In classical metaphysics, the laws of physics are treated as deep, immutable truths: abstract principles that govern the behaviour of matter across time and space. These laws are often imagined as external rules, universally valid, written into the fabric of the universe.
But this framing — laws as transcendent directives — reflects a theological residue. From a relational perspective, physical laws are not edicts imposed on passive matter. Rather, they are patterns of constrained actualisation — emergent regularities in how relational systems resolve under specific conditions.
1. The Myth of Law as Command
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Traditional physics treats laws as governing principles, akin to rules a system must obey,
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This metaphor implies an agent (Nature, God, the Universe) that sets the rules — a metaphysical legislator,
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But such language masks the fact that what we call “law” is always inferred from systemic behaviour, not imposed from above.
2. Law as Description or Construal?
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In more modern terms, laws are said to be descriptive, not prescriptive: they model what happens, not what must happen,
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But even here, the language often slips — we speak of particles being “forced” by gravity, “obeying” thermodynamics,
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From a relational point of view, this is still misleading: there are no entities obeying laws, only fields resolving tension under constraint.
3. Regularities as Emergent Coherence
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What we call laws are emergent regularities — patterns that remain stable across actualisations in particular regimes,
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They do not exist apart from the systems in which they arise: they are properties of the system’s potential under constraint,
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Gravity is not a force acting from without; it is a relational tendency toward configuration that reduces systemic tension.
4. Lawfulness as Systemic Tendency
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A “law” is not a universal decree, but a tendency toward coherence that appears robust across contexts,
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These tendencies reflect the geometry of constraint — how potentials are modulated and channeled in relation to each other,
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The so-called “constants” of physics may thus reflect systemic boundary conditions, not metaphysical absolutes.
5. The Limits of Law
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Many “laws” break down at certain scales or under different constraints — suggesting that lawfulness is conditional, not absolute,
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What persists across regimes is not the law itself, but the capacity for systemic construal — the ability to produce coherence under new relational tensions,
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Thus, the role of physics is not to uncover the laws of nature, but to trace the morphologies of possibility as they stabilise within different fields of relation.
Closing
In a relational ontology, laws are not commandments carved into the universe. They are stable attractors in the flow of actualisation — regularities that emerge when relational systems organise themselves coherently under tension.
To seek the “laws of nature” is to seek the patterns by which the possible becomes actual — and those patterns, like all construals, are perspectival, systemic, and alive.
In our next post, we’ll explore how this view changes our understanding of universality — not as sameness everywhere, but as patterns of relational transfer across difference.
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