Traditionally, the arrow of time is said to point in the direction of increasing entropy. This formulation appears to explain why processes are irreversible, why we remember the past but not the future, and why broken things do not spontaneously reassemble.
But this explanation quietly reintroduces everything we have already removed.
In this post, we will show that the arrow of time is none of these things.
1. The puzzle of reversible laws and irreversible histories
One of the oldest puzzles in physics is this:
The fundamental laws are (largely) time-symmetric.
The histories we observe are not.
If the laws make no distinction between past and future, why do processes so reliably appear to run in only one direction?
Standard answers typically appeal to initial conditions, probability, or cosmology. These answers may be technically adequate, but conceptually they often leave the core intuition untouched: that something must be giving time its arrow.
From the perspective of the relational ontology, this puzzle is mis-posed.
The asymmetry does not lie in time at all.
2. Separating three things that are usually conflated
To make progress, we must distinguish three notions that are routinely collapsed into one:
Unfolding — that successive construals occur at all
Directionality — that continuations overwhelmingly go one way rather than another
Irreversibility — that reconstruction of prior configurations is extraordinarily rare
Mainstream discourse often treats all three as expressions of “time’s arrow”.
But they are not the same phenomenon.
All three can be explained without temporal metaphysics.
3. The arrow as a gradient of constraint
From within the relational ontology, what we call an arrow is a gradient in constraint space.
Some regions of configuration space are densely compatible. They allow many re-actualisations that satisfy the same coarse description.
Other regions are sparse. They require extremely specific coordination across relations.
Once a system occupies a dense region, it is overwhelmingly likely that subsequent construals will remain nearby — not because it is pushed there, but because alternatives are combinatorially rare.
The asymmetry lies here:
Continuation is cheap; reconstruction is expensive.
This asymmetry is structural, not temporal.
4. Why reversibility is theoretically allowed but practically absent
The laws of physics permit a low-entropy configuration to arise from a high-entropy one.
Thermodynamics does not forbid reversal.
What it tells us is that reversal requires navigating an astronomically narrow corridor through constraint space.
To reconstruct a previous configuration, an immense number of relations must be simultaneously re-coordinated.
Nothing prevents this in principle.
Almost nothing supports it in practice.
The arrow of time is simply the name we give to this imbalance.
5. Memory, records, and apparent pasts
The same gradient explains why records accumulate in one direction.
A record — a memory, a trace, a fossil, a photograph — is a configuration that correlates with many others.
Once formed, it can be copied, degraded, embedded, and redistributed in countless ways while remaining recognisably the same record.
Erasing it without residue requires exquisite coordination.
Thus we remember the past not because time flows forward, but because records are easy to proliferate and hard to unmake.
6. The arrow without time
We can now state the central claim cleanly:
The arrow of time is not a direction in time.
It is not imposed by entropy.
It is not a feature of the laws.
It is a constraint gradient arising from asymmetries in relational availability.
Processes appear irreversible because the space of compatible continuations is profoundly lopsided.
Time does not point.
Availability does.
7. What remains to be explained
One concept still seems to resist this treatment: energy.
If nothing is lost, if entropy is availability, and if irreversibility is structural, why does useful energy seem to disappear?
In the final post of this mini-series, we will show that energy is not consumed or degraded, but redistributed into increasingly constrained forms of availability.
The arrow will remain — but it will no longer belong to time.
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