1. What the block universe tries to get for free
In the previous post, we argued that the block universe mistakes structured possibility for completed actuality. This post sharpens that diagnosis by identifying the specific cost the block universe refuses to pay.
That cost is perspective.
The block universe claims a fully actual reality without invoking any act of actualisation. All events are said to exist equally and timelessly, requiring no standpoint, no cut, no construal. Actuality is taken to be a default state of being rather than an achieved condition.
This is not austerity. It is an ontological subsidy.
2. Instantiation is not optional
Within a relational ontology, instantiation is not an optional add-on layered on top of an already-complete world. It is the ontological operation that makes an event an event.
Instantiation should not be understood as a process unfolding in time. It is not something that happens after the fact. It is the perspectival actualisation of a possible configuration under specific constraints.
Without instantiation:
there are no phenomena
there are no events
there is only abstract structure
The block universe attempts to eliminate instantiation by declaring that all possible events are already actual. But this move does not simplify the ontology; it empties it. What remains is a diagram without occurrence.
3. Why perspective cannot be eliminated
Perspective is often treated as a psychological or epistemic feature — something added by observers rather than something required by ontology. This treatment makes it seem safe to remove perspective from the furniture of the world.
That removal is illegitimate.
Perspective is not a subjective gloss placed on an objective reality. It is the condition under which anything counts as actual at all. There is no such thing as an unconstrued phenomenon. To deny perspective is not to purify ontology, but to abolish phenomena entirely.
The block universe relies on exactly this abolition. It posits events that are actual without being actualised, existing without being phenomena for any cut. This is not a deeper realism; it is a refusal to say what makes reality real.
4. The illusion of a view from nowhere
The block universe often presents itself as rejecting privileged standpoints. Because no observer has access to the whole of spacetime, it is said, no perspective is fundamental.
But this conclusion is inverted.
By denying all situated perspectives, the block universe reinstates a single unsituated one: the view from nowhere. The completed spacetime manifold functions as a total perspective that no observer can occupy but which is treated as ontologically decisive.
This is not the elimination of perspective. It is its displacement into an unreachable abstraction.
5. Actuality as a perspectival achievement
To say that actuality costs perspective is not to psychologise reality. It is to insist that actuality is an achievement, not a given.
An event is not actual merely because it is permitted by a law or locatable in a structure. It is actual because it is instantiated under a cut that brings it forth as a phenomenon. This is why actuality cannot be assigned wholesale to an entire manifold. There is no global cut that performs this work.
The block universe tries to bypass this requirement by declaring the work already done. But without a cut, nothing has been done at all.
6. The price the block refuses to pay
The refusal to pay the price of perspective explains both the appeal and the failure of the block universe.
It is appealing because it promises an ontology without dependence: no situatedness, no construal, no becoming. Everything simply is.
It fails because it cannot explain how anything ever counts as real. In avoiding perspective, it avoids actuality.
What it offers instead is a frozen abundance — a totality rich in structure but poor in being.
7. Toward a disciplined ontology of becoming
Becoming does not compete with structure. It completes it.
A disciplined ontology does not ask whether time really flows. It asks what must be the case for events to be actual rather than merely possible. Once that question is taken seriously, perspective and instantiation are no longer optional, and the block universe loses its claim to inevitability.
In the next post, we will return to relativity itself, not to reinterpret the physics, but to show how a perspectival ontology accommodates relativistic invariance without collapsing into a God’s-eye totality.
Possibility, it turns out, does not end where the equations stop.
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