The Becoming of Possibility: 12/27/25

Saturday, 27 December 2025

Conversations at the Edge of Possibility: 6 Albert Einstein — Reality, Locality, and the Refusal of Construal

The antagonist who clarifies what is at stake

Relational Ontology:

You insist that reality exists independently of construal. Why refuse the relational cut when quantum theory so clearly demands it?

Einstein:

Because reality cannot depend on observation. God does not play dice, and the world cannot be contingent upon our measurement.

Albert Einstein occupies a singular position in the quantum narrative. Where Planck hesitated, Born formalised, Heisenberg wavered, and Bohr approached the edge, Einstein stands resolute: the world is independent, continuous, and separable. His interventions articulate the cost of ontological insistence.

Realism, Separability, and Locality

Einstein’s conceptual framework is structured around three pillars:

Realism: Physical systems possess definite properties independent of observation.
Separability: Distant systems have their own states; one cannot instantaneously affect the other.
Locality: Influences propagate at finite speed; no action at a distance is allowed.

From this vantage, quantum theory’s indeterminacy and entanglement are not merely inconvenient. They are a conceptual affront.

“God does not play dice,” Einstein famously declared. Chance is not tolerated as a fundamental feature of reality. Probabilistic descriptions are at most epistemic approximations, never ontological statements.

Clarity and Refusal

Einstein’s brilliance lies in his clarity. He sees the formal successes of quantum theory, yet his reasoning remains disciplined: he refuses to confuse calculational efficacy with ontological status. Where others nudge toward relational insight, Einstein refuses: reality is prior to, and independent of, any act of construal.

Relational ontology does not reconcile with this position. It cannot translate indeterminacy into potentiality for instance without violating Einstein’s commitments. The dialogue here is one of friction, not synthesis.

Naming the Cost

Einstein makes explicit what is otherwise latent in the series: every insistence on reality independent of construal incurs a cost.

The observer must be conceptually externalised.
Measurement cannot be constitutive of phenomena.
Discrete instantiation is subordinated to pre-existing continuity.
Relations between system and perspective are obscured.

In short, refusing the relational cut preserves coherence under classical expectations — but at the expense of openness to new modes of possibility.

Respectful Friction

Relational Ontology:

You preserve reality, but at what cost?

Einstein:

I preserve intelligibility.

This is not a rebuke. It is a careful acknowledgment: Einstein’s commitment is principled, rigorous, and strategically coherent. His refusal illuminates the stakes of non-relational thinking. Without such clarity, we might underestimate how deeply the representational imperative is embedded in our conceptual apparatus.

The lesson is precise:

Insisting on reality independent of construal secures stability — and forecloses possibility.

The Consequence for the Series

Einstein reminds us that quantum theory, even at its most radical, is always in tension with classical intuitions. Relational ontology exposes that tension and names its cost: every move toward independence of construal is a move that restricts the field of potential instantiation.

He stands as the necessary antagonist, the conceptual counterweight against which the relational series measures its insight, its discipline, and its daring.

The next post will revisit Planck, Born, and Schrödinger from a meta-perspective, tracing how these figures together reveal the evolving structure of possibility itself.

Next: Concluding Reflections — The Field of Constrained Possibility

Conversations at the Edge of Possibility: 5 Erwin Schrödinger — The Wave That Would Not Decide

When formal elegance becomes ontology

Relational Ontology:

You treat the wavefunction as a physical entity. But why reify the formalism?

Schrödinger:

Because it evolves continuously, deterministically, and it accounts for everything we observe. To treat it as anything less is to misunderstand the world.

With Schrödinger, quantum theory achieves a level of formal elegance unrivalled by his contemporaries. The wavefunction obeys a smooth, continuous evolution — the famous Schrödinger equation — and predicts the probabilities of all possible outcomes. It is, in his view, a complete description.

This is not merely mathematics. For Schrödinger, the wavefunction is reality. The cat, the atom, the particle — all are subsumed under a single, continuous wave.

Here lies the first ontological overreach.

Continuous Evolution vs Discrete Outcomes

The wavefunction flows deterministically, unbroken. Yet the world of observation is discrete. Measurement yields events, not continua.

This is the tension Schrödinger dramatises in the cat thought experiment: alive or dead, not smeared across possibilities. The cat is not a paradox. It is a symptom — a symptom of treating formal description as ontological substance rather than as a map of instantiable possibilities.

The Wavefunction as Theory of Possible Instances

Relational Ontology:

The wave is not a thing. It is a theory of possible instances.

Schrödinger:

But it evolves, and we can calculate from it. It is the closest we have to understanding reality itself.

From a relational standpoint:

The wavefunction encodes what can become actualised, not what exists prior to actualisation.
Its continuous evolution is a formal device — a landscape of potentialities — not a literal flow of being.
The discrete outcomes we observe are instantiations, perspectival cuts from the underlying potential.

Collapse is not a mysterious physical jump.

It is the event in which the system is actualised — the cut in which a possibility becomes instantiated within a given construal.

The Cat: Symptom, Not Paradox

The Schrödinger cat thought experiment is often cited as the ultimate paradox of quantum mechanics. From a relational perspective, it is neither paradox nor puzzle.

The cat’s “alive” or “dead” state is an instantiation, not a property of a continuous wave.
Superposition is not ontic fuzz; it is the formal expression of the space of potential instantiations.
Collapse is the perspectival selection of one instantiation among many, not a sudden physical change in the wave itself.

The paradox arises only if the wavefunction is treated as an entity rather than a map of possibilities.

Continuous Formalism vs Relational Cut

Schrödinger’s genius is undeniable. He formalised the relational space of potential outcomes with unmatched clarity and rigour. Yet the interpretive step — moving from formalism to ontological substance — obscures the relational insight:

A system is a theory of possible instances, not a thing.
Collapse is a perspectival cut, not a physical jump.

Once this distinction is grasped, the “weirdness” of quantum mechanics dissolves. The wave does not “decide.” Instantiation does.

Schrödinger’s Achievement — and the Relational Lesson

Relational Ontology:

You mapped all possibilities in a single, continuous formalism.

Schrödinger:

And yet the world we observe is discrete.

What Schrödinger demonstrates is the tension between formal completeness and relational actualisation:

Formalism alone is insufficient to capture instantiation.
Treating a theory as a thing obscures the perspectival cut that produces events.
Discrete outcomes — cats alive or dead, electrons detected or not — are the primary reality, not the continuous wave.

This directly resonates with the system/instance distinction: the wavefunction is a system of potentialities, the instantiations are events actualised through construal.

Schrödinger’s work is indispensable: it provides the map of potential instances.

Relational ontology completes the interpretation: it names the cut.

The next conversation will confront someone who refuses to allow any of these subtleties: a thinker for whom realism remains absolute, and the relational cut remains unthinkable.

Next: Albert Einstein — Reality, Locality, and the Refusal of Construal

Conversations at the Edge of Possibility: 4 Niels Bohr — Complementarity and the Phenomenon

At the edge of relational insight

Relational Ontology:

You insist that physics deals with phenomena, not objects. Yet you retain the sense that descriptions somehow describe something “behind” the phenomenon. Why?

Bohr:

Because physics must account for what we experience as reality. The phenomenon is primary, yes, but it cannot be detached from the conditions of observation without losing its meaning.

With Bohr, quantum theory reaches a new level of sophistication. He does not merely acknowledge limits; he articulates a principle for navigating them: complementarity. Certain descriptions, mutually exclusive in their classical logic, are nonetheless jointly necessary for a complete account of phenomena. Position and momentum. Wave and particle. Cause and effect. Each is valid, but only within its context.

This principle is not an apology. It is a discipline of thought.

Phenomena, Not Objects

Bohr’s central insistence is deceptively radical:

Physics does not deal with independent, pre-existing objects.
Physics deals with phenomena: the results of specific experimental arrangements.
Properties emerge only within the context of these arrangements.

Here, Bohr comes very close to a genuinely relational insight: reality is not “out there” to be represented. The world of physics is what can be actualised as phenomena under particular conditions of construal.

For a moment, the door Planck opened swings wide.

Complementarity: Mutual Exclusion Without Reduction

Complementarity formalises a subtle truth: descriptions can be mutually exclusive, yet jointly necessary. No single measurement captures the totality. Classical categories cannot be naively combined. The world is structured not as a sum of independent elements, but as a network of constraining contexts in which phenomena emerge.

Here, relational ontology resonates:

Complementary descriptions point to perspectival limits, not ontic fuzz.
Phenomena are instantiated, not pre-existing.
The “object” is never separate from the event of observation.

Bohr’s thought dances on the edge of a relational cut.

The Critical Halt

And yet — and here lies the misstep — Bohr cannot release the idea that descriptions describe something. The phenomenon is primary, but he still assumes that what is described exists independently in some sense. The “classical picture” lingers, subtle but persistent. Even as he emphasises the inseparability of system and measurement, he treats the measured property as if it were a thing.

This is where the closest encounter with relational ontology falters. Bohr almost lets go of object-based realism, but he holds on to just enough to prevent the leap.

A Near Relational Cut

Relational Ontology:

You recognise phenomena as primary. Why not follow the cut fully?

Bohr:

Because to abandon representation entirely is to abandon the practice of physics. Without a notion of description as reflecting something, communication and calculation collapse.

Bohr’s conservatism is strategic. He preserves the operational integrity of physics while nudging conceptual boundaries. The tension is fertile: it creates a space in which relational thinking can be discerned, tested, and reflected upon — even if it is not yet fully actualised.

What Bohr Makes Possible — and What He Forecloses

Bohr’s insistence on phenomena and complementarity:

Opens the door to seeing reality as a network of instantiated events, not pre-existing objects
Forces attention to the conditions under which phenomena are actualised
Introduces the notion of mutually exclusive but jointly necessary descriptions

Yet by retaining the idea that descriptions somehow “refer” to something, Bohr preserves a representational anchor. The world is still, in some sense, out there. The relational cut is nearly made, but not completed.

Bohr’s conversation is pivotal because it demonstrates both the power and the limit of approaching relational ontology from within quantum theory. The edge is visible; the leap remains a choice.

The next encounter will explore someone who attempts to reify the wave itself — and in doing so, makes explicit the tension between formalism and construal.

Next: Erwin Schrödinger — The Wave That Would Not Decide

Conversations at the Edge of Possibility: 3 Werner Heisenberg — Indeterminacy and the Collapse of Description

When limits are mistaken for properties

Relational Ontology:

You showed that description itself has limits. Why did you then treat those limits as features of reality?

Heisenberg:

Because physics must speak of what can be said. And what cannot be said marks the structure of the world.

With Werner Heisenberg, quantum theory stops pretending that description is transparent. Measurement no longer reveals what was already there; it intervenes. The concepts of classical physics — position, momentum, trajectory — cannot all be applied at once. Something gives way.

Of all the architects of quantum theory, Heisenberg comes closest to a genuinely relational insight.

And it is precisely for that reason that his misstep is the most consequential.

Indeterminacy as Breakthrough

Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations are often summarised as a technical result. That summary misses their force.

What Heisenberg shows is not merely that measurements are imprecise, but that the conditions of application of concepts are constrained. The very attempt to ascribe determinate values to certain pairs of quantities fails — not because of experimental inadequacy, but because the concepts cannot jointly function.

This is a collapse of classical description.

Importantly, Heisenberg does not initially frame this as ignorance. The indeterminacy is not a gap to be filled by better instruments. It is structural.

So far, the move is radical — and promising.

Epistemic or Ontological?

The danger enters quietly.

Heisenberg repeatedly vacillates between two readings of indeterminacy:

Epistemic:
Indeterminacy reflects limits on what can be known or said.
Ontological:
Indeterminacy reflects a fundamental “fuzziness” in reality itself.

The slide between these readings is subtle, and historically understandable. But it is not innocent.

Once indeterminacy is treated as ontological — as something the electron has — the limit of description is reified into a property of objects.

The world becomes blurry.

The Temptation to Reify Limits

Relational Ontology:

You discovered a limit. Why did you turn it into a thing?

Heisenberg:

Because physics must describe reality, not merely its descriptions.

This reply captures the bind.

Heisenberg sees that classical description fails. But rather than rethinking the relation between theory and phenomenon, he relocates the failure into the world. The uncertainty relations become statements about what exists, not about what can be actualised as an event.

Indeterminacy becomes ontic fuzz.

From a relational standpoint, this is a category error.

A limit of description is not a feature of reality.

It is a feature of relation.

The Relational Cut

Relational ontology offers a different articulation of what Heisenberg uncovered.

Indeterminacy is not:

a temporal fluctuation
a lack of information
a smeared-out property of objects

It is a perspectival constraint on instantiation.

A system, understood as a theory of possible instances, cannot be cut in all ways at once. Certain distinctions exclude others. Not because reality is fuzzy, but because instantiation is selective.

Crucially:

Instantiation is not a temporal process.

There is no evolving state that gradually sharpens or blurs. There is only the cut — the event — in which certain determinations become actualised and others do not.

Heisenberg’s error is to imagine indeterminacy as something that persists through time between measurements, rather than as a constraint on what can be instantiated at all within a given construal.

When Limits Become Properties

Once indeterminacy is treated as ontological, several familiar problems arise:

What is indeterminate between measurements?
How does fuzz collapse into definiteness?
How does a vague reality produce sharp events?

These are not deep mysteries. They are artefacts of the mistake.

They arise only if limits of description are treated as properties of systems evolving in time.

Relational ontology dissolves the problem by refusing that reification. The limit belongs to the cut, not to an underlying process.

Heisenberg’s Achievement — and His Halt

Relational Ontology:

You showed that classical concepts cannot all be applied together.

Heisenberg:

And that this incompatibility reflects the structure of nature.

Here is the final divergence.

Heisenberg correctly identifies incompatibility. But he attributes it to nature rather than to the relation between construal and instantiation. In doing so, he preserves the representational ambition of physics even as he undermines its classical vocabulary.

He stands closer to relational ontology than any of his contemporaries so far — and yet he stops short of its decisive move.

He lets indeterminacy become a thing.

What Heisenberg Leaves Unfinished

Heisenberg reveals that physics cannot speak from nowhere. Description is constrained, selective, and mutually exclusive.

What he does not allow is the final step:

that those constraints are not facts about the world,
but facts about how worlds become available as events.

Indeterminacy is not the texture of reality.

It is the signature of relation.

And recognising that requires letting go — not of determinacy — but of the idea that description mirrors being.

With Heisenberg, quantum theory arrives at the edge of a relational ontology — and recoils.

The next conversation will be with the figure who comes closest to standing on that edge without retreating, even if he refuses to step across it.

Next: Niels Bohr — Complementarity and the Phenomenon

Conversations at the Edge of Possibility: 2 Max Born — Probability Without Perspective

When chance becomes real, but relation does not

Relational Ontology:

You replaced certainty with probability. But whose probability is it?

Born:

It is the probability of the system to produce a given result. Nothing more is required.

With Max Born, quantum theory crosses a decisive threshold. Where Planck introduced a discontinuity while refusing ontological consequences, Born makes chance itself fundamental. The wavefunction, he proposes, does not describe what is, but what is likely.

This move is often celebrated as an act of intellectual honesty: physics abandons determinism and accepts indeterminacy. Yet something crucial happens at the same moment — something that is rarely named.

Probability becomes real, but perspective disappears.

The Statistical Interpretation

Born’s proposal is deceptively modest. The wavefunction, he argues, should be interpreted statistically: its squared magnitude gives the probability of finding a particular outcome upon measurement.

This resolves a pressing problem. The mathematics no longer pretends to describe an evolving physical wave that somehow collapses. Instead, it describes a distribution of possible outcomes. Physics regains its footing.

But the ontological cost of this stabilisation is high.

In Born’s interpretation:

Probability is a property of the system.
The distribution exists independently of how or from where it is construed.
Measurement merely reveals which outcome occurred.

The wavefunction does not describe reality directly — but the probabilities it encodes are treated as objective features of the world.

This is probabilistic realism.

The First Major Fault Line

Relational ontology identifies Born’s move as the first major fault line in the foundations of quantum theory.

Not because probability is introduced — but because it is introduced without perspective.

Probability, in Born’s account, floats free of any construal. It belongs to the system as such. The observer disappears again, quietly, precisely at the moment they should have become unavoidable.

Chance replaces certainty, but representation remains intact.

Probability vs Readiness

Relational Ontology:

You speak of probability as though it were already there, waiting to be sampled. What if it is not?

Born:

Then physics would lose its objectivity.

This exchange names the core disagreement.

From a relational standpoint, probability is not a feature of the world. It is a second-order abstraction over possible instantiations. Treating it as ontological substance mistakes a measure for a mode of being.

Relational ontology proposes a different cut — without introducing a competing interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Instead of probability, it speaks of readiness.

Probability is a numerical distribution over outcomes.
Readiness is the structured potential for instantiation within a given construal.

Readiness is not something the system has.

It is something that emerges in relation.

Born’s probabilities describe frequencies across repeated trials. Readiness concerns what can be actualised as an event from a particular perspective.

The difference is subtle — and decisive.

Distributions vs Potential for Instantiation

Born’s interpretation treats the wavefunction as a distribution of outcomes. But a distribution already presupposes:

a space of outcomes
a metric of likelihood
a stable frame within which repetition makes sense

These are not innocent assumptions. They smuggle in a background ontology of sameness, repeatability, and observer-independence.

Relational ontology does not deny that distributions can be constructed. It insists that they are derivative.

What is primary is the potential for instantiation — the way a system, understood as a theory of possible instances, can be cut into an event under specific conditions of construal.

Probability is what you get after you forget the cut.

The Quiet Reinstatement of Realism

Born is often read as a break from classical realism. In one sense, this is true: determinism is abandoned.

But something else takes its place.

By treating probability as an objective property of systems, Born reinstates realism at a higher level of abstraction. What is real is no longer position or momentum, but likelihood.

This move feels modest. It is anything but.

The world becomes a catalogue of chances, existing independently of how those chances are construed, accessed, or actualised.

Relational ontology refuses this move — not by denying probability, but by relocating it.

What Born Makes Possible — and What He Closes Off

Relational Ontology:

You freed physics from certainty.

Born:

And preserved its objectivity.

Born’s contribution is indispensable. Without the statistical interpretation, quantum theory would likely have fractured beyond repair. He provided a way to work, calculate, and predict without metaphysical extravagance.

But the price of that stability is the foreclosure of a deeper question:

Probability of what, relative to which construal?

By answering that question too quickly — by assigning probability to systems rather than to relations — Born closes off the possibility of understanding indeterminacy as perspectival rather than ontological.

Chance becomes a feature of reality, rather than a feature of how reality is cut into events.

Born stands, in this series, as the figure who makes uncertainty safe — and in doing so, makes it inert.

The next encounter will be with someone who refuses that safety, and pushes indeterminacy to the brink of description itself.

Next: Werner Heisenberg — Indeterminacy and the Collapse of Description

Conversations at the Edge of Possibility: 1 Max Planck — The Reluctant Revolutionary

Opening the door without crossing the threshold

Relational Ontology:

You introduced a discontinuity into physics. But you never allowed it to become an ontological event. Why?

Planck:

Because nothing in nature itself required such a leap. The discontinuity was a formal expedient — a device required to secure the correct result. I did not take it to describe reality as such.

Planck’s intervention is often treated as the beginning of quantum theory. That is not wrong — but it is incomplete in a way that matters.

What Planck introduced was not a new ontology, but a constraint on description. Faced with the failure of classical physics to account for black-body radiation, he introduced a quantisation condition that made the equations work. Energy could only be exchanged in discrete packets. The mathematics closed. The anomaly disappeared.

But nothing else was allowed to move.

Planck did not reconceive matter, radiation, or reality. He did not question continuity as an ontological commitment. Quantisation, for him, was a necessity of calculation — not a feature of the world.

And that hesitation is the point.

Quantisation Without Ontology

Relational Ontology:

You allowed discreteness into the formalism, but not into being. Why stop there?

Planck:

Because physics describes nature; it does not invent it. The success of a formula does not license metaphysical conclusions.

Planck’s position is often described as conservative. But “conservative” here does not mean timid or uncreative. It means disciplined by a particular image of what physics is allowed to do.

In Planck’s view:

The world remains fundamentally continuous.
Discontinuity belongs to the means of description, not to reality.
Theory is a mirror refined by necessity, not a participant in constitution.

This is why Planck could introduce a constant that would later bear his name without allowing it to transform his ontology. The constant constrained calculation, not being.

From a relational perspective, this is a decisive moment of ontological arrest.

Discovery Is Not Transformation

Relational ontology insists on a distinction that Planck’s intervention makes newly visible:

Discovery does not equal ontological transformation.

A theory can require a discontinuity without acknowledging what that requirement reveals about the relation between system and instance, between potential and event.

Planck discovered that continuity could no longer be maintained within calculation.

He did not accept that continuity might no longer be maintainable as ontology.

This is not a failure of intelligence or courage. It is a consequence of treating theory as representation rather than as a theory of possible instances.

A Relational Cut

From a relational standpoint, quantisation does not announce that nature is “really discrete”. That would simply reverse the metaphysical polarity while leaving the representational frame intact.

Instead, quantisation marks a limit of construal.

The discontinuity does not belong to nature as such.

It belongs to the cut between potential and instantiation.

What Planck encountered — without naming it — was the impossibility of treating instantiation as a smooth unfolding of underlying continuity. The formalism demanded a cut. But the cut was left uninterpreted.

What Changes When the Discontinuity Is Not in Nature, but in Construal?

This is the question Planck opens — and refuses to answer.

If the system is understood as a theory of possible instances, then quantisation is not a property of objects or energies. It is a constraint on what can be actualised as an event within a given theoretical frame.

The discontinuity is not a feature of being.

It is a feature of how possibility becomes event.

Planck’s refusal to follow this line preserves the classical image of reality even as it destabilises it from within. The door is opened. The threshold remains uncrossed.

The Reluctant Revolutionary

Relational Ontology:

You changed physics forever.

Planck:

I solved a problem. Others made a revolution of it.

That reply is not evasive. It is precise.

Planck’s legacy is not that he founded quantum ontology. It is that he revealed, perhaps for the first time, that formal necessity can outrun ontological commitment — and that physics can no longer rely on continuity as an unquestioned background assumption.

What he did not do is equally important. He did not allow the formal cut to become a perspectival one. He did not treat quantisation as a clue to the nature of instantiation itself.

That task would fall to others.

And they, too, would hesitate — though in different ways.

Next: Max Born — Probability Without Perspective

Conversations at the Edge of Possibility: Series Overview

This series stages conversations between relational ontology and the architects of quantum theory — Planck, Born, Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrödinger, and Einstein. Each conversation explores what became possible when their ideas emerged, what was foreclosed, and where relational cuts might be enacted. These are not histories, interpretations, or reconciliations. They are encounters designed to illuminate the structure of constrained possibility itself.

1. Max Planck — The Reluctant Revolutionary

Planck introduces quantisation as formal necessity, without allowing it to transform ontology. Discovery opens the door; the threshold remains uncrossed.

2. Max Born — Probability Without Perspective

Probability becomes a property of systems, not of perspective. The first major fault line appears: chance replaces certainty, yet relational cuts are ignored.

3. Werner Heisenberg — Indeterminacy and the Collapse of Description

Limits of description are revealed, but danger lurks in reifying those limits as ontological fuzz. Indeterminacy is perspectival, not temporal; instantiation is not a process.

4. Niels Bohr — Complementarity and the Phenomenon

Bohr approaches relational insight most closely: phenomena, complementary descriptions, mutually exclusive but necessary. Yet he retains the lingering notion that descriptions describe something “behind” the phenomenon.

5. Erwin Schrödinger — The Wave That Would Not Decide

The wavefunction is treated as a thing, collapse as a physical jump. Relational perspective restores the wave as a theory of possible instances, collapse as the perspectival cut.

6. Albert Einstein — Reality, Locality, and the Refusal of Construal

Einstein preserves classical realism, separability, and locality. His refusal makes explicit the cost of insisting on reality independent of construal: possibility is constrained, relational cuts foreclosed.

Concluding Reflections — The Field of Constrained Possibility

Taken together, these encounters map a landscape in which the actualisation of possibility depends on relational cuts, not formal completeness or representational realism. Discovery, probability, indeterminacy, and complementarity mark the edges of what can be instantiated. Insistence on observer-independent reality preserves clarity but closes the field of potential.

This series is not a resolution. It is a map of constraints, tensions, and openings — an invitation to follow relational cuts wherever they may lead.

Conversations at the Edge of Possibility: Relational Ontology and the Birth of Quantum Theory

Quantum theory is often remembered as a revolution in physics.

Less often is it remembered as a crisis in how meaning itself is to be borne.

The figures who gave quantum theory its early form—Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Born, and others—were not merely solving technical problems. They were working at the limits of what could be said, pictured, and treated as real. Their disagreements were not secondary disputes over interpretation; they were fault lines in the very relation between theory, phenomenon, and reality.

This series stages a set of conversations between relational ontology and the architects of quantum theory—not to resolve those fault lines, and not to retrospectively conscript these thinkers into a contemporary framework, but to examine the conditions of possibility under which their concepts emerged, strained, and sometimes failed.

These are not historical reconstructions.

They are not interpretations of quantum mechanics.

And they are not dialogues in which the past is granted a final word.

They are relational encounters.

Ontology as Conversation, Not Representation

Relational ontology begins from a refusal: the refusal to treat reality as something that exists independently of the construals through which it becomes available.

In this view:

A system is not a thing, but a theory of possible instances.
Instantiation is not a temporal process, but a perspectival cut—a shift from potential to event.
A phenomenon is not an appearance of an underlying object, but first-order meaning as construed experience.
There is no “unconstrued” reality waiting behind phenomena to be revealed.

Quantum theory, in its formative years, circled these insights repeatedly—sometimes approaching them with remarkable precision, sometimes recoiling at the last moment. The conversations staged in this series trace those approaches and retreats without smoothing them into coherence.

What matters here is not who was “right”, but what each position made possible, and what it foreclosed.

Why Conversation?

The dialogic form is not a literary indulgence. It is an ontological commitment.

A conversation foregrounds relation. It keeps disagreement alive. It prevents the retroactive stabilisation of meaning that so often accompanies historical commentary. Most importantly, it resists the illusion that concepts simply represent reality, rather than participating in its becoming.

Each post in this series stages a disciplined encounter between relational ontology and a particular thinker. The aim is not synthesis. It is friction.

Where a concept holds, it will hold under pressure.

Where it fails, the failure will be instructive.

Against Reconciliation

Much contemporary writing attempts to show that quantum theory “already implies” some preferred ontology—relational, informational, many-worlds, or otherwise. This series explicitly rejects that gesture.

Quantum theory does not secretly contain relational ontology.

Relational ontology does not explain quantum theory.

Instead, quantum theory is treated here as a historical field of constrained possibility: a space in which certain ways of thinking could emerge, while others remained unthinkable or actively resisted.

When relational ontology speaks to Bohr or Einstein in these posts, it does not do so as a judge delivering verdicts, nor as a disciple offering gratitude. It speaks as a different cut through possibility—one that exposes where representational realism continued to exert its gravitational pull, even in the midst of radical innovation.

What This Series Is — and Is Not

This series is:

an exploration of how meaning, reality, and description were reconfigured at the birth of quantum theory
a disciplined use of fictional dialogue to surface genuine ontological commitments
an inquiry into the becoming of possibility itself

This series is not:

an introduction to quantum mechanics
a defence of any mainstream interpretation
a claim that physics licenses a particular metaphysics

Readers looking for explanations of wavefunctions, measurements, or experiments will find better sources elsewhere. Readers interested in how the very idea of explanation came under strain may find something of value here.

The Stakes

Quantum theory forced a confrontation with limits: limits of prediction, limits of description, limits of classical realism. But limits can be misunderstood. They can be reified, treated as features of reality rather than as features of relation.

Relational ontology offers a way of revisiting those limits—not to overcome them, but to understand what they are limits of.

These conversations take place at the edge of that understanding.

What follows is not a history of quantum theory, but a series of cuts through its becoming—each one opening a different space of possibility, each one leaving something unresolved.

As it must.

5 The Day Nothing Was Explained

Liora woke early, not because she intended to travel far, but because the light had already made its decision.

The road ahead was unremarkable. No threshold marked its beginning. No sign announced where it led. It passed through a low valley where grass grew unevenly and stones surfaced just enough to remind walkers to watch their step.

She walked without consulting anything.

By midmorning she reached a village—small, weathered, neither welcoming nor hostile. People were already at work. A woman struggled to lift a crate onto a cart whose wheel refused to align properly.

Liora stopped.

Together they shifted the weight, adjusting not the cart but how they held it. The wheel settled. No one commented on this. The woman nodded once and returned to her work.

Further on, a child sat by the roadside arranging pebbles into rows. Some were carefully aligned, others scattered loosely nearby. The child frowned, rearranged them, then abandoned the pattern entirely to chase a bird.

The pebbles remained.

Liora continued walking.

At the centre of the village, an argument was unfolding—not heated, not calm, but suspended somewhere between. Two men spoke at once, each convinced the other had misunderstood.

Liora listened. She did not intervene. Eventually one of them laughed, shook his head, and the conversation shifted. No agreement was reached. No principle clarified. Yet the tension eased, and they parted without resentment.

Nothing had been resolved.

Everything had moved.

At a well near the edge of the village, Liora stopped to drink. The bucket was heavy with water, heavier than she expected. She adjusted her grip and lifted again.

She noticed that she did this without thinking.

Once, she would have paused—asked what the weight meant, how it should be carried, whether there was a better method. Now, she simply responded.

The water tasted ordinary.

Beyond the village, the road narrowed. Wind moved through tall grass, producing no pattern that could be followed, only a rhythm that could be walked alongside.

Liora realised she was not looking for signs.

Not because she had learned there were none.

But because she no longer needed them.

As the sun lowered, she reached a bend where the road dipped briefly out of sight. She did not stop to consider where it would reappear.

She stepped forward.

No insight arrived.

No conclusion formed.

The world did not disclose itself.

It continued.

And so did Liora.

4 The Map That Grew Heavier Each Day

The map was given to Liora at the edge of a long road.

The cartographer who handed it to her did so with ceremony, as though passing on something fragile and essential. The map was folded neatly, its paper thick and finely made.

“It contains everything that matters,” the cartographer said.

Liora thanked him. She felt reassured by its weight—light, but not trivial. A good map, she thought, should feel like this.

At first, it was immensely helpful. Paths were clearly marked. Landmarks named. Distances measured. When Liora hesitated, the map steadied her. When she doubted herself, it reminded her where she was.

Each evening, she unfolded it carefully, tracing the day’s journey with her finger. The map responded well to attention.

But the road did not remain simple.

When Liora encountered a fork not shown on the map, she returned to the cartographers’ outpost she had passed earlier. They listened carefully and nodded.

“An omission,” one said.

They added a line.

The map grew slightly heavier.

Later, she discovered a village whose people spoke in gestures more than words. The map did not know how to mark this.

“A clarification is required,” the cartographers decided. They added symbols, annotations, cross-references.

The map grew heavier again.

As the days passed, the additions accumulated. Each new encounter required refinement. Each refinement improved accuracy. The map became more impressive, more complete, more authoritative.

It also became harder to carry.

Liora noticed that she began to plan her days around what the map could support. Steep paths were avoided. Unmarked routes postponed. Not because they were dangerous, but because they were inconvenient to document.

One afternoon, climbing a narrow trail, she slipped. The map struck the ground first.

She laughed, relieved to find it undamaged.

But when she lifted it again, she felt the strain in her shoulders.

That night, she dreamed of maps layered upon maps, each perfectly accurate, each weighing more than the last. In the dream, travellers competed not in distance travelled, but in the density of what they carried.

The next morning, she met others on the road. Some carried maps bound in leather, others scrolls tied with string. A few carried nothing at all.

“Where are your maps?” she asked one of them.

“I learned when to put mine down,” the traveller replied.

Liora did not understand this immediately.

The decisive moment came at a river crossing. The map contained detailed diagrams of the current, the depth, the safest stones.

Halfway across, the water rose.

Liora tried to consult the map, but its weight unbalanced her. She stumbled, catching herself just in time.

She looked at the map, then at the river.

Slowly, carefully, she set the map down on a dry rock.

Freed of its weight, she crossed easily.

On the far bank, she waited, expecting panic, regret, or loss.

None came.

The path ahead was still visible. The landmarks still recognisable. She noticed more now: the sound of water, the angle of light, the feel of the ground.

Others crossed behind her, some carrying maps, some not. Each crossed differently. Each succeeded.

Liora looked back at her map resting on the stone. It had not become false.

It had simply become too heavy to bring everywhere.

She did not abandon it forever. She folded it carefully and left it where others could use it if they wished.

As she walked on, she understood at last: the map had never been a container of meaning.

It had been a companion.

And some companions must be left behind, not because they are wrong, but because the journey has reached a place where carrying them prevents movement.

Liora continued on, unburdened.

The road did not end.

It never had.

3 The Shrine with No Doctrine

Liora first noticed the shrine because no one announced it.

There were no signs along the road, no carvings in the stone, no markers to distinguish the place from the fields and paths that surrounded it. Yet travellers slowed as they approached it. Some stopped. Some turned aside briefly, then continued on their way with altered pace, as if recalibrated.

The shrine stood where three paths crossed. Not dramatically—no pillars, no altar raised above the ground—but simply, almost apologetically, as a clearing held open by use.

There was nothing on it.

No statue. No symbol. No inscription.

Liora watched from a distance. People arrived alone or in pairs. Some knelt. Some sat. Some stood in silence. No one instructed them. No one corrected them.

She waited for an explanation to present itself.

None did.

Eventually she approached.

A caretaker sat nearby, repairing a crack in the stone with careful hands. He worked slowly, as though haste would introduce a kind of error the place could not tolerate.

“What is this place?” Liora asked.

He did not look up. “It’s a shrine.”

“To what?”

He considered this. “Nothing that could fit into an answer.”

Liora stepped onto the clearing. She felt no sudden revelation, no warmth or chill. Only a subtle sense of orientation, like finding north without having asked for it.

Others were there, each absorbed in their own manner of staying. No two behaved alike, yet there was no sense of disorder. The shrine did not coordinate them by instruction. It coordinated them by permission.

A woman lit a candle and placed it carefully on the stone, though no candles were required. A man bowed briefly, then laughed at himself and bowed again. A child sat cross-legged, tracing patterns in the dust.

Liora asked the caretaker what people believed here.

“Belief isn’t required,” he said.

“Then why do they come?”

“To hold something steady.”

“What?”

He smiled. “Themselves. Each other. Time.”

She stayed longer than she intended. Minutes loosened. Conversations elsewhere seemed to recede. The shrine did not demand attention; it absorbed it gently, like a basin collecting rain.

At one point, someone asked whether the shrine was sacred.

The caretaker answered, “Only if you stay.”

Liora thought of the old temples she had seen—grand, doctrinal, heavy with explanation. This shrine offered none of that. Yet it endured.

“Who built it?” she asked.

“No one remembers,” the caretaker said. “That’s how it survived.”

As dusk approached, people departed quietly. No closing ritual marked the end. The shrine did not require completion.

Liora lingered. She felt no obligation to return, yet she knew she could.

Before leaving, she asked one last question. “What does it mean?”

The caretaker finally met her eyes. “Meaning happens here,” he said. “It isn’t stored.”

Liora walked on, carrying nothing with her.

Behind her, the shrine remained—not as doctrine, not as object, but as a place where relation could gather without asking permission from explanation.

It would still be there tomorrow.

Not because it was defended.

But because it was used.

2 The Museum of Perfectly Preserved Things

The museum announced itself long before it appeared.

Posters lined the road for miles, each bearing the same promise in careful, serifed script:

Here, things remain what they truly are.

Liora had been travelling for some time when she reached it—a vast, pale building set back from the road, its façade symmetrical to the point of insistence. Columns framed the entrance, each identical in height and spacing, as though difference itself had been politely refused entry.

Inside, the air was cool and still. Footsteps softened as soon as they crossed the threshold, absorbed by floors designed to minimise disturbance. Voices dropped instinctively, not because silence was required, but because the space seemed to expect it.

A placard near the entrance explained the museum’s purpose:

To preserve objects in their essential identity, unaltered by time, context, or use.

Visitors nodded appreciatively. Liora did too, though she was not sure why.

She began in the first gallery.

Glass cases stretched in neat rows, each containing a single object. A cup. A hammer. A length of cloth. A book.

Each object was accompanied by a plaque. The plaques were remarkably thorough. They named the object, described its material composition, specified its function, and dated its origin. Some included diagrams; others cited authorities.

Liora stopped before the cup.

It was unremarkable: clay, slightly chipped, its glaze worn thin. According to the plaque, it was A Drinking Vessel, Type II, used primarily for the containment and conveyance of liquid.

She leaned closer.

As she watched, the cup did not move—but something about it shifted. Not the object itself, but the field around it. She imagined it filled with water and offered to a stranger. She imagined it placed upside down to catch rain. She imagined it hurled in anger, or kept empty on a shelf long after its owner was gone.

None of these imaginings altered the cup.

Yet none were captured by the plaque either.

A man beside her smiled approvingly. “Remarkable, isn’t it?” he said. “To see things as they really are.”

Liora nodded politely.

In the next gallery, tools were arranged with military precision. Hammers, chisels, blades—each isolated from the others, immobilised within its case. The plaques were especially confident here, listing correct usage and intended outcomes.

Liora noticed that the tools felt oddly inert. Not broken. Not damaged. Simply exhausted of possibility.

She asked a guide what happened if a tool were used differently than intended.

“That would be misuse,” the guide replied.

“And if the misuse became common?”

The guide hesitated. “Then the definition would need revision.”

“After the fact?”

“Of course.”

Liora thanked him and moved on.

In a quieter wing of the museum, garments were displayed. Dresses, coats, uniforms. The plaques here emphasised purpose and provenance. This uniform signified rank. That dress marked a rite of passage.

Liora lingered before a coat.

It looked warm.

She imagined it worn by someone waiting in the cold. Then by someone hiding something in its pockets. Then by someone remembered only because the coat remained.

The plaque did not mention warmth. Or memory.

A curator noticed her pause. “We focus on essential properties,” he explained.

“Essential for whom?” Liora asked.

The curator smiled tightly. “For the object.”

She wandered further, increasingly aware of a subtle tension. The museum was immaculate, comprehensive, and calm. Yet something strained beneath its order, like a held breath.

In the central hall stood the museum’s pride: a chamber dedicated to Pure Objects. Here, the lighting was perfectly even, eliminating shadow. The cases were sealed more thoroughly than anywhere else.

At the centre sat a stone.

Just a stone.

The plaque was long.

It described the stone’s mass, mineral composition, geological origin, and classification. It concluded:

This object exemplifies pure thinghood, independent of relation.

Liora felt a strange unease.

She imagined the stone thrown into a river, marking a grave, anchoring a roof, breaking a window, pressed into a hand as a reminder to return.

The stone did not resist these imaginings.

Only the museum did.

She sought out the curator again. “What do you preserve the objects from?” she asked.

He looked surprised. “From change.”

“And from relation?”

He frowned. “Relation contaminates identity.”

Liora thanked him and left.

Outside, the light was harsher, the air warmer. Near the steps, a child was playing with a cup remarkably similar to the one she had seen inside. The child filled it with rainwater, drank, then dropped it. It rolled away.

The cup had changed in no essential way.

Yet everything about it was alive.

Liora walked on, understanding now that the museum had succeeded perfectly at what it attempted.

It had preserved objects by freezing a single cut through their possibilities.

Nothing inside was false.

Nothing inside was sufficient.

And that, she realised, was the most dangerous kind of preservation of all.