Physics Without Totality: 3 Why the Universe Refuses a God’s-Eye View

Physics, in its classical ambition, dreams of a vantage point above all vantage points. A “view from nowhere,” a ledger where every event, every particle, every temporal twist is simultaneously visible, fully ordered, fully integrated. It is a seductive vision: global knowledge, total comprehension, the universe rendered in a single sweep. But this vision is an artefact of perspective, not a property of the cosmos.

Global Perspectives as Epistemic Artefacts

Every attempt at a global perspective encounters the same problem: locality keeps reasserting itself. Observers are bound to frames; measurements are frame-relative; causality is perspectival. The “view from nowhere” is no more than a bookkeeping trick, an epistemic convenience that hides the fundamental fact that events, time, and interactions are always local actualisations.

What looks like a singularity, a horizon, or a paradox is often the residue of trying to superimpose multiple local perspectives onto a single, impossible global canvas. The cosmos is not refusing coherence; it is refusing totalising coherence.

Observer-Dependence and the Paradox of Totality

In relativity, in quantum mechanics, in every theory that respects locality, observer-dependence is unavoidable. Observations do not merely record a pre-existing world; they are cuts, perspectival instantiations of relational potential. Demanding a God’s-eye view is thus a category error: it treats relational instantiations as if they were absolute entities, and the contradictions that arise are symptoms of this misreading.

Paradoxes — time loops, entanglement puzzles, frozen singularities — are not features of the universe but mirrors of our integrative ambition. The universe itself continues unperturbed; it is our demand for totality that fractures the description.

Locality Reasserts Itself

No matter how global our models aspire to be, locality persists. Information is constrained, interactions are bounded, events are perspectival. The universe is not fragmented; it is relationally disciplined. Our models fracture only when they ignore the primacy of local actualisations in favour of a non-existent global ledger.

Here, Escher whispers again: each stairwell, perfectly consistent, does not imply a coherent tower. Observers can trace each step flawlessly — yet any attempt to integrate the entire structure from a single vantage point collapses into impossibility. Local coherence is real; global totalisation is a fiction.

Implications for Thought

Accepting the refusal of a God’s-eye view is not anti-realist, nor is it instrumentalist. It is relationally disciplined. It frees us from the epistemic traps of singularity, frozen time, and universal narratives. Horizons, event limits, and apparent paradoxes are not endpoints; they are invitations to orient ourselves locally, to track actualisations without imposing impossible global integration.

This sets the stage for the final post: Locality Without Metaphysics, where we will explore how physics, freed from the obsession with totality, teaches us to inhabit the world relationally, to respect the constraints of local actualisation, and to reconceive our sense of worldhood and orientation.