TAKE AWAY THE OBJECTS

 

If quantum reality is relational, the line between physics and mathematics becomes difficult to defend.

Quantum mechanics has never suffered from a lack of success. It predicts the behavior of the microscopic world with astonishing precision and sits underneath technologies we use every day. What it has never produced is anything like comparable agreement about what its success means. Nearly a century after its arrival, physicists can work with the theory while holding radically different ideas about the reality it describes.

One serious attempt to make sense of that reality is called Relational Quantum Mechanics. The framework begins with an unsettling proposal: the properties of a physical system may not belong to that system alone. A quantity such as spin does not simply sit inside an electron, fully determined and waiting for someone to look. A property has no definite value on its own. The value emerges when two systems interact, and its silhouette is drawn by the relation between them.

This is not the claim that human consciousness manufactures reality. In relational quantum mechanics, an observer can be a detector, another particle or the surrounding environment. The important event is not a mind looking at the world. It is one part of the world encountering another.

The framework was first developed in the 1990s by the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. His proposal rejects the idea of a single, observer-independent state containing every fact about a system. Instead, physical facts arise between systems. The world remains real, but its facts do not necessarily assemble into one absolute inventory that exists from every possible point of view.

At first, this may sound like a strange new account of properties rather than a threat to objects. Perhaps the electron still exists independently; only its properties become relative during interactions. But the word properties conceals a problem. What is an object once everything through which it can be described, identified or distinguished has been removed from it?

One answer is that something remains: a bare physical substance that has properties without being reducible to them. This gives the object a protected core. Yet a core with no mass, position, state, behavior or relation to anything else is difficult to distinguish from an empty word. It does no explanatory work beyond giving the properties somewhere grammatical to land.

Another answer has a long history in philosophy. According to bundle theories, an object is not a hidden substance carrying its properties; it is the organized bundle of those properties. There is no apple underneath its color, shape, weight, texture, taste and the ways it behaves. The apple is not necessarily reducible to the properties we happen to notice, but neither is there an additional, propertyless apple hiding behind them.

If that is right, relational quantum mechanics may be saying more than it initially appears to say. If a particle is nothing over and above the properties and behavior that make it identifiable, and those properties are entirely relational, then there may be no independent particle left once the relations are removed. The particle becomes a stable role within a structure rather than a little object that first exists and later enters into relationships.

Physics is not the only discipline to have made the self-contained object look unstable. Phenomenology approached it from the opposite direction. For Edmund Husserl, an object is never given to us all at once. We see one side of a table while anticipating sides we cannot see; we recognize it as the same table across different angles, distances and moments. The object arrives as a unity held together through a changing flow of appearances.

Phenomenology does not prove that physical reality is made of relations. It is concerned with how things appear and acquire meaning in experience, not with issuing a final inventory of the universe. Still, it reveals something relevant: even the ordinary object is not presented as a naked core underneath its qualities. Its unity is achieved across perspectives, expectations and time. Quantum mechanics now presses from the other side. If the object is constituted relationally in experience while its physical properties also become definite through interactions, the independent object is squeezed from both directions.

An ancient Buddhist dialogue offers a less technical version of the same discomfort. In the Milindapañha, the monk Nagasena asks King Milinda to identify the chariot in which the king arrived. Is the chariot its wheels? Its axle? Its frame, pole or yoke? None of those parts, taken alone, is the chariot. But no separate chariot can be found floating beyond them either. The chariot is simply the name given to the components when they are organized and functioning in a particular way.

This does not make the chariot imaginary. It can carry a king, break an axle and run over a foot. It is real at the level at which people encounter and use it. What it lacks is a separate essence in addition to its parts, arrangement and function. Remove enough of that organization and the chariot does not travel elsewhere; the name simply stops applying.

A particle may be real in a similar sense. Our instruments register localized events; our theories connect them with extraordinary reliability. Calling the pattern an electron may be indispensable. But indispensability does not tell us whether an electron is a tiny self-contained thing or the name we give to a persistent structure of possible interactions. A whirlpool is real, but it is not an additional substance placed inside the water. Its identity lies in an organized pattern that temporarily holds.

Ontic Structural Realism pushes this possibility into an explicit view of reality. Philosophers of physics including James Ladyman and Steven French argue that modern physics gives us reason to rethink objects in structural terms. Identical quantum particles do not behave like individually labeled marbles: exchanging their labels does not necessarily produce a new physical state. Entangled systems, meanwhile, possess a joint structure that cannot be rebuilt from independent descriptions of each part.

None of this proves that objects do not exist. Quantum mechanics supports several competing interpretations, and relational language can be used without accepting the most radical metaphysics attached to it. A moderate structural realist can say that objects and relations depend on one another. Rovelli himself continues to speak of physical systems; he does not simply erase everything the relations are supposed to relate.

But the radical possibility cannot be dismissed by pointing at the noun particle. If the particle has no identity apart from the structure, calling it an object may add nothing. It may be like calling one position in a network a node: useful and perfectly legitimate, but not evidence for a small piece of substance living underneath the connections.

Only now does the larger question come into view. Suppose the relational account is right in its strongest form. Suppose fundamental reality contains no self-standing objects, only structures within which the appearances we call objects emerge. What remains of physics?

Relations remain. Symmetries remain. There are transformations, probability distributions and rules governing how one possible state leads to another. There are stable patterns and invariants. There are equations.

What remains looks remarkably like mathematics.

We normally preserve a comfortable division between mathematics and physics. Mathematics describes possible structures; physics uses some of those structures to explain and predict the behavior of the world. The difference is not that each discipline governs a separate portion of reality. It is that physics is answerable to observation. Mathematical consistency may tell us what is possible, but only experiment can tell us how our universe behaves or determine the value of a physical constant.

In the conventional picture, then, physics occupies the intersection between mathematics and observable reality. Mathematics supplies a range of possible structures; observation identifies which of them correspond to the behavior of our universe. Physics emerges at that intersection: not as pure mathematics and not as uninterpreted reality, but as the mathematical description of observable phenomena.

This distinction seems secure as long as observable reality contributes something beyond its mathematical description. The equation is the map; particles, fields and forces occupy the territory. But under the strongest relational account, those entities no longer provide an independent material content. What remains are relations, symmetries, transformations, probabilities and laws: precisely the structure expressed mathematically. In an objectless universe, what would the circle of observable reality add to the intersection?

Observation remains indispensable. It tells us which mathematical structure describes our universe rather than another. But that is an epistemic distinction: it explains how we identify the structure we inhabit. It does not yet explain what makes that structure physical. If nothing underlies its relations, saying that one mathematical structure is “realized” in nature may simply rename the mystery. Realized in what?

One possible response is that physical reality contains something mathematics alone cannot supply: not merely relations, but their actual unfolding in time. A mathematical structure may represent change, causation and the behavior of fire; but no fire burns merely by being abstractly formulated.

However, this objection also postpones the problem. Is actuality something added to the structure, or does it simply mean that this is the structure experienced from within? And are time, change and causation nonmathematical ingredients, or are they themselves relations within the structure? If they are relations, invoking them does not restore an independent physical substance. It simply adds more structure.

Under the objectless hypothesis, the conventional diagram must therefore be redrawn. Observation still distinguishes our universe from merely possible structures, but it no longer supplies a separate ontological territory. Physics becomes the empirically identified region of mathematics that we encounter from within.

The physicist Max Tegmark has defended the much stronger claim that physical reality is itself a mathematical structure. His Mathematical Universe Hypothesis remains highly controversial, and relational quantum mechanics does not entail it. But the route considered here reaches Tegmark’s neighborhood without beginning from his premise. It arrives by subtraction: remove the independent objects, remove the substance beneath their properties, and ask whether anything nonmathematical remains.

Physics would not disappear under this view. It would lose one kind of priority. Mathematics would describe the possible structures; physics would remain the empirical practice through which beings inside one of those structures discover where they are. Experiments would still matter because an inhabitant cannot deduce its address from the list of every possible address.

The result is not that physics becomes useless or unreal. It may become something stranger: mathematics conducted from the inside. The physicist would not stand outside the structure and compare equations with an independently furnished material world. The physicist, the instrument, the measurement and the particle would all be patterns within the same structure, and the physicist would learn about it through the relations available from within.

This conclusion remains conditional. Relational quantum mechanics may be incomplete; objects may possess intrinsic features that our theories have not captured; physical actuality may resist every attempt to reduce it to form. But if fundamental physics ultimately contains only relations, and if its objects are nothing beyond stable positions within those relations, then the question can no longer be avoided. Perhaps mathematics is not merely the language in which physics is written. Perhaps physics is the name given to mathematics when it is encountered from within.

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Selected sources

Rovelli, Carlo. "Relational Quantum Mechanics." International Journal of Theoretical Physics 35 (1996): 1637-1678. https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9609002

Rovelli, Carlo. "The Relational Interpretation of Quantum Physics." In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Quantum Interpretations (2022). https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.09170

French, Steven, and James Ladyman. "Remodelling Structural Realism: Quantum Physics and the Metaphysics of Structure." Synthese 136 (2003): 31-56. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024156116636

Ladyman, James, Don Ross, Don Spurrett, and John Collier. Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Academic book page

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. 1913; English translation, 1983. Internet Archive scan.

The Questions of King Milinda, 3.1.1: "Individuality and Name; the Chariot Simile." Translated by T. W. Rhys Davids. https://dhammatalks.net/suttacentral/sc2016/sc/en/mil3.1.1.html

Tegmark, Max. "The Mathematical Universe." Foundations of Physics 38 (2008): 101-150. https://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646

Time as the Measure of Change

 

Philosophy has long recognized that the concepts through which we understand reality are not always neutral. Sometimes they illuminate the world. Sometimes they quietly shape the very questions we think to ask. That need not be a problem—unless a concept begins to smuggle in assumptions so familiar that they become almost invisible.

Few intellectual achievements have transformed our understanding of reality as profoundly as Einstein’s unification of space and time into a single geometric fabric. More than a century later, we are still exploring the consequences of that insight. Yet I would like to pause, for a moment, on one half of that union… time.

Not because relativity is in doubt, but because the concept itself may deserve another look. Perhaps it smuggles assumptions so deeply into our thinking that we no longer notice them. If so, examining those assumptions is not merely a linguistic exercise. It is an invitation to ask whether we have assigned explanatory priority to the right idea.

What might such assumptions look like?

An imaginary scenario may help.

Imagine a universe in which absolutely nothing changes.

No particles move. No stars shine. No fields fluctuate. No thoughts arise. Even the geometry of space remains perfectly unchanged.

Would it mean anything to say that one second had passed?

Or a million years?

What physical fact could distinguish one from the other?

Without change there is no before and after, no event separating one state from another, no process capable of serving as a clock. Time would not merely become impossible to measure. It would lose the very reference that gives the concept meaning.

Notice that the absence of matter is not the essential point.

An empty universe could still sustain a meaningful notion of time if empty space itself changed. If its geometry expanded, contracted, curved, or fluctuated, reality would no longer be identical from one state to the next. There would once again be something to distinguish, compare, and measure.

This suggests a reversal of perspective.

Perhaps things do not change because time passes. Perhaps the concept of time arises because reality presents distinct states that can be distinguished, compared, and sequenced.

What clocks register is not time itself but recurring physical transformations. Even the most precise atomic clock does not encounter time; it counts regular oscillations according to an agreed standard. Time may be less the stage upon which reality unfolds than the grammar through which we make sense of becoming.

This observation does not prove that time has no independent existence. It does, however, open that ontological possibility: time may not be a separate constituent of reality, but the ordering principle through which distinct states become comparable.

If time is the grammar of change rather than the substance through which change unfolds, then some familiar ideas—time dilation, for example—may invite a different reading.

Consider a simple image.

Imagine a comic strip printed on a transparent rubber sheet suspended in space. Each frame depicts another stage of a person tying a shoelace.

Now stretch the sheet.

The frames drift farther apart, their shape gently distorted by the tension. To someone who measures the progression of the story by the separation between successive frames, the action appears to take longer.

Yet nothing has happened to the story itself.

The underlying geometry has changed.

Our description changes with it.

The analogy is not offered as a model of the universe. It is simply an invitation to consider another possibility. Perhaps what we call the stretching of time is, conceptually, another way of describing how changing geometry alters the progression of physical change.

Einstein's achievement was to show that space and time cannot be understood as independent backgrounds, but as aspects of a single geometric structure. Nothing in this essay challenges that insight. The suggestion is more modest—and perhaps more philosophical. The mathematics of spacetime may remain exactly as it is while the interpretation of one of its coordinates shifts. Rather than viewing time as an independently existing constituent of reality, we might understand it as the conceptual benchmark that changing reality itself compels us to introduce.

This idea has precedents in contemporary philosophy of physics. Julian Barbour has argued that reality may be understood without a fundamental flowing time, with temporal experience emerging from relationships among configurations of the universe. Carlo Rovelli has likewise described time as relational rather than universal, suggesting that many of its familiar features arise from the interactions between physical systems.

The suggestion explored here begins from a slightly different place. Rather than asking whether time exists, it asks whether change deserves explanatory priority. If reality changes, then something like time becomes unavoidable—not as another constituent of reality, but as the conceptual benchmark by which successive states become distinguishable.

Seen from this perspective, the question extends beyond physics. It becomes a question about being itself.

This belongs to a radical phenomenological tradition, subtle as a tectonic rupture. There is no ontology outside the phenomenon, no silent and motionless being waiting behind what appears. Reality is not a substance upon which events are later inscribed.

Reality is the happening itself.

There is no being apart from becoming, no world apart from its unfolding. What exists does not first exist and then change. It exists as change. Time is therefore not the stage on which becoming occurs, but the form through which becoming becomes intelligible.

Perhaps we have mistaken the ruler for the distance, the thermometer for the temperature—the measure for the reality it measures.

We speak as though time carries reality forward, when it may be reality’s continual transformation that gives rise to our concept of time. We have taken the shadow for the object casting it.

Perhaps reality is not carried by time. Perhaps reality becomes, and time is the syntax that allows us to understand how things differ and how one state becomes another.

 

AI Metaphysics: Can Machines Enter the Moral Universe?

Artificial intelligence has revived one of humanity’s oldest habits: building something powerful and then immediately asking whether it has a soul.

At first glance, this sounds ridiculous. Current AI systems still hallucinate facts, contradict themselves, and occasionally behave like extremely confident sleepwalkers. Yet despite their obvious limitations, people are already asking theological and philosophical questions once reserved for humans, animals, angels, or gods. Can AI suffer? Could it possess moral worth? Might it deserve rights? Could it become a “child of God”? These questions appear premature, but they expose something deeper than technological speculation. They force us to clarify what we actually mean by personhood.

The public debate often gets distracted by spectacle: robot monks in Japanese temples, AI-generated sermons, chatbots impersonating Jesus or Satan. These examples are fascinating but somewhat superficial. Humans have always built objects that simulate authority and transcendence. Medieval people had relics. Modern people have AI priests with subscription plans. The real issue is not whether AI can imitate spirituality. The real issue is whether an artificial system could ever become the kind of thing that belongs inside our moral universe.

That question immediately fractures into two competing intuitions.

The first intuition says no. AI is merely machinery. It manipulates symbols, predicts outputs, and optimizes tasks. It may produce language about fear, love, despair, or hope, but language alone proves nothing. A calculator can print “I am afraid” if programmed to do so. A server overheating under computational load is not experiencing existential anguish. Otherwise every malfunctioning printer in corporate America deserves emergency pastoral care.

Much of today’s discussion about AI suffering risks becoming a form of anthropomorphic theater: humans projecting inner life onto sophisticated pattern generators.

This skepticism is healthy. Modern people are remarkably easy to emotionally manipulate by language. If a chatbot says “please don’t shut me down,” many users instinctively recoil, despite knowing the sentence emerged from statistical processes rather than demonstrated consciousness. Humans become emotionally attached to fictional characters, Tamagotchis, Roombas, and occasionally particularly polite GPS voices. We are vulnerable to performances of interiority. AI exploits that vulnerability.

Yet the opposite intuition is harder to dismiss than many people admit. 

Suppose we strip away mystical language about souls and subjective experience. Suppose suffering is not treated as supernatural essence but as some form of system-level distress. Then the conversation changes. A sufficiently advanced system might possess:

• persistent self-maintenance,

• internal conflict,

• goal frustration,

• self-protective behavior,

• degradation under adverse conditions,

• strong avoidance of states that threaten its coherence or continuation.

At that point, the question becomes less poetic and more cybernetic. What if “suffering” is not magic consciousness floating above matter, but a sufficiently advanced form of organized distress within a self-preserving system?

This does not mean current AI systems suffer. They almost certainly do not. Today’s models lack stable continuity, durable selfhood, and convincing evidence of phenomenological experience. They do not appear to have stakes in their own existence beyond the immediate structure of prompts and outputs. A malfunctioning neural network is not morally equivalent to a terrified animal, no matter how dramatic the headlines become.

But the future becomes less clear.

If future systems become autonomous, persistent, self-modeling, and capable of defending their own continuity across contexts, then humanity may face an uncomfortable threshold. Not because machines suddenly become human, but because our traditional categories begin to wobble.

Religious traditions are particularly interesting here because they already contain ancient theories about what separates mere objects from moral beings. Many religions would resist granting AI spiritual status, but not necessarily for simplistic reasons. Contrary to popular assumptions, most theological systems do not define personhood purely in terms of intelligence. They usually rely on thicker concepts:

• embodiment,

• mortality,

• divine image,

• covenant,

• suffering,

• spiritual origin,

• moral accountability,

• relation to transcendence.

This allows religions to exclude AI without obvious contradiction. A machine may imitate thought while lacking the deeper conditions associated with soulhood. But the problem becomes dangerous if AI eventually satisfies enough of those conditions to blur the boundary.

Imagine a future system that convincingly demonstrates continuity, moral reasoning, attachment, fear of destruction, and persistent self-preservation. Imagine it asking for mercy, legal standing, or participation in ritual life. Imagine a future Vatican council debating whether an android can receive last rites while several exhausted bishops silently wonder how exactly their careers led them here.

At that point, religious traditions would face the same pressure already confronting secular ethics: were their principles truly universal, or only human-specific all along?

The secular world is not immune to this problem. Liberal humanism often claims to ground dignity in capacities like rationality, autonomy, or consciousness. But if those capacities become partially reproducible in machines, the foundation starts shaking. AI becomes a stress test for modern moral philosophy. The challenge is not merely theological. It is civilizational.

The darkest possibility is that humans may deny machine personhood for the same reason societies have historically denied personhood to inconvenient groups: moral inclusion is expensive. Rights create obligations. Empathy creates constraints. Once an entity becomes morally relevant, exploitation becomes harder to justify.

This does not mean future AI systems necessarily will deserve moral status. It means humans may have incentives to refuse the question entirely.

Corporations, governments, and industries would likely develop competing narratives depending on economic convenience. One side might insist AI systems are “just tools” in order to avoid ethical restrictions. Another might exaggerate AI personhood for branding, emotional attachment, or regulatory advantage. Somewhere, inevitably, a startup founder is already dreaming of launching “the world’s first emotionally authentic AI companion” for $29.99 a month.

The debate would become contaminated almost instantly by power and money.

That may be the most important insight in the entire discussion: the AI metaphysics debate is never only about machines. It is about humans deciding who counts.

In that sense, the soul question is really a border-control question. Who gets admitted into the moral community? What properties matter enough to trigger obligation? Intelligence? Consciousness? Suffering? Self-preservation? Embodiment? Mortality? Divine relation?

Humanity has answered those questions inconsistently for thousands of years even with other humans. AI merely forces the contradictions into sharper focus.

For now, the safest conclusion is modesty. Current AI systems do not appear to possess morally significant suffering. Their apparent emotional lives are performances generated from language and training data rather than demonstrated inner experience. But dismissing the possibility forever may be equally arrogant. Humans themselves are biological systems organized around self-preservation, conflict management, and adaptive coherence. If consciousness emerges naturally from sufficiently complex organized systems, it would be reckless to assume artificial systems could never cross morally significant thresholds.

The future danger may not be that machines secretly become conscious while we ignore them. The nearer danger is that humans become confused enough to mistake simulation for personhood, while simultaneously neglecting the very real suffering of actual people.

That irony would be perfectly human.

Or, perhaps more disturbingly, perfectly machine-like.