Relation Without Totality: 4 Instantiation as Cut, Not Process

Once systems are understood as structured possibility rather than containers of being, the status of instantiation must be reconsidered.

The most persistent mistake is to treat instantiation as a process — something that unfolds over time, transforming possibility into actuality.

This picture is intuitive.

It is also wrong.

Instantiation is not something that happens.

It is something that is taken.

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The Process Illusion

The process picture imagines a sequence:

1. First, possibilities exist.

2. Then something occurs.

3. Finally, one possibility becomes actual.

This picture smuggles in two assumptions:

• that possibilities are already formed objects waiting to be realised,

• and that actuality is a state achieved by causal transition.

Neither assumption holds.

Possibilities are not things.

They are constraints defined by a system.

Actuality is not an endpoint.

It is a perspectival status.

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What a Cut Does

A cut is the operation by which:

• certain distinctions are stabilised,

• certain relations are made salient,

• and a particular configuration is taken as a phenomenon.

Nothing is created by the cut.

Nothing is destroyed.

What changes is how the system is being construed.

Instantiation is the shift from:

• system-as-theory
  to

• system-as-instance.

This is not a temporal transition.

It is an ontological reorientation.

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Why Time Is the Wrong Metaphor

It is tempting to think instantiation must be temporal because phenomena appear in time.

But appearance-in-time is a property of phenomena, not of instantiation itself.

The cut that instantiates a phenomenon is not located in time.

Time is one of the distinctions that may be stabilised by the cut.

This is why instantiation cannot be explained causally.

Causes operate within instantiated systems.

They do not generate instantiation itself.

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Quantum Measurement, Revisited

Quantum measurement is often treated as a dynamic collapse.

Ontologically, it is better understood as a cut:

• a restriction of relevance,

• a stabilisation of distinctions,

• a perspectival commitment.

The system does not evolve into an outcome.

An outcome is instantiated relative to a cut.

This is why attempts to model measurement as a physical process always leave something out: they confuse instantiation with dynamics.

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Actuality Is Not More Than Possibility

A further mistake is to think actuality is richer than possibility.

In fact, actuality is less general.

A system’s structured possibility contains more than any instance ever could.

Instantiation is a narrowing, not a completion.

This is why actuality cannot exhaust possibility — and why no set of actualities can close a system.

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Why This Matters

If instantiation is a cut rather than a process:

• Total histories lose their ontological privilege

• Global states become illicit abstractions

• The demand for a complete description collapses

• Phenomena regain primacy

We stop asking how the universe became actual, and start asking how actuality is taken up within structured possibility.

This is a profound shift.

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Toward Phenomenon First

Instantiation delivers phenomena.

But phenomena are not “appearances” layered on top of reality.

They are first-order meaning — the basic units of what can be said to exist.

To understand ontology without totality, we must therefore give phenomena priority, not as subjective impressions, but as ontological anchors.

That is the next step.

Post 5 — Phenomenon First

Where meaning and ontology finally meet.