Three Masks of the Same Error: A Retrospective

Over the past three posts, I have set out three short critiques:

• Against Quantum Weirdness — the trap of treating quantum as a deviation from a “normal” classical baseline.

• Against the God’s-Eye View — the illusion that physics can speak from nowhere, erasing the reflexive role of construal.

• Against Information as Ontology — the confusion of symbolic abstraction with material substance.

Each of these may look like a separate problem. Yet retrospectively, a deeper coherence emerges: they are three masks of the same underlying error.

That error is the reification of construal. Each metaphor takes a symbolic architecture — “weirdness,” “objectivity,” “information” — and instals it as if it were the very fabric of reality. The symbolic cut becomes the ground, the construal disappears into the claim, and what is reflexively constituted is presented as self-evidently given.

In each case, the effect is the same:

• The normalisation of one symbolic order (classical mechanics, detached objectivity, digital abstraction).

• The erasure of reflexive alignment (the social and symbolic labour that makes phenomena intelligible).

• The projection of a metaphenomenal claim as if it were empirical discovery.

Seen this way, the three critiques together are not a miscellany but a systematic exposure of category errors at the heart of physics discourse. They show how quickly language about quantum phenomena slides into metaphysics without acknowledgment, and how urgently we need to keep ontological distinctions clear.

This is not to dismiss physics. On the contrary: it is to honour it by refusing to saddle it with confused metaphors that obscure rather than clarify. Physics has the power to reveal relational patterns of extraordinary depth — but only if we resist the temptation to let its symbolic scaffolding masquerade as reality itself.