Why Instantiation Is Not Temporal, Causal, or Epistemic
The argument of When Possibility Ends turned, at a crucial point, on a concept that often attracts immediate misunderstanding: the cut. The block universe fails, we argued, not because it mishandles time, but because it silently assumes that actuality comes for free — that events are already there, simply awaiting description. The cut names what that assumption erases.
But before the cut can do any real ontological work, it must be protected from a range of tempting but fatal misreadings. This post therefore begins negatively. Its task is not yet to theorise the cut, but to prevent it from being absorbed into conceptual frameworks that would neutralise it.
What follows is a disciplined refusal: the cut is not temporal, not causal, and not epistemic. Only once those refusals are in place can instantiation begin to appear in its proper form.
1. The Cut Is Not Temporal
The most immediate misunderstanding treats the cut as something that happens in time: a moment at which possibility becomes actuality. This picture is intuitively attractive, but ontologically disastrous.
If instantiation were a temporal process, then time itself would have to be already actual in order for instantiation to occur within it. The cut would presuppose the very actuality it is meant to explain. We would be back, quietly but decisively, in block-universe territory: a fully actualised temporal manifold, within which some further process merely selects what we notice.
The cut is not an event that occurs at a time.
Rather, time as experienced — time with before and after, duration and succession — is always already within a cut. Temporality is a property of phenomena, not a precondition for their actuality. The cut does not happen in time; time appears with the cut.
Instantiation, therefore, is not a becoming-over-time. It is a change in ontological status: from structured potential to phenomenon. To mistake that shift for a temporal transition is to conflate actuality with chronology.
2. The Cut Is Not Causal
A second misreading treats the cut as a causal intervention: something that brings about an event by acting upon an otherwise incomplete reality. On this view, the cut functions like a trigger, collapse, or forcing mechanism.
This, too, is mistaken.
Causation operates within actuality. Causes relate events to other events, states to later states. But the cut is not one more event among others, nor a special kind of force acting on the world. It is a condition for there being events at all.
To causalise the cut is to place it inside the system whose actuality it enables. This immediately generates a regress: what causes the cut? And what causes that cause? The attempt to explain actuality causally never reaches its target, because causation presupposes actuality rather than producing it.
The cut does not cause phenomena. It is what makes phenomena possible as phenomena.
3. The Cut Is Not Epistemic
Perhaps the most persistent temptation is to treat the cut as epistemic: as an act of observation, measurement, interpretation, or knowledge-acquisition. On this reading, the cut reflects a limitation in what we can know, not a feature of reality itself.
This interpretation is attractive because it appears modest. It reassures us that reality remains complete and determinate “in itself”, even if our access to it is partial. But this modesty is illusory. The cost is high: actuality is relocated into a realm forever beyond phenomena, while experience is reduced to a shadow-play of representations.
The cut is not an act of knowing.
It is not performed by a subject, nor does it presuppose consciousness, language, or cognition. To construe the cut epistemically is to mistake conditions of intelligibility for conditions of existence. The cut is not about what we can know of reality; it is about what it takes for there to be anything to know at all.
This point is crucial: phenomena are first-order. There is no unconstrued, fully actual reality sitting behind them, waiting to be accessed. Whatever exists, exists as instantiated — and instantiation is precisely what the cut names.
4. The Cut as Perspectival Shift
If the cut is neither temporal, nor causal, nor epistemic, what is it?
At the most general level, the cut is a perspectival shift. It is the transition from a system understood as a structured field of possible instances to the actuality of a phenomenon. This shift is not a process, an action, or an observation. It is a reconfiguration of what counts as real.
A system — whether physical, logical, or semiotic — is always a theory of possible instantiations. It specifies constraints, relations, and potentials. But no system, by itself, produces actuality. Structure is not enough. The cut is what makes a particular instantiation actual as an instance, rather than merely available in principle.
Perspective here does not mean subjectivity. It names the irreducible fact that actuality is always local, situated, and non-exhaustive. A cut does not reveal a pre-existing totality from one angle; it enacts a world in which something is the case.
5. Why This Matters
The block universe fails because it denies the cut. By treating the manifold as already fully actual, it collapses possibility into structure and substitutes a God’s-eye abstraction for instantiation. What it gains in apparent completeness, it loses in ontology.
Recovering the cut restores a discipline that physics, logic, and meaning all require: actuality is not global. It is achieved perspectivally, without ever exhausting possibility.
In the next post, we will develop this claim further by addressing a common objection: if instantiation is not a process, how can becoming be real at all? The answer will require a careful distinction between time within a cut and instantiation as a cut — and it will take us further away from totality than many readers expect.
For now, the essential point is this:
The cut is not something that happens in the world.It is what makes there be a world at all.
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