1 When Unfolding Begins: Energy and the Origin of Time
Time is not a container, and energy is not a substance. In a relational ontology, these are not independent dimensions or quantities—they are perspectives on unfolding.
And what unfolds is not matter, but process. What changes is not substance, but relation. What begins is not the universe in time, but the universe as time.
To begin this series, we must let go of some familiar pictures. The origin of the universe is not the appearance of things in space. It is the first differentiation of process—the first actualisation of potential into relation, the first event that could unfold.
That event is not the first moment in time. It is the first enactment of temporality.
And what made it possible?
Energy—not as force, not as stuff, but as the potential for unfolding, the structured condition for time to begin.
Energy as Structured Potential
In classical physics, energy is often treated as a measurable quantity: kinetic, potential, thermal, rest mass, and so on. It is conserved, exchanged, transformed—but always assumed to exist in some container called "the universe."
In a relational ontology, that picture is reversed.
Energy is not what happens in the universe. It is what makes the universe’s happening possible. It is the structured potential for processes to unfold—not something a system has, but what it is capable of doing.
And unfolding is not just a physical operation. It is the becoming of relation. A system unfolds when it differentiates itself—when its internal structure changes, when it enters into new configurations, when it expresses its potential in actual form.
So energy, in this view, is not what things use. It is what allows a world to begin.
Time as the Dimension of Unfolding
But this raises a subtle question: if energy is potential for unfolding, then unfolding of what?
Here is where we must be precise.
In the ontology we're working with, reality is understood along a perspectival cline of potential and instance:
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A potential is not a thing that might happen; it is a structured field of possibilities for what could unfold.
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An instance is an actual configuration within that field—a process that unfolds.
Importantly, the relation between potential and instance is not temporal. It is perspectival. One does not come before the other in time. Rather, a given configuration is understood as potential when we view it as what could unfold, and as instance when we view it as what is unfolding.
This distinction is essential, because time belongs only to the unfolding.
Time is the dimension of unfolding.It is not what passes between potential and instance, but what differentiates instance across its becoming.
In short: potential makes unfolding possible; unfolding makes time possible.
The Birth of Temporality
From this perspective, the origin of the universe is not the appearance of particles in space or the expansion of a singularity. It is the first instantiation of a field capable of unfolding—capable of differentiating across time.
The universe begins when something can unfold. That is what it means for time to begin.
So the Big Bang, in this ontology, is not the creation of matter in a void, but the emergence of structured potential—energy—configured such that unfolding became possible.
And with unfolding came time.
The early universe, then, is not just a hot, dense state—it is a richly potentialised field, out of which instances could begin to differentiate. The first time was not a tick of a clock. It was a configuration differentiating itself, becoming more than itself, entering into relation, becoming history.
Time began not because a universe started to exist, but because a structure capable of unfolding was instantiated.
Energy as the Potential for Time
And this leads to the central thesis of this post:
Energy is not only the potential for a process to unfold.It is the potential for time itself.
Because time is nothing other than the unfolding of instance, any system that can differentiate itself across a trajectory is a temporal system. And the capacity to do that—to unfold—is what energy is.
This recasts the origin of the universe as the birth of temporality: not the start of clocks, but the inauguration of unfolding as a cosmic principle.
And just as energy opens time, entropy will eventually close it. But we are not there yet.
What the Universe Is
In this light, the universe is not a thing that exists in space and time. It is a relational configuration whose capacity to unfold is what we call space and time.
The universe is not a static object. It is an active field of potential, instantiating itself process by process, differentiation by differentiation, moment by moment. It is a system that does not merely have energy. It is energy—structured potential—that, once instantiated, began to unfold.
And in that unfolding, time was born.
2 What It Means to Have Time: Time as the Dimension of Unfolding
In the previous post, we reframed energy as the potential for unfolding—and thus the precondition for time. Not time as a background container, but time as a mode of becoming: the dimension through which a process differentiates.
Now we turn to time itself. What is it, in a relational ontology? How do we recognise its presence in a system? And why does time not begin when something exists, but when something unfolds?
Time Is Not a Container
We often treat time as a medium through which things move, like water in which fish swim, or a ruler laid across the events of the universe. But this metaphor misleads.
In a relational ontology, time is not a thing we are in. It is not a substance or dimension that flows past passive entities. Time is a perspectival relation that arises only under specific conditions: when a process is instantiated and differentiates itself through unfolding.
Time is the dimension of unfolding.
This means time does not exist independently of what unfolds. It cannot be measured or conceived apart from actual differentiation in process. If nothing unfolds, there is no time.
So a system does not exist in time. Rather, it enacts time by unfolding itself. The more richly it differentiates, the more complex its temporality becomes.
Differentiation and the Enactment of Time
To “have time” is not to be placed in a timeline. It is to be capable of differentiating instance within the horizon of a potential. That is: to unfold one’s actual state in a way that is neither trivial nor static, but internally and externally relational.
Imagine a process—a swirl of unfolding relations, each changing in ways that reconfigure the whole. That process does not occupy a moment. It is the moment. And its unfolding is what we call time.
Where there is unfolding, there is temporality.Where unfolding ceases, so too does time.
Time is not an external coordinate system. It is a system’s trajectory of change, as viewed from within the unfolding of its own differentiation.
Temporality Is System-Specific
This has an important consequence: temporality is not universal.
Different systems enact different kinds of unfolding, and therefore different temporalities. The time of a tree, the time of a song, the time of a galaxy, the time of grief—each is a different expression of what it means to differentiate across unfolding.
This does not mean time is subjective. It means time is relational.
Each system has its own temporality because each system unfolds differently.
There is no “master clock” against which all systems tick. There is only the differentiated unfolding of instantiated relations, each with its own structure of change, rhythm, and decay.
So to ask if something “exists in time” is the wrong question. We must ask instead:
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What kind of unfolding does this system instantiate?
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How does it differentiate?
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What kind of temporality does that unfolding enact?
A World of Temporal Topologies
If time is the dimension of unfolding, then different processes trace different paths through that dimension—not like trains on parallel tracks, but like braided strands in a shifting topology.
And this brings us to a subtle but crucial point: temporality is topological, not linear.
Some processes loop, some accelerate, some drag. Some fork into branching paths, others spiral inward. The unfolding of time is not the repetition of identical units, but the structured difference of relational change.
In this view, the world is not a single river of time, but a co-unfolding of differentiated processes—each enacting its own temporality in relation to the others.
And what allows this to happen? Energy—structured potential. The universe unfolds because it can. That is what it means to have time.
What Time Is, What It Is Not
Let’s summarise:
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Time is not a background that flows behind events.
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Time is not a line stretching from past to future.
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Time is not the passage from potential to instance—that is instantiation, and it is not temporal.
Instead:
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Time is the dimension of unfolding.
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Time is enacted by processes that differentiate within their instance.
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Time is system-specific, relational, and topological.
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Time is the becoming of process—not its context, but its form of differentiation.
A system “has time” when it can unfold.It loses time when that capacity is exhausted.It is born into time when it first begins to differentiate.
Looking Ahead
In the next post, we’ll follow this trajectory to its limit. If energy is the potential for time, and unfolding is what enacts it, then entropy is what exhausts it. Not a force that drives time forward, but a trace of time having passed, and a sign that a system’s capacity to unfold is fading.
3 When a System Can No Longer Unfold: Entropy and the End of Time
We’ve followed the story of time from its beginning in energy—the potential for unfolding—through the differentiated unfolding of processes that enact time itself. In this post, we arrive at the other end of the arc: what happens when unfolding becomes no longer possible.
This is the domain of entropy.
In most accounts, entropy is described as a measure of disorder, or as a constraint on usable energy. But in a relational ontology, entropy is something deeper and more fundamental. It is not the degradation of things, but the fading of temporality.
From Energy to Entropy: The Arc of Unfolding
If energy is the condition for a process to unfold—and thus for time to be enacted—then entropy is the gradual erosion of that condition. It is the reduction in potential to differentiate.
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Energy opens the possibility of time.
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Entropy closes it.
Where energy is a structured field of potential, entropy is the flattening of that structure—less differentiation, less contrast, less capacity to unfold. It is not decay in the material sense, but homogenisation in the relational sense.
Entropy marks the waning of possibility.It is the thinning of the world’s power to become.
And because unfolding is what enacts time, entropy is not just a thermodynamic constraint. It is a temporal limit.
The So-Called Arrow of Time
Classical physics is largely time-symmetric: the equations work forward and backward. But entropy changes that. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that, in a closed system, entropy tends to increase. This introduces a direction—an asymmetry—in how unfolding proceeds.
In our ontology, this asymmetry is not due to entropy causing time to move forward. Rather:
Entropy is the trace of time having been enacted.
It is the signature of past unfolding—the accumulation of irreversible differentiations that have exhausted the potential field.
So the “arrow of time” is not a vector pointing forward. It is a gradient of diminishing capacity. A system unfolds because it can—but in doing so, it uses up the potential that made unfolding possible.
In this light, time moves forward only because potential is being spent. And the direction of that movement is not external—it is internal to the structure of unfolding.
Entropy as the Fading of Temporality
What happens when a system can no longer differentiate?
From a relational perspective, the answer is stark:
When nothing can unfold, time ceases to be instantiated.There is no becoming. No direction. No differentiation. Only stillness.
This is the scenario often described as the heat death of the universe. But rather than viewing it as the end of matter or motion, we see it as the cessation of unfolding—and thus the end of time itself.
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Not darkness.
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Not nothingness.
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But the absence of relational contrast.
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The loss of internal differentiation.
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The vanishing of capacity to become.
Entropy, then, is not a thing in the universe. It is a condition of the universe’s inability to enact time.
Time’s Closing Gesture
If time begins when energy is instantiated—when a system first unfolds—then time ends when entropy completes its slow work of erasure.
This arc—energy to entropy—is not a journey through time. It is time.
It is the story of temporality itself, from the first shimmering differentiation of potential to the final silence of exhausted possibility.
Time begins when something can unfold.It ends when nothing can.
And between those two conditions—energy and entropy—the universe unfolds.
A Quiet Implication
This view reorients the grandest questions of physics and philosophy.
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The universe does not begin in space; it begins in the possibility of unfolding.
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The universe does not end in collapse; it ends in the exhaustion of unfolding.
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Temporality is not a universal flow; it is a contingent enactment by relational systems.
And if that is so, then perhaps our own temporality—our finitude, our histories, our losses—is not a defect of nature, but an echo of its deepest structure.
Coming Next
In the final post of this series, we’ll pause to reflect on what this arc means. Not just cosmologically, but existentially. What does it mean to live in a universe where time can begin and end—not as a mystery, but as a mode of unfolding?
4 From Becoming to Silence: A Philosophical Reflection on Time’s Symmetry
We have followed a universe that unfolds—not in space, but in time; not from substance, but from relation.
What does it mean to live in a universe that has a beginning and an end—not of objects or matter, but of temporality itself? What becomes of meaning when time is not a container, but an enactment? And what becomes of us, if our lives are processes in that same arc?
A Universe That Becomes
First, we must let go of the still image.
The universe is not a fixed object that exists in time. It is a relational field that becomes time. Its very being is unfolding. Its existence is differentiation.
This means the universe does not have a history—it is its history.
Each instance is a thread in a wider tapestry of unfolding. Each unfolding is a flicker in the wider becoming of the real. Nothing precedes time; nothing escapes it; nothing stands outside it.
To be is to unfold.To unfold is to time.
The Birth and Death of Temporality
In this frame, the so-called beginning and end of the universe are not events at the edge of a timeline. They are the limit conditions of unfolding.
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The Big Bang is not the creation of particles in a void, but the first differentiation capable of enacting time.
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The Heat Death is not annihilation, but the cessation of differentiation—the end of the capacity to unfold.
This symmetry is not one of form but of function:
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Energy: the potential for time.
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Entropy: the fading of that potential.
We do not move through time from beginning to end. Rather:
Time moves through us, from origin to silence, from becoming to stillness.
Living in a Finite Temporality
And what of us?
We are not apart from this arc. We are small—but not separate—unfoldings within the universe’s unfolding. Our lives are not clocks counting down, but processes enacting their own temporality.
Our memories, our hopes, our transformations—these are the microdifferentiations by which we become. Not objects, but trajectories of unfolding.
And so our mortality is not a flaw in the system. It is its mode.
This is not a tragedy. It is the grammar of becoming.
Beyond Substance, Beyond Eternity
We are conditioned to seek permanence: enduring truths, immortal souls, timeless realities. But a relational ontology gives us something else—something harder, but truer:
There is no substance beneath process.No eternity beneath change.Only unfolding. Only relation. Only time.
And perhaps this is what it means to exist: not to be fixed in being, but to participate in a world that becomes.
A Final Gesture
If we take seriously this symmetry—energy opening time, entropy closing it—then the universe is not a space in which things happen. It is a gesture, a movement from the possibility of relation to the silence that follows relation's final note.
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