1. Not a debate about time
The block universe is usually presented as a claim about time: that past, present, and future are equally real, that temporal becoming is illusory, or that change is merely perspectival. Framed this way, the debate quickly collapses into familiar and largely unproductive disputes about experience, consciousness, or the psychological sense of flow.
This post takes a different approach. The block universe is not primarily a theory of time. It is a theory about when possibility ends.
More precisely, it is a theory in which all possibility is treated as already exhausted — a completed totality in which nothing remains to be actualised. The temporal rhetoric obscures a deeper ontological move: the collapse of structured potential into wholesale actuality.
2. From lawful structure to completed totality
The starting point of block-universe reasoning is entirely legitimate. Physical theories, especially relativistic ones, are often formulated in tenseless terms. They describe lawful relations among events using mathematical structures that do not privilege any particular temporal perspective. The spacetime manifold is one such structure: a way of organising possible events and their relations under invariant constraints.
So far, nothing ontological has been claimed. We have a system: a structured space of possible instances.
The ontological slide occurs when this representational structure is reinterpreted as a completed inventory of what exists. The manifold ceases to function as a theory of possible events and is instead treated as a fully populated totality of actual ones. Possibility is quietly re-described as already filled.
At that point, the distinction between system and instance collapses. The theory is no longer about what could be actualised under appropriate conditions; it is taken to be reality itself.
3. The elimination of instantiation
In a relational ontology, instantiation is not a process unfolding inside time. It is a perspectival cut: the actualisation of an event under a specific construal. Events are not simply “there” waiting to be labelled; they are constituted as events through actualisation.
The block universe leaves no room for this.
If all events are already actual, instantiation does no ontological work. Nothing is ever actualised, because everything is already so. “Event” becomes a purely geometric designation — a point in a structure — rather than an achieved actuality.
This is not a neutral simplification. It renders the ontology inert. Without instantiation, nothing happens in the only sense that matters: nothing comes to be actual as an event. The world becomes a completed diagram.
4. The hidden cost of wholesale actuality
Actuality is not free. It has a price.
In this framework, the price of actuality is perspective. There is no such thing as an unconstrued phenomenon. To be actual is to be actual for some cut, under some construal, from somewhere.
The block universe attempts to purchase actuality in bulk, without paying this cost. It postulates a totality of events that are actual without being actualised — a universe that exists without perspective.
But a perspective-free actuality is incoherent. Without perspective, there are no phenomena. Without phenomena, there is no physics. The block universe therefore undermines the very conditions that make its motivating theories intelligible.
5. Relativity and the multiplication of cuts
Relativity is often invoked as the decisive motivation for the block universe. Because there is no privileged frame of simultaneity, it is said, there can be no objective present — and therefore all times must equally exist.
This conclusion does not follow.
What relativity eliminates is not perspective, but privilege. It denies that any single cut through spacetime exhausts reality. The correct ontological response is a multiplication of legitimate perspectival actualisations, not their abolition in favour of a completed totality.
Relativity expands the space of possible cuts. The block universe closes it by declaring that all cuts are already actual at once.
6. When possibility is mistaken for completion
The block universe thus exemplifies a recurring ontological error: mistaking structured possibility for completed actuality. A lawful space of possible events is treated as if it were already filled, as if the work of instantiation had been done once and for all.
This is why the block universe feels austere and final. Nothing remains to be actualised. Possibility has ended.
In the next post, we will argue that this ending is not forced by physics, but imposed by a refusal to recognise the ontological work performed by perspective and instantiation — and that once this work is restored, the apparent necessity of the block evaporates.
Becoming, as it turns out, is not an extra ingredient added to reality. It is the name we give to the fact that possibility is never already complete.
No comments:
Post a Comment