1 Why Cosmology Must Be Relational
What is the universe?
It sounds like a question of fact, of inventory — as if the universe were a warehouse to be catalogued, a container of things to be explained. This is how most cosmologies — scientific and mythic alike — have tended to proceed. They begin by asking what exists, and then how those things behave. Matter, particles, laws, dimensions. Inheritance. Structure. Force.
But what if this way of questioning already hides an assumption?
The assumption is that reality is made up of things — discrete units that persist in themselves and relate only secondarily. The universe, in this view, is a stage on which separate entities appear and interact.
The Shift from Substance to Relation
This is not an esoteric metaphysical claim. It arises from the very heart of experience. Nothing arises alone. To see is to be seen. To breathe is to exchange. To think is to inherit language, to dwell in a history of meaning. Even the most basic 'thing' is already a confluence — a knot in a field of relations.
This is true not only experientially, but also physically. Quantum theory, for instance, resists efforts to describe isolated particles; it points us instead to entanglement, to wavefunctions that encode not individual properties but joint potentials. General relativity tells us that space and time are not neutral backdrops, but stretch and contract in response to mass — which is itself a measure of dynamic resistance to relational transformation.
Relation is everywhere — not as a feature, but as a ground.
Cosmology as a Mode of Life
If this is so, cosmology is not simply the study of what exists, but the study of how things co-exist — how they arise through participation, influence, and transformation. In this sense, cosmology becomes an ethical project: a way of orienting ourselves to a world in which we are always already entangled.
To insist on relational cosmology is to insist that the way we imagine the universe shapes how we live in it.
A Different Question
We begin here — not with substance, but with resonance; not with inventory, but with encounter. A cosmology not of separation, but of situatedness.
Next, we’ll turn to the story of cosmic origin — the Big Bang — and reimagine it not as an explosion of substance, but as the genesis of relation itself.
2 Rethinking the Big Bang
The Big Bang is often described as the origin of the universe — a single moment in which everything began. Space and time, energy and matter, all bursting forth from a singularity: infinitesimal, dense, and incomprehensibly hot.
Most treatments of the Big Bang imagine it as an explosion of stuff — the birth of particles, the unfolding of space, the ticking of time. In this view, the singularity is the seed from which all things expanded, driven by forces and governed by laws.
Yet this framing subtly smuggles in a substance ontology. It imagines existence as composed of separable entities, set in motion by prior causes.
From Nothing to With
It makes little sense to ask what existed “before” the Big Bang. Not just because time began then (as physics tells us), but because the very condition for anything at all is not a prior object, but a relational opening.
In this light, the early universe is not a crowded furnace of particles, but a fluid interrelation — a wavefunction of possibility, still undifferentiated. Only gradually do determinate structures emerge: matter, charge, spin, space, time.
Each is a stabilised pattern of relating.
The birth of the universe, then, is not a moment in which things were made, but the moment in which making-with became possible.
Becoming Local, Becoming Tangled
Cosmic evolution is the gradual unfolding of locality — not a decline into disorder, but the differentiation of situated relations.
From Myth to Meaning
Every cosmology is a mythos — not in the sense of a false story, but in the sense of a world-making narrative. The Big Bang, too, is a myth — a way of telling the origin in scientific terms.
Relational cosmology doesn’t deny the Big Bang. It reinterprets it.
In the next post, we’ll follow this thread from origin to ontology, and consider what it means to say that reality is composed of relations all the way down.
3 It’s Relations All the Way Down
We’re used to thinking of reality as built from smaller and smaller things: molecules from atoms, atoms from protons and neutrons, those from quarks. Dig deep enough, and you’ll hit bedrock — the final substance, the irreducible particle.
Abandoning the Bedrock
In physics, particles were once imagined as tiny billiard balls — solid and self-contained. But as theory progressed, this picture became untenable. Electrons have no known size or internal structure. Quarks cannot be isolated. Photons are quantised excitations of fields.
Quantum field theory no longer speaks of particles as things in space, but of fields in relation, where entities emerge as localised expressions of relational dynamics. An electron is not a discrete object so much as a recurrent ripple in a sea of potentiality.
Entanglement Is Not an Anomaly
Nowhere is this clearer than in entanglement.
Two particles interact, then fly apart — and yet, their properties remain co-defined. Measure one, and you instantaneously constrain the other. This has been experimentally verified time and again. There is no “hidden information” travelling faster than light.
What we call “particles” are not isolated facts. They are nodes in a network, and the state of any node can only be understood through its entanglements with others.
From Particles to Participation
This reframe has profound implications. It means that identity is not prior to relation — it is composed through relation.
It is not that things relate. It is that relation is what things are.
There Is No Background
In this light, even space and time lose their status as neutral containers.
Spacetime in general relativity is not a static stage but a dynamic fabric, warped by mass and energy. This warping is not an effect on space — it is space. Time does not flow independently of events — it is the dimension of their unfolding.
In the next post, we’ll ask how this relational metaphysics reshapes our understanding of physics itself — and how it invites us to read scientific theories not as mirrors of reality, but as maps of meaningful relation.
4 Physics as Relational Mapping
If reality is not built from things, but from relations, then physics is not the study of objects in space. It is the ongoing attempt to map the patterns of becoming in which objects arise.
Theory as Interface, Not Mirror
Scientific theories are often imagined as mirrors: polished reflections of the world “as it is,” independent of us. But this objectivist fantasy is hard to defend once we appreciate that observation is always interaction, and measurement is always participation.
In this light, theories are not mirrors but interfaces: symbolic systems through which we stabilise our couplings with dynamic processes. They don’t show us what the world is made of. They show us how worlds unfold when enacted through certain practices.
Every scientific law is a mapping of relation, not an edict of substance.
Models as Meaningful Constraints
This does not mean all models are equal. Some fit better. Some predict more. But “fit” and “prediction” are not properties of the universe. They are properties of our engaged mappings.
Importantly, a model’s usefulness does not depend on its metaphysical literalness. The Bohr model of the atom — with electrons orbiting like planets — is incorrect. Yet it was crucial in the development of quantum theory. Its power was not in being true, but in being fruitful.
This is the logic of all modelling: we render one domain intelligible in terms of another. This is not distortion — it is analogy in action. Every map is partial. But partiality is what makes navigation possible.
The Observer Is Always Inside the Frame
If theories are relational interfaces, then who is doing the mapping matters. We are not abstract minds gazing from nowhere. We are embodied participants — organisms within fields of relation, observing from within the world.
Even “objective” observations are made from positions — instrumentally, conceptually, affectively. This does not undermine science. It enriches it — reminding us that what we can know depends on how we relate.
Relational Truth
Truth, in a relational cosmology, is not correspondence with an independent reality. It is the ongoing adequacy of relation: the fidelity with which our concepts, models, and theories coordinate meaningful participation.
The world is not whatever we say it is. But neither is it a brute fact waiting to be mirrored. It is an emergent field of co-actualisation, and knowledge is the art of finding stable, generative paths through it.
In the next post, we’ll ask how this view recasts the concept of law in physics — not as universal dictate, but as conditioned regularity within an unfolding dance of relation.
5 Law as Conditioned Regularity
If the universe is a field of unfolding relations, then the laws of physics cannot be timeless commands imposed upon a mute reality. They must be patterns of regularity that emerge within particular conditions of relation.
The Myth of Universal Law
But even Newton, despite his genius, assumed a fixed space and absolute time — a passive stage on which God's laws played out. Einstein shattered this view: spacetime is not fixed; it curves, stretches, contracts, depending on the presence and movement of mass and energy.
Quantum mechanics dealt another blow: measurement does not merely reveal what is, but helps bring what is into being. Law, here, is not about universal certainty, but probabilistic regularity, enacted in the context of experimental configuration.
What emerges from these revolutions is a vision of law that is not absolute, but relationally enacted.
Conditions of Regularity
For instance, the laws of thermodynamics appear when we describe matter at scale, where individual atomic randomness becomes statistical order. They are not violated in the quantum realm — they simply do not apply in the same way, because the conditions are different.
Likewise, general relativity and quantum field theory describe different regimes, each mapping consistent patterns that hold under certain scales, speeds, and energies. The apparent “incompatibility” between them may not be a contradiction in reality, but a difference in the relational frame.
Participation and Stability
In this view, law is an attractor — a basin of relational possibility, sustained by the interplay of systems and constraints. These are not imposed from outside, but generated within the dance of participation.
And what we call "breaking a law" is better seen as entering a new regime: a shift in scale, energy, or context, where different patterns become dominant.
Law as Lure
And perhaps this is its greatest gift: not certainty, but trustworthiness — enough regularity to participate, enough openness to evolve.
In the next post, we’ll explore how such a cosmos supports emergence: how new structures and meanings arise, not by imposing form, but through the creative play of relation itself.
6 Emergence as the Play of Relation
If laws are stable patterns that arise within particular relational conditions, then emergence is the appearance of new patterns — patterns not predictable from the parts alone.
From Parts to Patterns
Classical science sought to explain the world by analysing it into parts. But parts, in isolation, do not explain wholes. A pile of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms does not explain the emergence of a living cell. The parts are necessary, but not sufficient.
It is how the parts relate — how they constrain, amplify, stabilise and transform one another — that gives rise to new kinds of being.
Emergence is the moment when relation becomes more-than the sum of its relata.
Not by magic, but by configuration — by the intricate choreography of dependencies, feedbacks, and co-regulations that make the whole a new centre of agency.
Creativity Without Blueprint
In a relational ontology, emergence is not the unfolding of a fixed plan, nor the outcome of blind chaos. It is patterned novelty — the capacity of relation to surprise.
New structures — atoms, stars, cells, ecosystems, minds, meanings — come into being through thresholds of complexity. But these thresholds are not dictated by universal laws alone. They are negotiated through interaction.
Nested Worlds
This creates nested ontologies: worlds within worlds, each with its own kinds of relation, its own patterns of lawfulness, its own forms of becoming.
To think relationally is to think through these layers — not erasing their differences, but holding their co-dependence in view.
Emergence and Ethics
What emerges is not only structure, but meaning.
In each new layer of complexity, the world becomes capable of more — more perception, more expression, more care, more harm. Emergence carries with it the weight of responsibility. To participate in the becoming of a world is to help shape what it makes possible.
In this way, emergence is not only a scientific concept. It is an ethical challenge.
7 Cosmos as Kin — Toward a Participatory Metaphysics
From Object to Kin
Participatory Knowing
This participatory knowing dissolves the strict boundary between subject and object, mind and matter, observer and observed.
It calls for humility, curiosity, and openness to the unexpected.
Ethics of Participation
The relational metaphysics demands ethics of participation:
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To act with awareness of our embeddedness and influence
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To nurture relations that sustain flourishing
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To resist domination and fragmentation that harm the whole
Participation is an ongoing practice — a continual negotiation with the world’s becoming.
Toward a New Story
Relational cosmology opens a space for wonder, responsibility, and transformation.
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