1 Against the Flow
We are accustomed to saying that time passes, that it flows like a river, that it slips away or marches on. These expressions are so deeply embedded in our ways of speaking, thinking, and feeling that they rarely invite reflection. Time is something through which we move, or which moves past us. It seems self-evident — a background against which everything happens.
But from within a relational ontology, such expressions are not neutral descriptions. They are construals — ways of making sense of unfolding processes — and they carry with them metaphysical assumptions that no longer hold. To speak of time flowing is to treat it as a substance or medium, as something separate from the world that somehow governs its change. It is to mistake the shape of our construal for the structure of reality.
This post opens a short series that will dismantle the metaphor of time’s flow — not just as a linguistic habit, but as a model of thought that underpins physics, psychology, and everyday life. Our aim is not to eliminate time from our vocabulary, but to reconstrue it more carefully: not as something that exists apart from systems, but as the perspectival unfolding of those systems themselves.
Time as Reified Metaphor
Consider what is implied by the phrase “the flow of time.” It invites us to imagine time as a stream, with entities either moving through it or being carried along by it. It presupposes:
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a direction (from past to future),
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a uniform medium (time as an independent continuum),
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a fixed rate (something that can speed up or slow down).
But none of these are observable features of reality. What we actually observe are systems in motion, in change, in unfolding. A plant grows, a body ages, a wave rises and falls. These are all events within systems. Time, as we speak of it, is not something in addition to these changes; it is how we construe the phases and sequences of their unfolding.
The metaphor of time’s flow, then, reifies a construal — it turns an abstraction into an entity. We come to treat time as something with its own properties, separate from the phenomena that give rise to it. In this way, construal is mistaken for substance, and temporality becomes ontologised as a kind of invisible fluid.
From Flow to Unfolding
In contrast, a relational ontology does not treat time as a container, a current, or a fourth dimension. Instead, it begins with the premise that systems are structured potentials — that what exists is the unfolding of possibilities within systems in relation. To speak of "time" is simply to cut across this unfolding from a particular perspective, tracing how processes become actualised.
Time, then, is not a medium in which systems exist; it is the construal of systems as unfolding.
This reframing has significant consequences. It means:
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There is no independent variable called “time” that ticks away in the background.
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There is no "flow" of time, only the perspectival construal of change.
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There is no ontological "past" or "future" — only phases of potential as construed from particular cuts.
To say that time flows is to impose a metaphor of movement onto something that is already movement — to construe the construal.
What’s at Stake
This is not just a semantic quibble. The metaphor of flowing time underwrites everything from physical theory to personal identity. It shapes how we model the universe and how we understand our own becoming. If that metaphor is misleading — if it treats second-order construals as if they were first-order phenomena — then it needs to be held to account.
In the next post, we will develop this critique further, showing how time as construed unfolding allows us to move beyond both everyday metaphor and scientific reification. We will trace how temporality emerges from relational processes — not as a dimension or substance, but as a perspectival effect of construal.
Time does not pass. Systems unfold. And that difference matters.
2 Time as Construal
In the previous post, we challenged the idea that time “flows” — arguing instead that what we call time is a construal of unfolding systems. But what does it mean to say that time is a construal? What exactly is being construed, and from where?
In this post, we build the foundations of a relational theory of temporality. We move away from time as a dimension or quantity, and toward time as a perspectival cut across the unfolding of systems in relation. Here, time is not something that exists independently of experience, nor something that structures reality from the outside. It is the way in which reality is brought into phase — by and for a perspective.
1. From Events to Systems
The dominant image of time in many traditions — including classical physics — treats the world as a collection of entities that change over time. But from a relational standpoint, this is already a misstep. There are no isolated entities “in” time. There are only systems in relation, and each system is a structured potential for unfolding — what we might call system-as-theory-of-its-instance.
An unfolding, in this sense, is not a trajectory through time. It is what time becomes — the construal of that system from a perspective that traces its actualisation phase by phase.
To say “this system has a history” is to say that it can be construed as unfolding — not that it moves through an independently existing temporal field.
2. The Cut That Makes Time
So how does time arise? Time arises through what we call a relational cut — a perspectival construal of difference within a system’s unfolding. That is: time is not a process, but a way of construing process. It is not the sequence of changes itself, but the construal of those changes as successive.
In this view:
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The “past” is not behind us — it is the potential we construe as already actualised.
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The “future” is not ahead of us — it is the remainder of the system’s potential, not yet cut into phase.
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The “present” is not a moment in time — it is the standpoint of construal itself, the cut that gives temporal shape to the unfolding.
There is no ontological timeline. There is only the structured possibility of unfolding, and the perspective from which that unfolding is construed as time.
3. Time as Semiotic Resource
This has strong affinities with linguistic theory — particularly systemic functional linguistics, where time is not a thing but a meaning potential. In the grammar of tense, aspect, and phase, we find tools for construing experience as temporal. These are not windows onto a pre-existing dimension; they are semiotic resources for construing experience as if it were distributed across past, present, and future.
In this sense, grammar does not merely describe time — it helps constitute our experience as temporal. Our orientation to time is not given by the world but realised in the way we construe the world.
This does not reduce time to language. It situates time in a broader category of semiotic construal — ways of meaning that arise through systems in relation. Time is just one way of cutting experience; a powerful one, but not a neutral or universal one.
4. Implications: No Time Outside the Cut
If time is construal, not substrate, then it follows:
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There is no temporality that is not perspectival.
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There is no “objective” passage of time — only the unfolding of systems and the ways they are brought into phase.
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Every experience of time is already a cut — a construal of difference and phase in a relational system.
This cuts across both common-sense metaphors (“time flies”) and scientific models that treat time as a fixed variable (“t = 0”). In both cases, the construal is mistaken for the structure. We reify the cut as a dimension, forgetting that it is made — not found.
In the next post, we’ll turn directly to the language of temporality. Phrases like “time passes,” “time heals,” or “time is running out” are more than figures of speech — they are metaphysical commitments smuggled into grammar. By examining the metaphoric architecture of temporal language, we’ll expose the hidden ontology that underwrites our temporal thinking — and begin to imagine other ways of cutting.
3 The Ontology Behind the Idiom
By now we’ve seen that time, in a relational ontology, is not a substance that flows but a perspectival construal of unfolding. What we call “time” emerges from the ways we cut across processes and bring systems into phase. It is not something we move through, but something we construe in the movement of things.
So what are we to make of our everyday expressions — “time flies,” “time is running out,” “time will tell”? These idioms are not innocent. They do more than decorate thought — they shape it, and in doing so, they reproduce an ontology in which time is treated as a thing. In this post, we trace the metaphoric architecture of temporal language, and expose the metaphysical sleight of hand it performs.
1. Time as Space
One of the most pervasive metaphors for time is spatial:
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We’re approaching the deadline.
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We’ve moved past that stage.
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A long time ago…
Here, time is construed as a linear spatial path. Past, present, and future become locations along a trajectory. This invites two reciprocal metaphors:
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Time moves past a stationary observer (“time marches on”).
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The observer moves through a stationary landscape of time (“we’re coming up to August”).
These are not mere figures of speech. They enact a model in which time is an objective terrain through which events or agents move — a container, an axis, a medium. They give time a kind of dimensional solidity, as if it existed independently of the systems that are construed within it.
From a relational standpoint, this is an error of category: it treats the construal of unfolding as if it were a thing that unfolds.
2. Time as Resource
Another common metaphor construes time as a scarce commodity:
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I don’t have enough time.
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We’re wasting time.
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She gave me her time.
Here, time is imagined as something we can possess, lose, save, spend, or allocate — a kind of quantifiable resource. This model underwrites entire systems of labour, efficiency, and value. But again, the metaphor obscures its own origins: time is not something we own or use. What is being counted is not time, but the unfolding of processes brought under a particular construal — one that slices them into abstract, exchangeable units.
This is not a metaphysical claim about time itself. It is a cultural construal that allows some kinds of activity to be measured and coordinated — often at the cost of obscuring their actual systemic dynamics.
3. Time as Agent
Then there are idioms that construe time as an active force:
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Time heals all wounds.
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Time will tell.
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Time destroys everything.
These expressions personify time, attributing to it the power to act, to change, to reveal. Time becomes not just a medium or a measure, but a subject — an agent that performs.
In relational terms, this is the most extravagant error: time is not a thing, nor a quantity, nor a being. To ascribe agency to “time” is to displace the actual agencies involved — to treat construal effects as causal forces. It amounts to a metaphysical evacuation: replacing the dynamics of real systems with an abstract spectre called “time.”
4. Metaphor as Ontological Commitment
These idioms are not ontologically neutral. Each one recruits a familiar construal — of space, substance, motion, agency — and applies it to unfolding processes. In doing so, they:
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obscure the perspectival nature of time,
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reproduce the fiction of time as independently existing,
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naturalise a model in which systems are subordinated to temporal “laws.”
We are not arguing for a purging of metaphor. Metaphor is how meaning happens. But we must distinguish between metaphor as construal and metaphor as ontological smuggling. When metaphors about time are taken as literal descriptions of reality, they collapse second-order construals into first-order fact — and this is precisely what a relational ontology resists.
Toward a New Temporality
What if we treated these idioms not as truths, but as testimonies to our ways of cutting? What if we read them not for what they say about time, but for what they reveal about the construal of process?
Then, instead of saying “time is running out,” we might ask: Which systems are unfolding, and how are we positioned within them?
Instead of saying “we’re approaching the end,” we might ask: Which construal is framing this phase as an “end,” and from what standpoint?
In the next post, we’ll shift from metaphor to mechanism — exploring how the invention of clocks, calendars, and symbolic timelines gave rise to a materialised construal of time as regular, divisible, and objective. These technologies did not simply measure time — they helped to constitute it, and in doing so, reinforced a particular ontology. We’ll ask what it means to cut systems according to symbolic regularity, and what is lost in the process.
4 Clocks, Cuts, and Calendars
In our previous posts, we’ve argued that time is not a thing that flows or a dimension we occupy, but a perspectival construal of unfolding systems. We’ve seen how everyday metaphors treat time as space, resource, or agent — reifying construal into substance. But how did this reification become so dominant, so infrastructural to our ways of living?
In this post, we turn to the material side of temporal construal — to the technologies that have enabled and sedimented the illusion of time as objective, regular, and divisible. Clocks, calendars, and timelines did not merely track time; they enacted a symbolic cut across systemic unfolding, and in doing so, helped produce the very temporality they claimed to measure.
1. The Symbolisation of Regularity
Every system unfolds in relation — with internal rhythms, thresholds, and phases. A day-night cycle, a growth phase, a seasonal pattern: these are not “in time,” but temporalised by construal.
The symbolic move comes when we begin to abstract recurrence from these systems — to treat a particular pattern as a unit, and then impose that unit back onto other systems. A clock does not simply reflect unfolding; it regularises it. It cuts the continuous into discrete intervals and overlays these intervals across domains.
Thus:
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A sundial maps solar movement into a flat surface.
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A mechanical clock converts rotational motion into ticks.
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A calendar reduces ecological cycles to a repeatable grid.
These are not neutral devices. They materialise a theory of time — one that treats temporal unfolding as uniform, universal, and external to systems.
2. From Phase to Schedule
This symbolic reconfiguration of unfolding has deep consequences. Consider the difference between a phase and a schedule:
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A phase is a systemic threshold: a stage within the unfolding of a particular system (e.g. germination, migration, digestion).
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A schedule is an imposed cut: a regularised interval that determines when phases should begin and end (e.g. 9:00am meeting, fiscal quarter, delivery window).
The schedule overrides the system’s own dynamics. It imposes a symbolic order that may or may not align with the system's actual potential. In doing so, it creates the illusion that time exists outside the systems it organises.
This is not just a practical convenience — it is a disciplinary move. It allows institutions to coordinate labour, regulate bodies, enforce norms. It replaces systemic potential with symbolic command.
3. Clocks as Cuts
In relational terms, the clock is not a measure of time but a cut across systems. It does not reveal how a process unfolds; it imposes a construal that detaches unfolding from its local dynamics and aligns it with an external symbolic order.
This cut is not simply epistemological — it is material. Clocks discipline not only thought, but action:
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The worker must conform to the shift, not the body’s rhythm.
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The student must submit to the timetable, not the arc of learning.
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The event must happen “on time,” regardless of its readiness.
The symbolic regularity of clock time thus becomes a means of control, a way of abstracting systems from their potentials and rendering them legible, predictable, governable.
4. When Symbols Forget Themselves
Over time, symbolic timekeeping systems come to forget their own origins. The clock is no longer seen as a model or a tool — it is seen as reality itself. We no longer ask which systems are unfolding in what ways; we ask what time is it? As if the tick of a device captures the essence of change.
This is a metaphysical reversal. A symbolic construal of unfolding is taken as ontologically primary, while the systems it cuts across are treated as secondary, or as noise to be normalised.
Thus, relational potentials are subordinated to symbolic rhythms. The construal becomes law, and time becomes a fiction we live as if it were fact.
Toward Other Cuts
What would it mean to reverse this process — to treat symbolic time not as reality but as construal, open to revision?
It would mean:
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Returning to the unfolding of systems as the basis for temporality.
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Treating clocks and calendars as tools for coordination, not truth.
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Attending to local phases, rhythms, and thresholds rather than imposed intervals.
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Making visible the cuts we make — and recognising them as cuts, not structures of the real.
In the next post, we’ll turn our gaze to physics — a domain in which time is most rigorously formalised as a variable, a dimension, or an illusion. But we’ll ask: what remains of physics when time is no longer granted ontological priority? Can the universe be redescribed not as evolving in time, but as a relational field of unfolding systems — where time, once again, is the cut?
5 Time in Physics — A Friendly Dismantling
Physics is often treated as the ultimate authority on time. Nowhere else has time been so meticulously measured, modelled, and theorised. From Newton’s absolute time to Einstein’s spacetime continuum to contemporary debates about the “arrow of time,” the discipline has produced a rich and rigorous tradition — and one that appears, at first glance, to have little interest in metaphor.
But even here, we find reifications at work. Physics inherits — and codifies — a model of time that treats it as an independent variable, a dimension of the universe, or, in some recent formulations, a psychological illusion. In this post, we offer not a rejection of physics, but a dismantling of its temporal ontology — a friendly one, grounded in the same commitment to rigour, but from a relational standpoint.
We ask: What happens to physical theory when time is no longer treated as a structure of the universe, but as a construal of unfolding?
1. The Variable That Structures the World
Much of classical physics treats time as a parameter:
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Position changes over time.
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Forces act across time.
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Systems evolve as functions of time.
This model treats time as a neutral backdrop — a uniform parameter within which change can be described. But as we've seen, this is already a construal: it imposes a one-dimensional regularity across heterogeneous systems, cutting their unfolding into commensurable intervals.
More subtly, it assumes that all systems are embedded in the same time — that there is a single, shared temporal field in which all events occur. This assumption is ontologically incoherent from a relational point of view. Systems do not unfold within a universal clock; their unfolding is their time, and no system’s unfolding can be ontologically subordinated to another’s symbolic regularity.
2. Relativity and the Persistence of Time
Einstein’s theory of relativity destabilised Newtonian time by showing that temporal intervals depend on the observer’s frame of reference. Simultaneity is no longer universal; time dilates, stretches, bends. But even here, time remains a dimension — integrated into the four-dimensional geometry of spacetime.
This is often hailed as a radical shift, but it still treats time as a thing — a structure with measurable properties, woven into the fabric of reality. It refines the model, but does not abandon the ontological assumption.
From a relational standpoint, this is still a reification. What relativity captures is not time’s curvature, but the relational perspectivity of unfolding systems — the fact that no cut across systems is absolute. In this sense, relativity affirms our model more than it contradicts it — but physics continues to construe the cut as a structure, not a perspective.
3. The Block Universe and the Denial of Becoming
Contemporary physics often embraces the block universe: a model in which all events — past, present, future — co-exist in a static four-dimensional structure. In this view, the flow of time is an illusion. Nothing happens in the universe; everything is.
This model achieves ontological elegance by abolishing becoming altogether. But in doing so, it obliterates the very unfolding that gives rise to our sense of time. The block universe is a geometry, not a world; it captures the structure of relations, but erases the perspectival cuts that constitute experience.
In our terms, this model mistakes a second-order abstraction (a totalising construal of all cuts at once) for a first-order ontology. It denies process in the name of completeness — and in doing so, forgets that process is the ground from which all cuts arise.
4. Physics Without Time?
Some physicists — particularly in quantum gravity — now speculate that time may not be fundamental at all. In certain formulations, it drops out of the equations entirely. Others propose that time emerges from entanglement, thermodynamic irreversibility, or informational complexity.
These moves open space for a relational reframing — but often without breaking the reifying habit. “Time is emergent,” we are told — but emergent from what? If it emerges from systems in relation, then we are already in our framework: time is not a variable to be found; it is a construal to be made.
A physics that begins here would not look for time in the world, but for the conditions under which construals of unfolding become meaningful. It would treat temporal form not as structure, but as a perspectival alignment of systems in relation.
5. What Remains
Physics remains a powerful means of construal — a symbolic system for bringing certain domains of unfolding into alignment. But it is not an ontology. It is a modelling practice grounded in cuts — and like all cuts, it is perspectival, selective, and system-specific.
What remains, once time is released from its metaphysical role, is not less science — but a science grounded in process, relation, and perspectival construal. A physics without time is not a void. It is a field of unfolding systems, cut differently.
In the next post, we’ll turn from the theoretical to the existential. What does it mean to live without the flow of time? How does this reconfiguration shift the way we understand urgency, change, loss, and becoming? Without the scaffolding of “past,” “present,” and “future,” what becomes of the self — and of the world?
6 Living Without Flow
To live without the flow of time is not to live without change. It is to live without a fiction — a fiction that imagines time as something that slips away, runs out, or carries us forward. What we have been dismantling in this series is not experience itself, but a particular construal of experience: one that cuts the unfolding of the world into “past,” “present,” and “future,” and then treats these phases as locations in a larger, invisible medium called “time.”
But once that scaffolding is removed — once time is no longer flowing, no longer passing — what are we left with?
We are left, simply, with systems in relation, unfolding from within their own structured potentials. We are left with phases, thresholds, actualisations. We are left with a world that becomes, but not “in” time — a world whose becoming is the ground for everything we construe as temporal.
This post explores what it means to inhabit that world.
1. Urgency Without Time Pressure
Much of modern life is governed by temporal urgency: deadlines, countdowns, expiry dates, diminishing windows of opportunity. These are not inherent features of reality — they are symbolic construals imposed upon systems by calendars, clocks, and economies.
To live without flowing time is not to deny the reality of thresholds — a seed rots if left unplanted, a tide turns, a window closes — but it is to relocate urgency. Urgency is not the pressure of time itself; it is the phase-specific sensitivity of unfolding systems.
Instead of asking “how much time do we have left?”, we might ask:
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What is this system’s phase potential?
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Which conditions make a particular shift possible or impossible?
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What unfolding is imminent, latent, delayed?
Urgency is no longer a race against time, but an attunement to the relational readiness of systems to shift.
2. Memory Without the Past
We often think of memory as a bridge to the past — a way of accessing a part of the timeline behind us. But in a relational ontology, the past is not “behind” us at all. It is not a location or container. What we call the past is simply the traces of prior actualisations — configurations of meaning, form, and relation that have left their imprint within a system.
Memory is not travel. It is reconstrual — the act of cutting across a system to bring forward a pattern that was already latent, already folded into the system’s unfolding.
To live without flowing time is to stop treating memory as a window onto another realm. It is to treat it as a perspective enacted in the present — a present which is not a point in a sequence, but a cut through unfolding.
3. Anticipation Without the Future
Similarly, anticipation does not require a future. The future is not “ahead of us.” There is no “ahead.” There is only potential yet to be actualised — patterns not yet brought into phase.
Anticipation is the modelling of potential within a system’s unfolding. It is not foresight into an ontological domain called the future. It is construal: an act of alignment between one’s current perspective and a system’s possible shifts.
This reframing has ethical implications. It rescues anticipation from fatalism — the belief that the future is already “out there” waiting to arrive — and returns it to participation: to the choices we make in how we cut, construe, and engage with unfolding systems.
4. Loss Without Linear Time
What of grief, decay, and loss? These too are often construed through flowing time — as things “left behind,” “gone forever,” or “lost to time.” But again, the loss is not to time. It is a change in the unfolding of systems — a shift in what can and cannot be brought into phase.
Loss is not the disappearance of an object down a temporal river. It is the reconfiguration of relational potential. A system is no longer available to be construed in the way it once was. But traces remain. Cuts can be re-made. Meaning can be re-aligned.
To mourn without flowing time is not to mourn less. It is to mourn differently — not as a sequence of stages to “move through,” but as an ongoing negotiation with unfolding and construal.
5. Becoming Without a Timeline
Finally, what becomes of becoming itself?
In place of a linear timeline, we have the perspectival cline between what is possible and what is actual. Becoming is not movement along a path; it is the shifting of phase space within and across systems. It is the actualisation of new potentials, the emergence of new construals, the formation of new relational cuts.
To live without flowing time is not to live without becoming. It is to live within becoming — no longer framed by the fiction of temporal movement, but by the lived reality of unfolding.
In our final post, we will return to the question of the “present.” Often treated as the most immediate and real slice of time, the present is still a metaphorical cut — still framed by the assumptions we have now left behind. We’ll ask: What becomes of the present when time no longer passes? And can we speak of “now” at all, if there is no flow?
7 No Time Like the Present?
Of all the temporal metaphors, none feels more immediate — more real — than the present. It is the locus of attention, the threshold of action, the vanishing point between memory and anticipation. Even those who doubt the reality of the past and the future tend to anchor themselves in the now. The present, we are told, is what we have.
But what is “the present,” exactly? Is it a moment? A slice? A duration? A flicker between the no-longer and the not-yet? Or is it — as we have come to suspect — another construal, another cut, shaped by the very metaphors we’ve been dismantling?
In this final post, we turn our attention to the metaphysics of now. We ask what becomes of the present when time no longer flows — and whether there is anything left to call the present once we stop mistaking construal for reality.
1. The Present as Cut, Not Container
The common image of the present is that of a moving spotlight: a narrow beam sweeping along a timeline, illuminating each moment as it arrives. This is the metaphor of the sliding now — the ever-advancing front edge of time’s flow.
But if time does not flow, then there is no beam, and no timeline to sweep across. There is only unfolding — and the cut we make when we construe a phase of that unfolding as present.
In this model:
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The present is not a moment that exists.
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It is a construal we perform.
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It is not the location of reality.
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It is a perspectival cut across systems in relation.
The “now” is not a thing. It is a way of orienting to unfolding — a construal that traces what is currently being brought into phase.
2. The Duration Illusion
Some try to salvage the present by expanding it: the “specious present,” the “lived present,” the interval of awareness that feels real. But this too is a metaphor — one that treats time as measurable stuff, capable of being portioned out and assigned width.
From a relational standpoint, such attempts miss the point. There is no objective width to the present, because there is no objective temporal field to measure. Different systems unfold on different scales, and different construals cut across them in different ways. What is construed as “now” in one context may be vastly broader or narrower than in another — not because reality changes, but because our construals do.
3. The Present as Synchronisation
Instead of thinking of the present as a universal moment shared by all systems, we can think of it as a mode of alignment:
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When multiple systems are brought into phase — when their unfoldings are construed together — a “present” is forged.
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This present is not in the world; it is in the relation.
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It is a synchronisation, not a timestamp.
This has profound implications. There is no singular “now” ticking along universally. There are as many “presents” as there are perspectives — as many cuts as there are construals. And each present is the outcome of a relational configuration, not a metaphysical fact.
4. Letting Go of Now
This may sound disorienting. To let go of the present seems to threaten the very ground of experience. But what we are letting go of is not experience — only the fiction of a metaphysical now, detached from systems, hovering over unfolding like a spotlight.
What remains is far more robust:
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The actuality of unfolding systems.
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The perspectival cuts we make as we engage with them.
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The meaningful phases we construe — some emergent, some recurring, all situated.
To “live in the present” is not to inhabit a fixed temporal location. It is to engage with unfolding systems from within the perspectives available to us, to attend to what is becoming phaseful, to trace the contours of actualisation as they emerge.
5. After Time
If time does not flow, then the present does not pass. It is not a fleeting gift to be clutched, nor a shrinking platform from which we glimpse the abyss of the future. It is simply a perspectival act — one among many — through which we cut across unfolding and make it meaningful.
And with that, the metaphysical drama of time dissolves. No more past slipping away. No more future bearing down. No more present poised on the edge of oblivion.
What remains is relation, construal, unfolding. What remains is a world not in time, but becoming through systems and cuts.
Coda: Living the Unflowing
This series began with a question: what if time does not flow? We have answered it not with a new theory of time, but with the dissolution of time as theory. We have shown that temporality is not an underlying structure, but a semiotic act — a way of cutting across the world’s unfolding in order to construe phase, pattern, potential.
To live without the flow of time is not to live without meaning. It is to recognise that meaning is not in time — time is in meaning. It is the name we give to certain kinds of construal, made from certain standpoints, over certain systems.
And when those construals are no longer mistaken for reality, we are free to cut differently.