1. The standard inference
The block universe is most often defended as the sober ontological lesson of relativity. Because there is no observer-independent notion of simultaneity, it is said, there can be no objective present. And if there is no objective present, then all times must be equally real. The universe, therefore, must be a four-dimensional block.
This inference has become so familiar that it is rarely examined. Yet it rests on a simple mistake: it treats the removal of privilege as the removal of perspective.
Relativity does not warrant that move.
2. What relativity actually does
Relativity’s central ontological contribution is not the elimination of time, but the elimination of privileged frames. No single inertial frame has the right to dictate temporal orderings for all others. Simultaneity is not absolute; it is relative to a frame.
What follows from this is clear:
there is no global temporal foliation
there is no universal ‘now’
What does not follow is that there is a completed totality in which all events are already equally actual.
Relativity multiplies legitimate perspectives. It does not abolish perspectivality itself.
3. The equivocation at the heart of block reasoning
The slide to the block universe relies on an equivocation between two very different claims:
No frame is ontologically privileged.
Reality itself is frame-independent.
The first claim is a physical result. The second is a metaphysical assertion.
Relativity establishes (1). Block-universe reasoning assumes (2) without argument.
But to say that no perspective exhausts reality is not to say that reality has no perspectives. The latter claim reintroduces, under a different name, exactly what relativity forbids: a standpoint from which all relations are simultaneously given.
4. The geometry that no one can occupy
The spacetime manifold is often treated as the neutral ground that replaces all frames. Because no observer occupies it, it is taken to be objective.
This is a mistake.
The manifold is not perspective-free; it is perspective-abstracted. It is a representational structure that encodes relations among possible observations. Treating it as an ontological totality turns an abstraction into a surrogate observer — one that sees everything without being anywhere.
This is the view from nowhere, reinstated as geometry.
5. Relativity and the discipline of cuts
From a perspectival ontology, relativity has a very different lesson. If no single cut through spacetime is privileged, then actuality cannot be assigned at the level of the whole manifold. It must be understood as arising at the level of particular cuts.
Each frame supports its own legitimate actualisations. None is globally authoritative. There is no further totality in which all these actualisations are themselves already actual.
Relativity thus enforces ontological discipline. It forbids both:
a privileged global present, and
a privileged global totality
The block universe violates the second prohibition.
6. Why totality is not a neutral fallback
It is tempting to think that if no perspective is privileged, then all perspectives must be equally contained in a higher-level whole. But this temptation rests on a misunderstanding of what perspectives are.
Perspectives are not partial views of a pre-existing totality. They are the conditions under which anything becomes actual at all. There is no perspective-independent remainder waiting to be collected.
To posit a totality of all events is therefore not to remain neutral. It is to assert an ontology in which actuality is detached from instantiation.
Relativity does not require this detachment. It exposes its incoherence.
7. Becoming after relativity
Once the equivocation is removed, the apparent conflict between relativity and becoming dissolves.
Becoming does not require a universal now. It requires only that actuality is not globally complete — that possibility is not exhausted in advance. Relativity, by denying global privilege, leaves this condition untouched.
What it rules out is not becoming, but totality.
The irony is sharp: the block universe presents itself as the ontological completion of relativity, when in fact it is an evasion of its deepest lesson.
Relativity teaches us how to live without privileged perspectives. The block universe teaches us how to pretend we no longer need perspectives at all.
Only the first lesson is faithful to the physics.
Only the first leaves room for possibility.
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