Ontological Evasions in Physics: Series Conclusion From Evasion to Relational Insight

Across eight instalments, we have traced a consistent pattern in modern physics: when confronted with paradox, anomaly, or limitation, physics often chooses not to rethink its ontology, but to evade it. Superdeterminism collapses possibility into predestination. The block universe freezes time. Wavefunction collapse smuggles mind into matter. Many Worlds multiplies reality to infinity. The simulation hypothesis outsources actuality to an external programmer. QBism retreats into the observer’s beliefs. The string landscape proliferates possibilities without selection. Dark matter and dark energy stand in as invisible placeholders.

These evasions share a common logic: preserve formalism, secure predictive apparatus, and avoid confronting the question of relation—how actuality, possibility, and perspectival alignment are instantiated in the world. In doing so, physics repeatedly sacrifices ontological coherence for technical convenience.

The cost of evasion

Each manoeuvre carries epistemic consequences. Experiment becomes tautological, observation collapses into belief, infinity replaces relational actualisation, and unexplained placeholders dominate explanatory structures. Even when formal success is achieved, understanding suffers: we no longer apprehend how reality unfolds, only that it conforms to equations.

The theological undertones recur across these cases. Whether framed as pre-scripted determinism, divine authorship in Many Worlds, simulation programmers, or invisible cosmic agents, physics repeatedly imports the structure of omnipotence in order to rescue its formalisms. What is presented as rigorous reasoning is often an implicit metaphysics in disguise.

Relational insight

Relational ontology offers a coherent alternative. It foregrounds relation itself: actuality is perspectival, possibility emerges through interaction, and constraints are not external impositions but features of relational alignment. Measurement, temporal unfolding, and emergent structure are intelligible not because of hidden authors, infinite worlds, or invisible matter, but because relation operates collectively across scales.

This framework dissolves paradoxes without mutilating ontology. Superdeterminism’s fatalism is replaced by emergent possibility; the block universe’s frozen time by perspectival becoming; wavefunction collapse by actualisation across relational construals; Many Worlds’ plenitude by selective emergent outcomes; simulation and QBism by relational alignment rather than external or subjective authorship; string landscape by structured, emergent possibility; dark matter and dark energy by large-scale relational interactions.

The lesson

The pattern is clear: physics often chooses evasion over reflection, sacrificing ontological clarity for technical expedience. Recognising these evasions is the first step toward a more coherent understanding of reality. By privileging relation over abstraction, emergence over pre-scripted determinism, and perspectival actualisation over infinite speculation, we reclaim both intelligibility and explanatory power.

Ontological evasion is avoidable. Relational insight is unavoidable.

Ontological Evasions in Physics, Part 2 The Block Universe: Freezing Time to Save Equations

Relativity revolutionised physics by dissolving the absolute backdrop of Newtonian space and time. Space and time were no longer separate containers but fused into spacetime. Yet out of this insight came one of physics’ most tenacious evasions: the block universe.

The evasive manoeuvre

The block universe takes spacetime as a four-dimensional slab, already complete from beginning to end. Past, present, and future are equally real; the entire history of the cosmos is laid out “all at once.” What we experience as the flow of time is relegated to illusion, a parochial trick of consciousness.

Why does this picture persist? Because it preserves the mathematical elegance of relativity. Treating the cosmos as a fixed four-dimensional geometry keeps the equations neat and symmetric. But the neatness comes at an ontological cost.

The ontological cost

In the block universe, possibility is frozen. The future is no less determined than the past; becoming is erased. Individuation can no longer emerge, since all events already exist. Relation collapses into geometry, a static adjacency with no openness.

This is not merely determinism; it is the denial of temporality itself. The world becomes a sculpture, not a process. Construal, alignment, emergence—these are written out of the script.

The epistemic collapse

If the block universe is true, then the very practice of science is incoherent. Experiment depends on temporal unfolding: posing a question, intervening, waiting for an outcome. But if outcomes are already fixed in the block, experiment is just our traversing of a pre-laid track. Inquiry becomes a form of tourism through an already-finished landscape.

More subtly, the block universe deprives science of its own reflexivity. Scientific practice is itself a temporal process of conjecture, critique, and revision. To deny the openness of time is to deny the openness of science itself.

The theological return

Once again, what presents itself as “hard-headed” physics smuggles in theological undertones. The block universe is a cosmic manuscript, already authored, where becoming is replaced by eternal inscription. It echoes the ancient image of the book of fate: everything already written, nothing truly unfolding.

A relational reframing

Relational ontology does not require such evasions. Time is not an illusion to be explained away, but the very mode of perspectival actualisation. Becoming is real because relation individuates and aligns in ways that cannot be pre-scripted. Possibility is not the weak shadow of a fixed block; it is the condition for emergent construals of reality.

From this view, relativity’s real insight is not that time is illusory, but that the separation of time and space was always perspectival. Relation unfolds across multiple horizons, but this does not erase temporality—it multiplies it.

Conclusion

The block universe is not a courageous extrapolation of relativity but an evasion: freezing time to preserve equations, even at the expense of ontology and epistemology alike. What physics calls elegance here is, in truth, paralysis.

The alternative is not to retreat into illusionism, but to affirm the openness of time as relational becoming. Only then can physics move beyond the block and into the living cosmos it seeks to understand.

Ontological Evasions in Physics: A Series Introduction

Physics prides itself on confronting reality head-on. Equations are taken to be the ultimate distillation of truth; experiment is the final court of appeal. Yet again and again, when pressed by contradiction, paradox, or anomaly, physics chooses not to rethink its ontology but to evade it. Instead of asking what its categories of relation, possibility, and causation actually mean, it patches the cracks with metaphysical quick fixes.

These evasions take many forms. Some deny the openness of possibility altogether, as in superdeterminism. Others freeze reality into a static tableau, as in the block universe. Still others proliferate infinities of worlds, invoke invisible placeholders, or retreat into the subjectivity of the observer. The tactics differ, but the logic is consistent: preserve the formal apparatus at any cost, even if ontology must be contorted into incoherence.

The result is that physics, in its most self-assured moments, becomes least aware of what it is doing. It smuggles in theological structures (the cosmic author, the simulation programmer), collapses the very conditions of experiment (superdeterminism), or dissolves ontology into epistemology (QBism). In every case, what is evaded is the need to reconceive relation itself: not as entities joined by causal arrows, but as perspectival construals that individuate and align.

This series will track these evasions one by one. Each instalment will:

1. Identify the problem physics was trying to solve.

2. Show the evasive manoeuvre and its appeal.

3. Expose the ontological cost of that move.

4. Unpack the epistemic collapse it entails.

5. Sketch a relational reframing that dissolves the paradox without mutilating ontology.

The point is not to score rhetorical victories over physics, but to reveal the structural pattern: when ontology is treated as a disposable inconvenience, physics ends up ensnared in contradictions of its own making. Only by confronting relation directly—as perspectival, collective, and open—can the dilemmas physics generates be reframed rather than evaded.

The first instalment takes up perhaps the starkest evasion of all: superdeterminism, the claim that everything we take to be possibility, choice, or experiment was already fixed from the beginning of time. What physics embraces here is not courage but retreat, a straitjacket masquerading as rigour.