Across three tightly structured series — Ontological Evasions (16 posts), Ontological Distortions (9 posts), and Ontological Exposures (8 posts) — we have systematically examined how physics handles, misrepresents, and overextends ontology.
1. Patterns of Evasion, Distortion, and Exposure
Ontological Evasions
Highlighted areas where physics defers or conceals ontology.
Examples: superdeterminism, the anthropic principle, renormalisation, inflation, wavefunction realism.
Strategy: physics hides relational complexity behind mathematical or conceptual abstractions.
Ontological Distortions
Focused on misplacements and reversals — where phenomena are forced into inappropriate ontological categories.
Examples: substance reifications (matter, energy, spacetime), epistemic reversals (information, probability), category mistakes (symmetry, laws), temporal distortions (block universe, reversibility).
Strategy: physics misreads representations, measures, and formal symmetries as direct ontic claims.
Ontological Exposures
Revealed overextensions and overcommitments, where physics projects beyond what is justified.
Examples: abstractions treated as entities, reduction to mathematics or information, idealisations, closure assumptions, continuity, dualism, universality, finality.
Strategy: physics claims more than it can ontologically secure, imposing formal structures onto relational reality.
2. Insights from the Combined Critique
Relation is primary: In every series, the root issue is a failure to foreground relational actualisation. Matter, energy, spacetime, probability, fields, and laws all gain ontic weight at the expense of seeing relations as constitutive.
Representation vs. reality: Many distortions arise from misreading formalism, models, and abstractions as ontological. Evasions and exposures are complementary: one hides what exists, the other overstates what is formal.
Context matters: Universality, closure, and finality illustrate how physics often ignores perspectival and contextual contingency, projecting local or provisional insights as global truths.
Temporal unfolding is suppressed: Both distortions and evasions reveal a tension between mathematical symmetry and actual temporal becoming, which relational ontology preserves.
3. Toward a Relational Reframing
Taken together, the series points toward a relational ontology of physics:
All “entities” — matter, energy, spacetime, fields, laws — are actualisations of relational configurations, intelligible only in context.
Mathematical, computational, or symbolic constructs are tools for describing relational dynamics, not independent components of reality.
Apparent dualities, symmetries, and invariances are perspectival features of relational alignment, not ontological absolutes.
Physics’ ambition to unify, idealise, or finalise is epistemic, not ontic; relational reality remains open-ended and dynamic.
4. Concluding Thought
By systematically exposing evasions, distortions, and overextensions, we can see the structural habits of physics’ ontology: what it hides, what it misplaces, and what it overclaims. The three series together provide a diagnostic lens for reading physics not as a repository of ultimate being, but as a symbolic architecture tracing the contours of relational reality.
This meta-perspective invites a critical question:
How would physics — and our understanding of the cosmos — look if relation, not representation, were the foundational lens?
The answer lies beyond traditional formalism, in the ongoing unfolding of actualisation that physics’ abstractions can describe but never exhaust.
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