The God’s-Eye View

Modern physics often imagines itself as gazing upon the universe from nowhere — as if it could peel back appearances and access reality as it truly is. This posture is what I call the God’s-eye view: the assumption that science speaks from a privileged, non-situated vantage point outside the conditions of its own meaning-making.

At first glance, this stance appears as a mark of rigour: to strip away bias, subjectivity, or distortion, leaving only the objective truth of the cosmos. But the move is ontologically treacherous. By erasing the reflexive role of construal, cut, and alignment in constituting phenomena, it mistakes symbolic architectures for transparent windows onto reality.

Relationally, there is no view from nowhere. Every phenomenon arises as an event of construal: a cut across potential, an instantiation of meaning, a situated alignment of observer and system. To claim otherwise is to collapse second-order claims (about the symbolic systems through which we know) into first-order claims (about the phenomena themselves). This confusion allows metaphenomenal assertions to masquerade as empirical descriptions.

For example, when physics declares that the universe consists of fields, particles, or information, it is not merely reporting what is “there.” It is enacting a symbolic cut that produces those categories as phenomena. To treat this enactment as transparent access to reality is to deny the constitutive role of construal, reducing reflexivity to illusion.

The God’s-eye view thus operates as an ontological sleight of hand. It hides the conditions of possibility for knowledge, smuggling in metaphysical certainty under the guise of neutrality. But once we see that meaning is not peeled away but produced through construal, the illusion dissolves.

There is no standpoint beyond construal, no pure mirror of nature. There are only symbolic architectures through which we make the real intelligible. The task is not to escape them but to reckon with their reflexive power — to see that physics, like any other discourse, is not revelation from nowhere but a social alignment of meaning and matter.