The three critiques just traced — initial conditions, measurement, and randomness — may appear to pick at different corners of physics. But they are in fact connected by a deeper scaffolding: the way physics construes processes across time.
Physics needs a starting point, so it posits “initial conditions.” But this starting point is never observed — it is imposed. It is a perspectival cut presented as an ontological given, a moment dressed up as the foundation of all that follows.
Physics needs a way to access the unfolding, so it invokes “measurement.” But measurement is not passive access — it is a constructive act. The very phenomena being measured are shaped, constrained, even brought into being by the act of measurement itself. To construe this as revelation is to erase the cut and disguise construction as discovery.
Physics needs a way to end the story, to explain what escapes law and prediction, so it calls upon “randomness.” But randomness, too, is not a property of being — it is the residue of framing, a statement of epistemic stance hardened into metaphysical declaration.
Taken together, these assumptions form a cycle: a starting point posited, an act of access misconstrued, and an endpoint wrapped in inevitability or chance. The cycle is stabilised by a recurring ontological error: mistaking modalisation (degrees of possibility, perspectives on unfolding) for modulation (decrees, forces, ontological features). What are in fact construals — cuts into relational potential — are recast as absolutes that nature itself must obey.
Seen in this light, physics’ hidden architecture is not simply a collection of misplaced metaphors, but a systematic pattern: a way of covering over the act of construal itself. To expose this pattern is not to diminish physics, but to make visible its conditions of meaning. Only then can we begin to imagine a science that does not mistake its own scaffolding for the structure of reality.
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