5 Patterns of Construal: Closing the Arc

The critiques of causality, time, information, and symmetry reveal a recurring structure: physics routinely projects relational patterns as absolute features of reality. Initial conditions anchor causality, measurement enacts temporal order, randomness frames what counts as potential, information codifies relational alignment, and symmetry highlights invariants. Each move is a construal; each is treated as decree.

Together, they form a network of hidden scaffolding. What appears as necessity — laws, flows, invariants, or conserved quantities — is in fact the stabilisation of modal relations, shaped by perspective, method, and interpretive choice. The misreading of modalisation as modulation persists as a structural habit, repeated across domains and scales.

Recognising this does not diminish physics’ predictive power or its elegance; it reveals the conditions under which its explanations make sense. The universe is not compelled by absolute decrees, nor does it “contain” information as a substance. Reality presents structured possibilities, and physics slices, measures, and models these possibilities, giving rise to the patterns we observe.

Seeing the frame allows us to step back and reflect on the practice itself. It opens a horizon where the laws, objects, and measurements of physics are not unquestionable givens, but choices and construals that shape our experience of the world. From here, future explorations can follow the same diagnostic lens: examining how foundational metaphors in physics — space, force, energy, and even mathematics — structure understanding, and where relational potential is mistaken for necessity.

In short, this arc exposes a rhythm in physics’ discourse: a dance between the relational and the absolute, the modal and the modulated, the construed and the presumed. To see this rhythm is to see the frame itself.