On not interpreting physics
Across the previous two series — When Physics Stops Describing and Relational Cuts — something slightly unusual took place. Physics was not interpreted, corrected, or philosophically supplemented. Instead, it was allowed to run until it disclosed the conditions of its own intelligibility.
This post makes that move explicit.
What this was not
It is important to begin by naming what these series deliberately did not do.
They did not offer an interpretation of quantum mechanics. No hidden variables were introduced. No consciousness-based explanations were smuggled in. No claims were made about what reality is “really like” behind the phenomena.
They also did not attempt to turn physics into philosophy, or philosophy into physics. The mathematics of physics was left untouched. Its empirical successes were neither challenged nor re-explained.
If anything, restraint was the method.
What physics itself forced into view
Modern physics has long known that description fails. Bohr’s insistence that physics concerns what we can say about nature, Heisenberg’s recognition that observation is inseparable from the phenomenon, Wheeler’s claim that no phenomenon is real until observed — these were not philosophical flourishes. They were operational discoveries.
Physics encountered a limit: it could not coherently treat phenomena as pre-existing objects independent of the conditions of observation. But physics also could not articulate what replaced that picture. It could gesture, warn, and caution — but not reconstruct.
The first series followed physics to that limit and stopped.
The missing question
At that point, the problem was no longer physical. It was ontological.
If phenomena do not pre-exist observation, then what are they? If observation is constitutive, what structure makes that possible? If meaning is unavoidable, why does physics lack the resources to account for it?
These questions cannot be answered by further experimentation or more refined measurement. They concern the conditions under which anything can count as a phenomenon at all.
That is where the second series began.
What relational ontology supplied
Relational Cuts did not reinterpret physics. It reconstructed the minimal ontology required for physics to be intelligible in the first place.
It introduced:
systems as structured potentials rather than hidden realities,
cuts as relational distinctions that actualise phenomena,
instances as perspectival actualisations rather than temporal events,
actualisation without creation or emergence,
meaning as relational constraint, not mind, value, or convention,
limits as constitutive features of intelligibility rather than failures.
None of these were imported to fix physics. They were extracted from the conditions physics already presupposes in practice.
Why this is not an interpretation
An interpretation of physics tells you what the equations really refer to. Relational ontology does something different. It explains why reference, objecthood, and description fail — and what structure must already be in place for physics to function without them.
Physics does not need an ontology that mirrors reality. It needs an ontology that makes phenomena intelligible. The distinction matters.
Seen this way, relational ontology does not compete with physical theories. It operates at a different level: not the level of explanation, but the level of condition.
What remains open
With physics now behind us, the question shifts.
If meaning is a structural condition of intelligibility rather than a mental or social addition, then symbolic systems — language, mathematics, discourse — are no longer origins of meaning. They are specialised exploitations of cuts within systems.
That opens an entirely new line of inquiry:
How meaning operates before language.
How symbolic systems stabilise and refine cuts.
How different forms of constraint give rise to different kinds of intelligibility.
Those questions cannot be addressed by physics, nor by philosophy understood as interpretation. They require a continued exploration of relational structure itself.
After the cut
The work of the previous two series is now complete. Physics has done what it can do. Ontology has supplied what physics presupposes.
What follows is no longer about nature as described, nor about physics as a mirror of reality. It is about the evolution and specialisation of meaning itself — beginning not with symbols, but with relation.
That is where the next series will begin.
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