Adventure signals a phase-shift: a destabilisation of the current construal.

• The Departure does not represent literal movement but the symbolic unbinding of alignment — the dislocation of self from the coordinates of the known.

• The Threshold Guardians and Initiatory Ordeals figure the forces that resist or reconfigure the symbolic architecture of the self-world relation.

At each turn, what appears as narrative sequence is actually the enactment of symbolic instability — a traversal of construal that puts the social ontology itself into motion.

The Journey: Traversing Possibility Space

As the journey unfolds, the hero undergoes transformation — but not as an individual alone. What is transformed is the phase-relation between collective construals.

• The Road of Trials sequences the traversal of alternative symbolic construals — each trial a perspective, a cut, a provisional alignment.

• The Abyss marks the limit of symbolic coherence — a point where reflexive orientation collapses, and the possibility of rephasing becomes both necessary and uncertain.

• The Revelation is not a truth discovered but a new symbolic topology — a shift in alignment that reconfigures the system of meaning itself.

This is why myths of descent, death, or dissolution feature so prominently. They are not tales of suffering alone, but symbolic mechanisms for transitioning between incompatible construals of reality.

The Return: Rephasing the Collective

The final arc of the journey — the Return with the Elixir — completes the symbolic operation. The hero does not bring back “knowledge” or “power” in a literal sense, but a new alignment of the collective symbolic field.

• The Return is a symbolic re-entry into the shared system of construal.

• The Gift is the new reflexive phase: a reconfiguration of self, community, and cosmos that can now be lived.

• The Master of Two Worlds embodies the capacity to mediate between incompatible construals — to sustain coherence through symbolic reflexivity.

In this light, the Hero’s Journey is a collective symbolic cut — a traversal and rephasing of social ontology that allows for the reconstitution of meaning.

Myth as Reflexive Infrastructure

Campbell interpreted the Hero’s Journey as a map of psychological transformation. But through a relational lens, it is better understood as symbolic infrastructure for reflexive re-coordination.

It is:

• A mythic technology for shifting alignment.

• A recursive traversal of the possible.

• A symbolic system for phasing the collective into a new ontological topology.

Not every culture has heroes. But every culture faces moments when the symbolic fabric begins to fray — when coherence gives way to ambiguity, and the real becomes unliveable.

The Hero’s Journey is a mythic grammar for such moments. Not because it resolves them, but because it allows a system of meaning to cut, collapse, and reconstrue itself — all while keeping the symbolic infrastructure intact.

That is the true power of the monomyth: not its archetypes, but its function as reflexive topology in motion.

Myth as an Ongoing Journey of Relational Meaning: 5 Myth and the Symbolic Coordination of the Real

“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.”

— Joseph Campbell

Campbell’s provocation is not without merit. History, as typically construed, operates within the coordinates of what was — a linear procession of facts, names, and events. Myth, by contrast, shapes the coordinates themselves. It does not recount what happened; it orients what can happen — and, more deeply, what counts as real.

Through the lens of relational ontology, myth emerges not as fiction or allegory, but as symbolic infrastructure for coordinating the real.

Myth as Symbolic Coordination

In a relational ontology, there is no reality independent of construal. What is “real” is not a pre-existing domain waiting to be discovered; it is a relational achievement — constituted through the symbolic alignment of perspectives, practices, and possibilities.

Myth participates in this achievement. It functions as a symbolic coordination mechanism, phasing collective experience into a shared topology of meaning. In this view:

• Myth is not a passive reflection of the world, but an active participant in its construal.

• It does not merely explain the real; it coordinates what reality means and how it can be lived.

• It scaffolds the symbolic architectures through which communities align, imagine, and transform.

Beyond Explanation: Myth as Phase-Alignment

Unlike theory, which seeks to explain, or ritual, which seeks to enact, myth phases construal. It allows a social formation to shift its alignment with reality by offering symbolic cuts that reconfigure the relationships between self, world, time, and possibility.

Myth does not simply tell a story. It realigns reflexivity:

• It displaces individual meaning into collective coordinates.

• It synchronises private experience with shared symbolic forms.

• It phases ontological transition — from crisis to coherence, from origin to destiny.

In this way, myth is not an “expression of belief.” It is a technology of symbolic coherence, a system for navigating the collective dimensions of becoming.

Myth and the Reality Function

Where Campbell sees myth as the pathway to personal transformation through archetypal integration, a relational lens reframes myth as the symbolic mediation of social alignment. It is not the hero who transforms reality. It is the system of construal — the symbolic infrastructure — that makes the hero legible in the first place.

Thus, myth functions as a reality system: a symbolic configuration through which experience is ordered, values are phased, and the possible is delimited.

This system:

• Selects and aligns construals of time (e.g., cyclical, linear, apocalyptic)

• Coordinates symbolic figures (e.g., ancestors, deities, tricksters, founders)

• Phases space and territory (e.g., sacred/profane, centre/periphery, exile/return)

• Aligns moral structure with ontological topology (e.g., cosmic justice, divine order)

These construals do not reflect reality. They constitute its terms of coherence.

Myth as Ontological Infrastructure

The power of myth lies not in its content but in its function. Myths endure because they stabilise ontological possibility — making collective alignment thinkable, feelable, liveable. They are infrastructures of reflexive resonance.

That is why myth cannot be replaced by data or supplanted by theory. It does something theory cannot: it phases symbolic matter into collective coherence.

Campbell’s genius was to glimpse the structuring role of myth. But in romanticising its content, he mistook its mechanism. A relational view shifts the focus from mythic narrative to symbolic system, from archetypal form to collective phasing, from psychological meaning to ontological coordination.

To study myth, then, is not to uncover hidden truths about human nature. It is to trace the symbolic architectures through which social formations make reality reflexively liveable.

Myth as an Ongoing Journey of Relational Meaning: 3 The Hero’s Journey as Symbolic Infrastructure

"The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there's something lacking in the normal experiences available or permitted to the members of his society."

— Joseph Campbell

No motif in Campbell’s work is more iconic than the Hero’s Journey. From Star Wars to self-help, it has been repurposed across media, therapy, education, and marketing — often stripped of its mythic nuance and reduced to a linear plot device. Even in Campbell’s own telling, the Hero’s Journey risks universalisation: the singular path of departure, initiation, and return becomes an archetypal blueprint, one size fits all.

But through the lens of relational ontology, we can reread the Hero’s Journey not as a universal story structure, but as a symbolic infrastructure for phasing transformation — a repeatable construal that aligns self, world, and possibility into a coherent system of becoming.

The Journey, in this light, is not a story. It is a mechanism of symbolic realignment.

The Journey is a Cut

The journey begins with a break — a tear in the fabric of the ordinary, an invitation or compulsion to cross a threshold. This is not merely narrative exposition. It is a symbolic cut: a perspectival distinction that disaligns the self from its current phase of reality.

• The “call to adventure” is a symbolic disjunction.

• The “refusal of the call” marks the inertia of alignment.

• The “threshold crossing” is the moment the system rephases.

In relational terms, the Hero’s Journey enacts a reflexive passage through symbolic disalignment and realignment. The individual moves from one symbolic system (home, order, normativity) into another (otherness, chaos, transformation), and returns changed — not because something happened to them, but because their alignment with the symbolic field has been reconfigured.

Transformation as Symbolic Rephasing

Campbell treats the journey as a psychological ordeal: death of the ego, rebirth of the self. But if we dispense with the metaphysics of a pre-given self, we can read the transformation differently. The “self” that returns is not deeper or truer. It is differently aligned.

Each trial is a site of rephasing:

• The ordeal realigns the self with vulnerability and death.

• The boon is not an object but a symbolic potential.

• The return restructures the collective’s symbolic field.

Thus the journey is not inward. It is infrastructural. It alters the symbolic economy through which possibility is construed and distributed — for the hero and, crucially, for the collective to which they return.

The hero is not a figure. The hero is a relay in the symbolic system.

Ritual, Myth, and Systemic Realignment

In many traditions, the hero’s passage is ritually enacted — not as personal narrative, but as a collective phasing mechanism. Initiation rites, seasonal festivals, mourning rituals: these are not stories about transformation, they are symbolic transformations. They modulate alignment at scale.

The Hero’s Journey, then, is not just an archetype. It is a symbolic circuit: a structured passage through disalignment and reintegration that enables symbolic systems to maintain coherence while evolving. It holds the field open to transformation — and, when formalised into myth or ritual, it allows that transformation to scale.

In this sense, the journey functions not to individuate, but to reintegrate. It is a technology of collective maintenance — not the assertion of self over world, but the symbolic infrastructure that phases the self as a function of the world’s ongoing construal.

Against Individualist Appropriations

The modern appropriation of the Hero’s Journey — especially in consumer self-help and entertainment — often casts the journey as personal fulfilment. This misses the point entirely. The hero’s transformation is never private. It is a recalibration of symbolic alignment that only matters because it alters the collective field.

In relational terms:

• The journey is not personal growth.

• The self is not the goal.

• The return is not a resolution.

Instead, the journey operates as a symbolic scaffold for construal — one that allows a collective to phase novelty without dissolving into chaos. It is a mythic mechanism for holding open the real.

Myth as an Ongoing Journey of Relational Meaning: 1 Myth as Construal: From Archetype to Alignment

“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism, and you know how reliable that is.”

— Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell believed that myth disclosed the deep structures of the human psyche — timeless archetypes etched into the symbolic imagination of every culture. At the heart of his sweeping synthesis stood the monomyth, a single Hero’s Journey unfolding across traditions and epochs, revealing what he took to be universal truths about the human condition.

But what if myth is not the echo of a shared human essence, nor the outward form of an eternal inward truth? What if myth is something else entirely — not a reflection of the real, but a construal of possibility?

In this series, we re-read Campbell’s theory of mythology through the lens of relational ontology. Rather than reducing myth to an expression of fixed structures — biological, psychological, or metaphysical — we approach it as a symbolic act of worldmaking. Myth, we propose, is not timeless but reflexive. It is not universal but infrastructural. It does not mirror reality — it phases it.

Relational ontology rejects the idea that meaning is discovered in a pregiven world. Instead, it understands all meaning — including myth — as emerging through construal: the perspectival cut that brings a possibility into phase, rendering it as real within a collective horizon of alignment. This shift has profound implications for how we understand not only myth, but reality itself.

From Essential Pattern to Symbolic Possibility

Campbell’s project was an attempt at synthesis: to bring together the myths of disparate cultures under a single unifying logic. His comparative method worked by abstracting symbolic elements across narratives — the call to adventure, the crossing of the threshold, the return with the elixir — and rendering them as a recursive pattern. But the very act of abstraction cuts across difference, reconfiguring the symbolic terrain it seeks to map. The “hero’s journey” becomes not a neutral summary, but a reconstrual — one that centres certain modes of action, agency, and identity, while rendering others peripheral or invisible.

In this light, Campbell’s mythology is not a window into the human soul. It is a symbolic infrastructure aligned with a particular worldview — liberal individualism, masculine transcendence, modernist progress. It is less an uncovering than an organising, less a discovery than a design.

This is not a critique of mythology. It is a mythological critique of critique itself.

The Mythic Cut

Each myth, from a relational perspective, constitutes a cut in the field of symbolic possibility. It draws boundaries between what is real and unreal, possible and impossible, sacred and profane. These cuts are not reflections of the cosmos; they are enactments within it. And when such construals are collectively taken up — repeated, retold, institutionalised — they become symbolic architectures: the scaffolding of reality itself.

In this way, myth is not secondary to knowledge or subordinate to science. It is not a naive stage in human development to be outgrown by reason. Myth is one of the primary mechanisms by which societies phase their cosmos — aligning collective action, values, and perceptions through symbolic construal. Campbell intuited this, but framed it within a psychology of the universal. We instead place it within a reflexive ontology of the symbolic.

Re-reading Campbell

This series does not seek to dismiss Campbell’s work. Quite the opposite: it takes his mythic ambitions seriously, but repositions them within a more precise ontological frame. We do not fault Campbell for cutting reality into the pattern of the Hero — all myth is a cut. What matters is understanding what kind of cut it is, how it aligns possibility, and who it phases in or out of being.

Over the coming posts, we will explore:

• how myth functions as a construal of ontological possibility,

• how the Hero’s Journey operates as a symbolic alignment of the self and the collective,

• how modernity continues to generate its own mythic forms,

• and how new symbolic architectures might phase different worlds into being.

In doing so, we will not merely analyse myth — we will participate in its reflexive unfolding. For to engage myth is to engage the phasing of meaning itself. And in an age of planetary crisis and civilisational confusion, it may be that our most pressing task is not simply to understand the myths we have inherited, but to begin making new ones.

From Collective Construal to Symbolic Cosmos: 29 Thresholds and Crossings

If vectors align motion, thresholds construe transformation. They are not just spatial boundaries or temporal moments. They are symbolic cuts: decisive shifts in what is possible, what is required, what is real.

1. The Symbolic Cut

Every threshold marks a cut in the field of meaning:

• Entering the temple is not just stepping into a building—it’s crossing into a sacred order.

• A rite of passage is not a change of status alone—it reconstitutes identity through symbolic death and rebirth.

• Leaving one’s homeland is not only geographic—it fractures and reconfigures the self.

A threshold, then, is where symbolic topology and vector converge: a boundary cut through a trajectory of becoming.

2. Three Phases of Passage

Symbolic thresholds are rarely instantaneous. They unfold in phases:

• Separation – withdrawal from a prior state or collective.

• Liminality – suspended between meanings, norms, and roles.

• Reincorporation – entry into a transformed order of being.

This triadic construal is widespread not because it is culturally inherited—but because it structures how symbolic reality phases itself.

3. The Gatekeeper Function

Every threshold implies a gatekeeper:

• Sometimes literal (priest, judge, guard).

• Sometimes systemic (ritual, test, ordeal).

• Sometimes internal (doubt, readiness, desire).

Gatekeepers regulate symbolic transition. They instantiate the cost of passage, ensuring the threshold is not trivial, but world-reconfiguring.

4. Failed Crossings

When thresholds are crossed improperly—or prematurely—the consequences are profound:

• A novice becomes a fraud.

• A society tears through limits it cannot sustain.

• A sacred space is violated, and profaned.

Such failures register not as mistakes, but as violations of symbolic order. Meaning itself breaks down—or is reforged at a cost.

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Thresholds symbolise rupture and reconstitution. They are how symbolic cosmoses generate new phases of being. But even more than thresholds, what animates transformation is the drama of refusal and return—our next point of focus.

From Collective Construal to Symbolic Cosmos: 27 Cosmic Topology

As symbolic construal coordinates salience and value, it also configures where things belong—not just physically, but cosmologically. This is what we call cosmic topology: the patterned construal of positions, boundaries, and relations in a meaningful world.

1. Topology vs Geometry

Unlike geometry, which is concerned with measurable distance and shape, topology is about relation and connectivity. Symbolic topology construes:

• What is above, below, within, outside.

• What is central or peripheral, bounded or leaky.

• What may cross, what must remain apart, what is held together.

These are not physical truths—they are symbolic positions, saturated with value and possibility.

2. Worlds Within Worlds

Every symbolic cosmos is nested:

• The family within the clan, the clan within the cosmos.

• The self within the soul, the soul within the world.

• The sacred within the mundane—or vice versa.

Symbolic topology makes such nesting meaningful. It allows positions to be phase-shifted, boundaries to be crossed or sacralised.

3. Boundaries that Matter

The symbolic cosmos is made of meaningful distinctions:

• Between life and death, purity and pollution, inside and outside.

• These are not binary in nature—they are modulated and phased.

• A corpse, a relic, or a rite may be a liminal zone between categories.

Symbolic topology tells us not just where things are, but how they relate across zones of meaning.

4. Topologies of Power and Participation

The cosmos is also a structure of alignment:

• Who may speak for whom?

• Who is positioned as mediator, sovereign, supplicant?

• What forms of relation are made visible—and which remain unthinkable?

Such topologies scaffold not only meaning, but agency and identification.

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Cosmic topology gives the symbolic cosmos its deep architecture. It arranges the possible, aligns the valuable, and distributes the meaningful. But symbolic worlds do more than position and value—they instantiate orientation. In the next post, we consider symbolic vectors: how construals move, point, and phase across the cosmos.

From Collective Construal to Symbolic Cosmos: 11 When the Cosmos Construes Itself

A cosmos becomes symbolic when its horizon includes not just phenomena, but the possibility of construal itself. It becomes reflexive when its symbolic systems turn back on their own architectures, construing how they construe.

In such a cosmos, meaning is not a localised feature of life. It is a structural principle of reality. But this principle is not external or imposed—it is internal, emerging from the recursive alignment of construals across scales and systems.

What does it mean for the cosmos to construe itself?

It means that symbolic systems do not merely represent reality. They phase it. They do not describe what is already there; they shape what can count as there, and as real, and as meaningful. In so doing, they participate in the becoming of the cosmos.

This is not a metaphor. It is the ontological condition of reflexive alignment.

The cosmos, in this view, is not a container of things but a dynamic ordering of construals—a symbolic topology that evolves by reconfiguring its own conditions of possibility.

And this reconfiguration is not uniform. It is phasal. It occurs in differential pulses of alignment and disalignment, where symbolic systems stretch, rupture, reconstellate. What was once unimaginable becomes thinkable. What was once sacred becomes banal. What was once taken for granted becomes opaque.

These phase-shifts are not epistemic alone. They are ontological. They alter the fabric of lived reality—not by changing the objects in it, but by changing what counts as object, as relation, as cause, as value, as self.

In this way, a reflexive cosmos is not a static totality but a recursive opening. It is always already becoming other than itself, through the symbolic cuts that remake its horizon.

We live in such a cosmos now. But we do not yet know how to live with it—how to inhabit a symbolic architecture that can construe its own limits, without collapsing into nihilism or nostalgia.

That is the task ahead. Not to explain the cosmos, but to construe it reflexively—to craft symbolic systems that can align collective life with the openness of meaning itself.

Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning: 30 Self as Reflexive Phase: Memory, Construal, and the Illusion of Interior Continuity

In the everyday imagination, the self is a persistent interior: a centre of thought, feeling, and agency that lives behind the eyes and travels through time. But in relational ontology, no such uncut interior exists. The self, too, is a construed phenomenon, a cut-bound phase of coherence.

So what is the self, if not an inner container?

Reflexive Matter and the Appearance of a Self

The illusion of a continuous, private self arises from the reflexive nature of construal. The system not only construes — it can also construe its own construals. In doing so, it organises patterns of coherence across perspectives.

This reflexive loop allows the emergence of:

• Memory as the symbolic re-instantiation of prior construals.

• Self-reference as a semiotic strategy for stabilising construal identity.

• Interiorisation as the myth of a central locus from which construals proceed.

But none of these require an interior subject. What persists is not an entity, but a historically sedimented phase of perspective-taking.

The self is not inside the body; it is distributed across remembered construals.

Memory as Symbolic Alignment

What we call “my past” is not a continuous substrate, but a symbolic re-alignment of prior construals. Memory does not preserve the past; it re-performs it — according to the constraints of current perspective.

Hence, the self appears to persist because symbolic systems enable cuts to be stitched together into a phase. Language, narrative, ritual, and naming all serve this function. They phase construals so that:

• What differs can be construed as the same (identity).

• What is distributed can be construed as interior (subjectivity).

• What is contingent can be construed as necessary (continuity).

The Self as a Construal Constraint

From a relational view, the self is not an agent but a constraint on construal: a habitual vector for making meaning. When we say “I,” we are not naming a thing — we are invoking a semiotic phase space: the historically sedimented trajectory of symbolic construals that can be aligned as a self.

This means:

• The self is not the origin of meaning, but its conditioned pathway.

• There is no essence behind the self, only a phase of reflexive alignment.

• The self is not hidden inside, but produced in the very act of cutting.

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This decentring of the self opens space to rethink agency, ethics, and transformation. If the self is a phase, not a core, then change becomes not a loss of identity, but a shift in construal resonance. And the ‘liberation’ of the self is not an inward turn, but a new way of cutting.

Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning: 29 Phase and Identity: Patterns That Hold Across the Cut

If the world appears continuous, it is because patterns of construal cohere across cuts. And if identities appear stable — persons, objects, species, fields — it is because certain of these patterns phase across time.

Let us now understand identity not as what something is, but as what holds through ongoing perspectival instantiations.

Identity as a Phase, Not a Substance

Under relational ontology, identity is not a pre-given property. It is a temporally extended relation: a coherence maintained across instances of construal. Each cut produces a new instantiation; identity emerges when successive cuts echo, reinforce, or align with each other.

So we can say:

Identity is not what recurs, but what recurs coherently.

It is not sameness that constitutes identity, but the possibility of aligning cuts in such a way that a pattern appears to hold — a pattern that can be construed as the same across a phase of difference.

Phasing as Reflexive Stability

Think of phasing in the sense used in physics or music: not a perfect repetition, but a structure of reciprocal resonance across time. In this light:

• An individual is a phase through which certain semiotic, social, and biological patterns cohere.

• A species is a phase through which genetic, ecological, and construal tendencies stabilise across evolutionary cuts.

• A concept is a phase that emerges when construals become recurrent across contexts, structuring how we can continue to mean.

This interpretation removes the need to posit hidden substances or enduring cores. What persists is not a thing, but a reflexive coherence — a holding pattern that appears as identity.

The Ontology of What Holds

From this perspective, ontology must shift from what exists to what holds together. The question is no longer “what is X?” but “what patterns constrain how X can be construed?” Identity becomes a function of construal inertia — the resistance to disruption in patterns of alignment.

And crucially, identity is always:

• Perspectival: dependent on which construals are aligned.

• Phase-dependent: defined across cuts, not within them.

• Fragile: maintained only insofar as coherence can be sustained.

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This shift reframes our understanding of persistence, individuation, and being. It opens the way to rethink phenomena like selfhood, memory, and symbolic reference — not as mappings to static entities, but as performances of continuity across the cut.

Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning: 5 Observers as Cuts in the Field

Physics, especially quantum theory, has long wrestled with the problem of the observer. Are they external to the system? Internal? Can observation alter outcomes? Does measurement collapse a wavefunction?

From a relational standpoint, these questions dissolve. The observer is not a passive eye nor a distinct agent. The observer is a cut — a perspectival enactment of coherence in a field of possibility.

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From Agent to Articulation

In classical thought, the observer is an agent who perceives an objective world. Even in quantum mechanics, this persists — albeit paradoxically. The observer “measures,” and the system “collapses.” But who or what is doing the measuring? And where is the line between observer and system?

Relational ontology reframes the issue: there is no separate observer. There is only the perspectival articulation of the system — a cut in the field, a moment of semantic configuration.

To observe is to enact — to draw a distinction, to actualise a possibility, to integrate constraint.

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A Cut Is Not a Subject

We must resist the temptation to anthropomorphise the cut. A cut is not a self. It is not a knower. It is not a perceiving mind.

It is a perspective instantiated — a semantic configuration of the field that delineates what counts as what, what relates to what, and how coherence is maintained.

The so-called “observer” is not observing a world. The observer is the enactment of a world — one among many possible articulations of the same systemic potential.

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Reframing the Measurement Problem

In this light, the so-called measurement problem is a misdescription. There is no collapse, no sudden change from superposition to fact. There is only a relational shift: a new cut, a new configuration, a new construal of coherence.

Measurement is not an intervention. It is an instantiation of a perspective — one that constrains future possibilities while remaining consistent with the field.

This makes the observer neither causal nor magical. They are simply co-constitutive: a local articulation of a global potential.

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Objectivity as Stability Across Cuts

If each observer is a cut, what becomes of objectivity?

It is not a property of the world, but a property of the system of cuts. Objectivity is stability across construals — the consistency of certain relational patterns across many enactments.

In this view, “what’s real” is not what exists independently of observers. It’s what persists through the shifting horizon of perspectives — what survives coordination.

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Selfhood as Recurrent Construal

If observers are cuts, what is a person?

A person is not a singular observer but a system of cuts — a construal profile that maintains certain patterns of coherence across time and interaction. What we call “identity” is the recursive integration of cuts that construe themselves as continuous.

The self, then, is not a substance or essence. It is a relational rhythm — a patterned way of participating in meaning.

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We Are the Field Articulating Itself

To observe is to articulate. To exist as an observer is to be a moment of coherence in a field of possibility.

We are not separate from the world we observe. We are cuts within it — perspectival nodes through which it becomes intelligible to itself.

This is not solipsism. It is not idealism. It is the recognition that intelligibility is not added to reality — it is what reality is.