3 At the Limits: Horizons, Singularities, and the Architecture of Construal

In previous posts, we drew a line between event horizons and singularities — two concepts often paired in physics, but which belong to very different ontological orders. Horizons structure what can actualise as experience; singularities mark the breakdown of systemic description.

It is worth taking a step back and asking: what does this distinction reveal, not just about physics, but about how reality is construed?

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Two Kinds of Limit

From the perspective of relational ontology, horizons and singularities are not parallel features of the cosmos. They are different kinds of limit:

• Event horizons are perspectival. They cut across actualisation, marking what can and cannot be construed as phenomenon. They belong to the phenomenal order of construed events.

• Singularities are systemic. They mark the collapse of the theory of potential itself — the point where a grammar ceases to generate coherent instances. They belong to the systemic order, not the phenomenal one.

To conflate them is to collapse two distinct dimensions of limit: the limit of construal (horizons) and the limit of theory (singularities).

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The Ontological Payoff

Why does this matter? Because each limit tells us something different about reality:

• Horizons remind us that all experience is perspectival. No construal is total; every event has a horizon.

• Singularities remind us that no symbolic system is complete. Every theory has its points of collapse, its markers of incompleteness.

Together, they point to a reflexive cosmos: a reality whose structures appear only through construal, and whose systemic descriptions inevitably carry their own conditions of failure.

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Beyond Reification

When we treat singularities as “things” lurking inside black holes, we mistake a breakdown in our symbolic architectures for a feature of the universe itself. When we treat horizons as “walls” or “membranes,” we risk mistaking a perspectival cut for an absolute partition.

Relational ontology resists these reifications by insisting on ontological clarity: horizons are real as phenomenal boundaries; singularities are real as reflexive markers of theory’s limits — but neither is a thing-in-itself.

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Toward a Relational Cosmology

By drawing these distinctions, we begin to see how a relational cosmology might unfold. Reality is not punctured by singularities nor walled off by horizons. Instead:

• Horizons shape the perspectival structure of construal.

• Singularities expose the incompleteness of systemic architectures.

Both are reminders that meaning and matter are inseparable, and that our theories of the cosmos are as reflexively bound as the cosmos itself.