Few concepts in contemporary physics capture the imagination like the singularity and the event horizon. They are often paired together in accounts of black holes, as if one naturally implies the other: the singularity hidden behind the veil of the horizon, the horizon shielding the universe from the singularity.
Yet from the perspective of relational ontology, these two terms point to radically different kinds of entity. One belongs to the structure of phenomena as construed. The other belongs to the limits of systemic theory. Bringing them together under the same heading risks blurring not just physical categories, but ontological ones.
The Event Horizon: A Perspectival Cut
An event horizon is, at its core, a perspectival condition. It marks the point beyond which no light, no signal, no construal can cross back to an observer.
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In relational terms, the event horizon is a perspectival cut: a boundary that distinguishes what can be instantiated as phenomenon from what cannot.
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It is not an absolute property of the universe, but a relational alignment between observer, potential, and construal.
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What lies beyond the horizon is not “unreal” — but it is unconstruable from that position.
In this sense, the event horizon is part of the architecture of actualisation: it structures what counts as event. Horizons are real, but they are real as reflexive boundaries of construal, not as things-in-themselves.
The Singularity: A Collapse of Systemic Description
A singularity, by contrast, is something altogether different.
In mathematics, a singularity arises when the equations that generate potential cease to yield coherent results: a value tends to infinity, a denominator vanishes, the structure of description collapses. In general relativity, the “singularity at the centre of a black hole” is precisely this: a point where the theory’s grammar breaks down.
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A singularity is not a phenomenon: nothing is instantiated, nothing is actualised.
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A singularity belongs to the systemic level: it is a limit of the theory of possible instances, not of the instances themselves.
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Its ontological status is that of a mathematical artefact, a reflexive marker of incoherence in our symbolic architectures.
From this perspective, the singularity is less a window into the heart of matter than a mirror held up to our theories. It reveals where our systemic construal has exceeded its own scope.
Distinguishing the Two
Relational ontology makes clear that singularity and event horizon are not parallel terms.
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The event horizon is a perspectival phenomenon: the edge of construal, the limit of what can actualise as experience.
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The singularity is a systemic failure point: the limit of the theory of meanings, where our symbolic machinery ceases to generate coherent potential.
One belongs to actualisation, the other to systemic breakdown. One structures events, the other interrupts theories.
Why This Matters
The danger of conflating horizons and singularities is more than semantic. It risks collapsing distinct ontological orders: mistaking a breakdown in theory for a property of the world, or mistaking a perspectival limit for an absolute void.
From the perspective of relational ontology:
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Horizons remind us that construal is always perspectival, bounded, reflexively structured.
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Singularities remind us that no symbolic system is complete, that every grammar of potential has its own conditions of collapse.
Taken together, they are not signs of mystery hidden in the cosmos, but signs of the reflexive limits of our own alignment with reality.
Toward a Relational Cosmology
The language of singularities and horizons need not be abandoned — but it must be re-situated. In a relational cosmology:
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Horizons are constitutive: they belong to the phenomenology of experience itself.
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Singularities are diagnostic: they belong to the reflexive critique of our systemic theories.
To confuse the two is to mistake the edges of construal for the collapse of reality itself. To distinguish them is to recognise that the universe is not broken where our equations fail, nor absent where our perspective ends.
It is we who are always cutting, construing, theorising — and it is in the reflexive recognition of these limits that reality itself comes into view.
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