This arc installs a worldview in which the real is always elsewhere. Truth is hidden, waiting to be unlocked. Constants are set by an external hand. Fields are ghostly substances humming beneath phenomena. Each metaphor deflects attention away from the relational labour of construal and toward a fantasy of underlying essence.
But this fantasy is misplaced. There is no pre-written book of nature, no fine-tuned control panel, no invisible ocean filling space. These are projections of symbolic imagery onto phenomena, treating abstractions as substances. What we call “laws,” “constants,” and “fields” are not discoveries of an occult substratum but symbolic architectures we build to stabilise relational possibility.
The danger of these metaphors is not only that they mislead. It is that they naturalise a representational worldview: reality as something already given, already authored, waiting only to be revealed. Against this, a relational perspective insists: every scientific model is a perspectival cut, an active construal, a shared symbolic alignment.
The arc linking these three critiques exposes a recurring category error: mistaking symbolic potential for hidden substance. The mirage of secret codes, fine-tuned designs, and invisible fabrics distracts us from the real work of science — the collective construction of architectures that remain open, revisable, and reflexively bound to our own position within them.
Each of these critiques — against the fantasy of hidden secrets, against the theological lure of fine-tuning, against the reification of fields — works to the same end: dissolving the illusion that physics uncovers a pre-given order. Instead, physics constructs symbolic architectures that make sense of phenomena through cuts, frames, and alignments.
To see the frame is to resist the fantasy of hidden substance — and to recognise our own cut in the weave of reality.
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