The metaphor of the universe as a machine is one of the oldest in modern science. Born in the 17th century, it cast reality as clockwork: gears, levers, and cogs clicking in deterministic precision. Today, physics dresses the metaphor in modern garb — with talk of “mechanisms,” “deterministic laws,” or “the machinery of nature.” But the underlying assumption remains the same: reality is a pre-assembled apparatus whose structure we simply uncover.
Relationally, this is a profound distortion. A machine implies an already-complete arrangement of parts, each with a fixed role, functioning according to a design. It presupposes an ontological closure — a system built and finished, waiting for inspection. But phenomena do not emerge from pre-fabricated gears; they emerge from perspectival cuts through systemic potential. Meaning is not discovered in the turning of hidden cogs, but constituted in construal and symbolic alignment.
By clinging to mechanical metaphors, physics risks obscuring its own role in carving events out of possibility. What appears as “the machine of nature” is, in fact, the reflexive stability of symbolic architectures that have achieved temporary coherence. There is no cosmic clock to be dismantled on a workbench. There are only phenomena actualised through construal — and theories that symbolically stitch them into a frame of intelligibility.
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