The previous posts dismantled two familiar assumptions: that the world is a given container, and that objectivity consists in escaping perspective. What now comes into view is the positive alternative. If worlds are actualised through constraint, then the agents of world-making are systems.
This post clarifies what is meant by a system, and why systems — not representations, subjects, or descriptions — are the engines of worlds.
What counts as a system?
A system is not defined here by substance, scale, or material boundary. It is defined by the constraints that organise its possible states and responses. A system is whatever can hold distinctions stable enough for phenomena to appear.
This means that systems come in many kinds. Cells, organisms, laboratories, disciplines, languages, and formal practices can all function as systems, provided they enact constraints that determine what can count as real within them.
What they share is not composition, but structure: each is a theory of its own possible instances.
Systems as theories of possibility
To call a system a theory is not to intellectualise it. It is to recognise that a system specifies, implicitly or explicitly, a space of what can happen. Certain transitions are permitted, others are excluded. Certain distinctions matter; others are invisible.
This is why systems do not merely encounter worlds — they enact them. The world of a system is the space of phenomena that can be actualised given its constraints.
Nothing outside that space can appear as such within the system, no matter how much it may exist for another.
World-making without invention
To say that systems make worlds is not to say that they fabricate reality at will. Constraints are not chosen freely. They are enforced by viability, coherence, and coupling. A system whose constraints do not hold collapses.
World-making is therefore not invention but actualisation. A system cuts possibility in a particular way, and a world follows from that cut.
Different systems cut differently. That is all that is required for multiple worlds to exist.
Overlapping worlds
Systems do not exist in isolation. Their worlds can overlap, interfere, and partially align. Where constraints are compatible, phenomena can stabilise across systems. Where they are not, worlds pass through one another without contact.
This explains a great deal that is otherwise mystifying: why translation is imperfect, why interdisciplinary work is difficult, why disagreements persist even in the absence of error.
Worlds do not need to contradict one another to be distinct. They need only be differently constrained.
No hierarchy of systems
It is tempting to rank systems by depth or fundamentality, placing some worlds closer to reality than others. But this temptation rests on the very container metaphor we have already abandoned.
There is no privileged system from which all worlds derive. Physics, biology, culture, and language each enact worlds under their own constraints. None can claim ontological priority simply by virtue of its scope or precision.
This does not make all systems equal. It makes them non-foundational.
What follows
With systems now in view as world-making engines, the remaining task is to examine particular kinds of systems and the worlds they enact. The next instalment turns to one that has long claimed special authority: physics.
Physics will be treated neither as a mirror of reality nor as a mere social construction, but as one highly disciplined way of cutting possibility.
Worlds are not given.
They are made.
And they are made by systems.
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