When the model claimed the world
With the previous post, the long preparation is complete. Formal closure has migrated from number, to form, to law. Mathematical necessity has been steadily promoted—from an internal feature of symbolic systems to an alleged feature of reality itself.
Physics is where this trajectory reaches its apotheosis.
Not because physics is uniquely arrogant, nor because it is uniquely mathematical, but because it inherits an expectation centuries in the making: that to describe the world mathematically is to say what the world is.
This post integrates — rather than repeats — the critique developed in the earlier physics-focused series. Singularities, infinities, collapses, and renormalisations will appear here not as isolated technical problems, but as systemic symptoms of a symbolic practice that has forgotten its own ground.
1. Physics as Ontology by Other Means
Modern physics rarely announces itself as metaphysics. It presents its claims as empirical, provisional, and model-based. Yet its explanatory posture tells a different story.
When physics explains a phenomenon, it does so by embedding it within a mathematical structure that is treated as:
universal,
perspective-independent,
and ontologically authoritative.
The equations are not merely tools for coordination or prediction. They are taken to disclose what exists and what must happen.
At this point, mathematics is no longer a language physics uses. It is the substance physics assumes.
2. The Forgetting of the Semiotic Cut
From a relational-semiotic perspective, this is the decisive forgetting.
All symbolic systems operate by making cuts: selecting, stabilising, and projecting aspects of relational potential. Mathematics is no exception. Its power derives precisely from its extreme discipline in making such cuts — enforcing closure, suppressing horizon, and eliminating perspectival variation.
Physics inherits these cuts and treats them as discoveries rather than constructions.
The result is a symbolic system that has forgotten its own semiotic ground. Construal is erased. Inclination is naturalised. Closure is reified.
What remains looks like ontology.
3. Singularities as Over-Closure
Within this posture, singularities appear mysterious and troubling. They are points where the mathematics yields infinity, indeterminacy, or breakdown — precisely where the model seems to say too much and nothing at once.
From the inherited metaphysical stance, this is alarming. If the equations reveal reality, then a singularity looks like a wound in being itself.
From a relational stance, the diagnosis is simpler:
Singularities are sites of over-closure.
They arise when a formal system, designed to suppress openness, is forced to confront conditions where its own exclusions can no longer be maintained. Infinity here is not a feature of nature, but the signal that construal has been pushed beyond its viable horizon.
The paradox dissolves once closure is recognised as methodological rather than ontological.
4. Infinities and Renormalisation: Managed Openness
The appearance of infinities elsewhere in physics produces a different response: not panic, but technique.
Renormalisation does not remove infinity from nature. It reorganises the formalism so that certain divergences are cancelled, absorbed, or ignored. The theory remains operationally effective, but only by carefully managing what it refuses to see.
This is not a failure. It is an admission — albeit an unacknowledged one — that mathematical openness must be actively constrained.
Renormalisation is counter-inclination in practice: a way of reintroducing limits into a system that has overextended its claim to necessity.
5. Collapse and the Reification of State
Quantum mechanics introduces a different pathology.
The wavefunction is a mathematical object designed to generate probabilities for outcomes. Yet it is routinely treated as a physical state of the world — something that exists and then mysteriously collapses.
Here, over-closure takes a subtler form.
A generative model is mistaken for an ontological inventory. The linear algebra that coordinates measurement outcomes is promoted into a story about what reality is doing when no one looks.
Collapse becomes a metaphysical drama rather than a signal that construal has been misread as substance.
6. Physics as Late-Stage Metaphysics
Seen in this light, the crises of modern physics are not anomalies. They are the late-stage symptoms of a long-inherited inclination.
Singularities mark the failure of enforced closure.
Infinities mark unmanaged openness.
Renormalisation marks practical retreat without ontological revision.
Collapse marks the reification of symbolic devices.
7. Reintegrating Physics into Semiosis
This does not diminish physics.
On the contrary, it restores its intelligibility.
Physics becomes what it always was at its best: a powerful symbolic system for coordinating construals across horizons, not an oracle that legislates reality. Its equations regain their proper status as disciplined cuts through relational potential — extraordinarily effective, but never exhaustive.
The apotheosis dissolves.
8. Where This Leaves the Series
This post completes the arc that began with the seduction of formal necessity.
We have traced how mathematical closure:
acquired authority,
migrated into ontology,
hardened into law,
and finally claimed the world.
In the remaining posts, we will step back from physics to examine the broader consequences of this inheritance — and to ask what a genuinely relational practice of mathematics, modelling, and explanation might look like once inclination is treated as first-class.
The model can be powerful again — once it stops pretending to be the world.
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