Beyond the Mirage: Relational Ontology, Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics

1 Relativity as Reflexive Alignment

When Einstein introduced the equivalence principle, he did more than revolutionise physics — he reconfigured how actuality itself could be construed. The principle states that the effects of acceleration and the effects of gravitation are indistinguishable. This is usually read as a physical truth about forces. From a relational ontological perspective, it is something more profound: it shows that actuality is constituted by the alignment of construals across perspectives of motion.

Relativity, then, is not about uncovering a hidden substrate of reality “beneath” appearances. It is about recognising that motion and gravitation are already appearances of alignment. To move through spacetime is to be caught in a web of reflexive cuts, where each observer’s construal is calibrated against others.

The genius of relativity is not that it explains gravity but that it shows how actuality arises in the mutual construal of phenomena across frames of reference. Space and time are not containers for events; they are symbolic dimensions for reflexive alignment.

In this way, relativity becomes an ontology in disguise: a theory of how actuality is construed, not of what reality “is” underneath.

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2 Quantum Mechanics as Construal of Possibility

If relativity shows us that actuality is alignment across perspectives of motion, quantum mechanics pushes us further: it reveals that actuality itself is drawn from the space of possibility.

Physicists describe quantum systems in terms of superposition, uncertainty, and probability. But a relational ontological reading lets us see these not as strange properties of particles, but as symbolic articulations of construal. The “wavefunction” is not a thing in the world — it is a theory of possible instances. Measurement is not a mechanical collapse; it is a reflexive cut, an act of construal that selects an actuality from among structured potentials.

This is why the quantum domain appears paradoxical when read as physical mechanism. Is the particle a wave or a point? Does it exist before measurement? Such questions presuppose that actuality precedes construal. But in fact, construal is constitutive. A phenomenon is not an object awaiting discovery but an event of alignment in which actuality is actualised.

In this sense, quantum mechanics is not about hidden variables or indeterminate objects. It is about the structured openness of possibility. The uncertainty principle is not a limit of knowledge but an ontological truth: potential is not actuality. Superposition is not a ghostly in-between but a reflection of construal’s reach.

Where relativity shows us the alignment of construals across frames of motion, quantum mechanics shows us the alignment of construals across frames of possibility. Both are modes of reflexivity. Both are ontologies masquerading as physics.

And so, rather than seeking to resolve the puzzles of quantum mechanics within a “realist” physics, we can see them as signs pointing back to the reflexive architecture of reality itself.

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3 Unification Beyond Physics

The century-long quest to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics has been framed as the holy grail of physics: a single mathematical theory that explains the universe from the cosmic to the quantum. Yet the very persistence of the problem suggests that something deeper is at stake.

If we read relativity and quantum mechanics as physical mechanisms, we are forced into contradictions. The smooth curvature of spacetime jars with the discrete jumps of quanta. The deterministic evolution of the cosmos cannot be reconciled with the indeterminacy of measurement. But when we shift our perspective — when we construe them as complementary articulations of reflexivity — the tension dissolves.

Relativity construes actuality as alignment across motion. Quantum mechanics construes actuality as alignment across possibility. Both articulate the same truth: actuality is not given but actualised, constituted in and through construal. What they share is not a mathematics of unification but an ontology of reflexivity.

From this perspective, the “theory of everything” is a misnomer. There is no single formula waiting to be discovered. What there is, instead, is a reflexive architecture in which all phenomena are phases of alignment. Physics, at its best, is one symbolic register of this larger ontology.

This does not diminish the grandeur of Einstein or the strangeness of the quantum pioneers. Rather, it reframes their achievements. They were not charting ultimate mechanics but tracing, in symbolic form, the very conditions of actuality.

And so the unification of relativity and quantum mechanics is not a task for physics alone. It is already realised in the relational ontology that underpins both. What remains is to construe it — to see, finally, that meaning is not added to reality but is the very ground from which reality emerges.

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.

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.