Relational Cuts: 3 Actualisation Without Realisation

Why nothing is added when a phenomenon occurs

In the previous instalment, we established the distinction between system and instance: systems as structured potentials, instances as perspectival actualisations through cuts. With that architecture in place, we can now examine the operation that brings phenomena into intelligibility: actualisation.

Actualisation is not creation

Actualisation is often misunderstood. It does not imply that something new is produced or created in reality. Nor does it mean that a latent entity is revealed. Actualisation is a shift in construal: a phenomenon becomes intelligible within a system because the cuts have been enacted. Reality itself is not altered; what changes is how it is articulated and distinguished.

Every instance of observation, every stabilised phenomenon, is an actualisation of potentialities already encoded in the system. Nothing extrinsic is injected. The instance is simply a perspectival manifestation of what the system, under its constraints, allows.

Disentangling common metaphors

Terms like “emergence,” “production,” or “realisation” often suggest temporal or causal processes that mislead. Actualisation does not unfold over time; it is ontologically instantaneous in the sense that the phenomenon exists relationally only once the cut is made.

• It is not emergence-as-creation. The system already contained the potential; the cut actualises it.

• It is not realisation-as-abstraction. No new abstraction is imposed; the system’s relational potential is simply made intelligible.

• It is not a temporal event in the external world. The instance is perspectival: its actuality is defined relative to the system and the cut.

Physics as illustration

Quantum measurements provide a familiar example. The eigenstate observed in an experiment is an actualisation of the Hilbert-space potential constrained by the measurement arrangement. The eigenstate does not “come into existence” in a temporal or causal sense; it is intelligible because the system, via the cut, allows it to be actualised.

Actualisation preserves objectivity because it is structured by the system. Different observers performing the same cut will actualise the same phenomena. No observer injects reality; the relational constraints define consistency.

The structural payoff

Actualisation without realisation resolves persistent confusions about the ontology of phenomena:

• Phenomena occur without adding new substance.

• Systems contain structured potential, not hidden entities.

• Cuts define what counts as an instance; actuality is perspectival, not temporal or causal.

Together with the previous posts, this clarifies why physics can operate reliably without appealing to consciousness, emergent properties, or hidden realities. Actualisation is the operational core of phenomena: it animates system and instance without overstepping the structural limits.

The next instalment will address meaning itself, showing how the relational structure of systems, instances, and cuts provides a framework for understanding why phenomena are intelligible, and why meaning is neither mental nor reducible to value systems. Actualisation is the operation; meaning is the condition it presupposes.