1. Why this distinction matters
Physics is habitually described in juridical language. We speak of laws that are obeyed, of nature as being governed, of systems that must behave in certain ways. This idiom is so entrenched that it often goes unnoticed — and with it, a powerful metaphysical presupposition.
The presupposition is simple: that physical laws are commands issued to the world, and that phenomena occur because those commands are followed.
From the perspective developed in the previous two posts, this way of speaking is not merely metaphorical. It is actively misleading.
2. The law-as-command picture
On the law-as-command picture:
laws exist independently of particular phenomena
they determine how systems must behave
deviations are either impossible or treated as failures of compliance
This picture encourages a familiar metaphysics: laws as external governors, nature as a rule-following subject, and explanation as the tracing of obedience back to first principles.
Even when physicists reject this picture explicitly, it often survives implicitly in how results are framed — especially when invariants are described as deep features “written into the fabric of reality”.
3. Invariants are not instructions
Relational ontology invites a different starting point. Systems are not passive recipients of laws; they are structured potentials. Phenomena are not produced by obedience; they are instantiations under particular cuts.
Within this frame, invariants such as c do not instruct systems how to behave. They constrain the space of coherent description. They mark what must remain fixed if multiple perspectives are to be treated as perspectives on the same system.
An invariant does not say what happens. It says what cannot vary without the system dissolving into incoherence.
4. Constraint without governance
This is a subtle but decisive shift.
A command requires:
an issuer
a subject
a notion of compliance
A constraint requires none of these. It is internal rather than external. It does not act on phenomena; it conditions the intelligibility of phenomena.
To say that no signal can propagate faster than c is not to say that the universe enforces a speed limit. It is to say that descriptions violating this constraint cannot be integrated into a single coherent spacetime system.
Nothing is stopped. Something is rendered indescribable within that system.
5. Laws as summaries of stable constraints
From this perspective, what we call physical laws are best understood as compressed descriptions of stable constraints within particular theoretical systems.
They are not causes. They do not produce events. They summarise regularities that persist because the underlying system remains intact under repeated instantiation.
When the system changes — as it did between Newtonian and relativistic mechanics — the laws change not because nature revised its commandments, but because the constraints defining intelligibility were reconfigured.
6. Why the command metaphor persists
The command metaphor survives because it flatters human intuitions:
it mirrors social order and authority
it offers explanatory closure
it promises necessity rather than contingency
But it comes at a cost. It encourages us to mistake formal success for ontological insight, and to treat mathematical invariants as metaphysical machinery.
Relational ontology does not deny the power of physics. It denies only that power requires governance.
7. Re-reading necessity
Invariants often feel necessary. From a law-as-command perspective, this necessity is read as metaphysical force. From a constraint perspective, it is read as structural non-negotiability.
Once a system is defined, certain relations cannot be altered without destroying the system itself. That is not because the universe forbids them, but because there is no longer anything left to describe.
Necessity here is internal, not imposed.
8. A final cut
Physical laws do not govern the world.
They do not issue commands, enforce obedience, or compel behaviour. They articulate the constraints under which a particular system of meaning remains coherent across perspectives.
To mistake constraint for command is to reintroduce metaphysics where only structure is required.
And once that mistake is released, the world does not become less intelligible — only less mythologised.
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