What Is Reality? Why Process is a Metaphysical Necessity (2)

Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

Essay 2

What Is Reality?

Why Process is a Metaphysical Necessity

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

Static Ontologies can no longer carry the metaphysical load.

What is required is a processual ontology that can.

If reality is processual, then what kind of process is it?

- R.E. Slater

We now think Reality is an ongoing, self-conditioning,

relationally-unfolding metaphysic in which novelty, coherence,

beauty, meaning, and value are intrinsic rather than imposed.

- A Paraphrase of process thought

The task of metaphysics is not to name the Sacred, but to describe the

conditions under which the Sacred could meaningfully be named at all.

- R.E. Slater

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Preface

From Comparison to Constraint

Process is not a metaphysical option among other options, but the minimal ontological condition required for intelligibility, actualization, emergence, value, and temporal reality to be real rather than assumed.

The first essay in this series surveyed the contemporary landscape of reality theories. It did not seek to resolve metaphysical disputes, but to clarify them. By organizing dominant accounts of reality into a small number of recurring families, and by examining how each performs under shared diagnostic pressures, it revealed a striking pattern: despite their differences, these theories repeatedly encounter the same unresolved questions.

Those questions concern becoming rather than being, actuality rather than possibility, emergence rather than mere complexity, and intelligibility rather than description alone. They arise not at the margins of inquiry, but at its core - where scientific explanation, philosophical coherence, and lived experience intersect.

This second essay takes the next step. It does not introduce a new metaphysical system, nor does it defend a particular philosophical school. Instead, it asks a more constrained and more demanding question:

Do the recurring tensions identified in contemporary accounts of reality point toward a metaphysical requirement rather than a theoretical preference?

To pose the question this way is to shift the terms of debate. The issue is no longer which ontology one finds most compelling, elegant, or familiar. The issue is whether certain ontological commitments are already being relied upon - implicitly and unavoidably - by the very practices of explanation, interpretation, and understanding that define contemporary inquiry.

Table A

Comparative Performance of Contemporary Reality Theories Across Diagnostic Criteria

Reality Theory Family	Time / Becoming	Actualization (Possibility → Fact)	Relationality	Emergence	Experience	Value	Primary Strength	Primary Limitation
Stuff-First (Physicalism)	◐ (parametric)	✖ (assumed)	◐ (external)	◐ (descriptive)	✖	✖	Predictive power; causal clarity	Cannot ground novelty, agency, or meaning
Structure-First (Math / OSR)	✖	✖	✔ (formal)	✖	✖	✖	Explains order, symmetry, lawfulness	Lacks account of becoming and concreteness
Information-First	◐	✖	✔ (formal)	◐	✖	✖	Models complexity and constraint	Cannot explain instantiation or lived actuality
Experience-First	✔ (phenomenal)	◐	✔	◐	✔	✔	Restores meaning and subjectivity	Weak cosmological integration
Two-Tier (Supernatural)	◐	◐	✖	◐	✔	✔	Grounds transcendence and normativity	Breaks causal and ontological continuity
Construction-First (#6)	◐ (historical)	✖	✔ (social)	✖	✔	◐	Exposes power, identity, mediation	Undermines constraint and correction

Legend:
✔ = addresses well ◐ = partial / ambiguous ✖ = weak or unresolved

Table A demonstrates that each theory family secures explanatory success by sacrificing or minimizing other dimensions of reality. No single framework satisfies all diagnostic criteria without remainder.

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Introduction

Why Necessity, Not Preference

Metaphysical discussions often proceed as though ontology were a matter of choice. One selects a framework - materialist, structural, informational, experiential - based on explanatory success, aesthetic appeal, or disciplinary loyalty. Yet the analysis undertaken in the previous essay suggests that this framing may be misleading.

Across physics, biology, philosophy, and theology, explanations routinely presuppose features of reality that are not fully accounted for within the ontologies that officially accompany them. The Relationality of Time is treated as real in practice and minimized in theory. Emergence is described as effective and denied causal depth. Possibility spaces are rigorously defined, while the transition to actuality is left unexplained. Experience is taken as epistemically central and ontologically marginal.

These tensions are not the result of conceptual confusion or theoretical immaturity alone. They persist even in the most refined contemporary accounts. This persistence raises a critical question:

are the tensions accidental, or do they indicate that something structurally necessary about reality has yet to be fully acknowledged?

This essay argues that the latter is the case.

The claim advanced here is not that process philosophy, as a historical tradition, must be adopted wholesale. Nor is it that process provides a final or complete metaphysical account. Rather, the claim is more modest and more stringent:

Any account of reality that seeks to remain intelligible, coherent, and faithful to contemporary knowledge must treat becoming, relational actualization, and temporal production as ontologically fundamental rather than derivative.

In this sense, process is not introduced as a metaphysical preference, but as a minimal ontological constraint - a requirement imposed by the phenomena themselves.

To speak of necessity here is not to invoke logical deduction or metaphysical certainty in a classical sense. It is to speak of explanatory indispensability. A concept is necessary when attempts to do without it repeatedly reintroduce it under different names, or rely upon it tacitly while denying it explicitly. The argument of this essay is that process occupies precisely this position in contemporary thought.

The sections that follow examine four domains where this necessity becomes especially clear: intelligibility, actuality, emergence, and temporality. In each case, the argument proceeds in the same manner. First, the domain is described as it appears in contemporary theory and practice. Second, the limits of static or non-processual ontologies are identified. Finally, it is shown that only an ontology that treats reality as eventful, relational, and temporally productive can account for what is already being assumed.

Only after this work is done will it be appropriate to name process explicitly and minimally - not as a completed system, but as the irreducible remainder left standing once other ontological options have spoken.

Table B

Recurring Ontological Features Across Contemporary Theories of Reality

Comparative Recursions

Recurring Feature	How It Appears Across Theories	How It Is Minimized or Deferred	What Remains Unresolved
Becoming	Change universally acknowledged	Treated as parametric, perspectival, or illusory	How reality genuinely comes to be
Actualization	Possibility spaces widely defined	Selection treated as brute fact or collapse	Why this outcome occurs
Relational Production	Relations recognized as important	Rendered static or structural	How relations generate novelty
Emergence	Novelty described at higher levels	Denied causal depth	Whether emergence is ontologically real
Experience	Epistemically central	Ontologically displaced	How experience belongs in reality
Value	Normativity widely presupposed	Reduced to projection or utility	Why anything matters

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Interpretive Pattern

Observation	Implication
Same unresolved features recur across theories	Not local failures
Recursions appear at explanatory limits	Ontological pressure points
No static ontology resolves them	Conceptual insufficiency
Each theory reintroduces them implicitly	Suggests deeper necessity

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What Follows

We will now examine each of these recurring features in turn, not as isolated problems, but as pressure points that reveal what any coherent ontology must be able to account for.

• Part 1 - Intelligibility - Coherence from Within

• Part 2 - Actuality and Possibility - From Potential to Event

• Part 3 - Emergence - From Complexity to Creative Event

• Part 4 - Temporality and Becoming - Why an Unfinished World Cannot Be Reduced to a Timeless One

• Part 5 - Process as Ontological Constraint - The Minimal Remainder

Within each section its topic will be approached:

descriptively --> then diagnostically --> and finally, ontologically.

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I. Intelligibility as a Metaphysical Fact

Coherence from Within

Any account of reality presupposes that reality is, in some meaningful sense, intelligible. This presupposition is so deeply embedded in scientific and philosophical practice that it often goes unnoticed. Yet it is not trivial. To claim that reality is intelligible is to claim not merely that it can be described, but that it can be understood - that it exhibits coherence, regularity, and internal consistency sufficient to support inquiry from within.

Modern science depends upon this assumption at every level. Experimental repetition presumes stability across time. Mathematical modeling presumes that patterns are not accidental. Explanation itself presumes that events are connected in ways that can be traced, learned, and anticipated. Even skepticism presupposes intelligibility, insofar as it assumes that reasons can be given for doubt.

The question, then, is not whether reality appears intelligible in practice, but what kind of reality must exist for intelligibility to be possible at all.

Intelligibility Is Not Explanation

A common mistake in metaphysical discussions is to treat intelligibility as a byproduct of explanation. On this view, reality is simply there, and intelligibility emerges only when human cognition imposes conceptual order upon it. Laws, models, and theories are said to organize an otherwise indifferent world.

Yet this inversion fails to account for the success of inquiry itself. Explanations succeed only because the world already exhibits forms of order that are responsive to investigation. Mathematical description works because reality behaves consistently enough to be describable. Prediction works because patterns persist across time. Inquiry works because reality does not dissolve into randomness at each moment.

Intelligibility, therefore, cannot be merely epistemic. It must be, at least in part, ontological.

The Limits of Static Intelligibility

Non-processual ontologies typically ground intelligibility in static features of reality: fixed laws, timeless structures, or immutable mathematical relations. On such accounts, intelligibility is secured by what does not change.

While this approach captures important aspects of order, it introduces a difficulty. If intelligibility is grounded entirely in what is static, then change becomes secondary - something to be accommodated rather than explained. Time is reduced to a parameter. Becoming is re-described as rearrangement. Novelty is treated as apparent rather than real.

Yet scientific practice resists this reduction. The intelligibility of reality is not exhausted by invariance alone. It also depends upon continuity through change - the ability of reality to maintain coherence as it unfolds. Laws must hold across time, but they must also operate in time. Patterns must persist, but they must persist through transformation.

A purely static account can describe regularity, but it struggles to explain why regularity remains intelligible in a world that is continuously changing.

Intelligibility and Temporal Coherence

What makes reality intelligible is not simply that it is ordered, but that it is coherently ordered across time. Past states inform present conditions. Present actions shape future possibilities. Explanation traces pathways, not snapshots.

This temporal coherence is not an optional feature of understanding; it is its condition. To understand something is to situate it within a sequence - of causes, developments, or relations  - that unfolds. A reality in which events were disconnected across moments would be unintelligible, regardless of how mathematically describable each moment appeared in isolation.

Thus, intelligibility requires more than static structure. It requires that reality must carry itself forward in a way that preserves coherence while allowing transformation. This requirement already presses beyond substance, structure, or information alone.

The Implicit Appeal to Process

At this point, many contemporary accounts quietly introduce process-like notions without naming them. They speak of evolution, dynamics, interactions, histories, pathways, and trajectories. They describe systems that develop, laws that govern change, and relations that unfold.

Yet these notions are often treated as secondary descriptors rather than ontological commitments. The language of process is used instrumentally, while the ontology remains officially static.

The argument here is that this division cannot be sustained. If intelligibility depends upon temporal coherence, and temporal coherence depends upon reality’s capacity to sustain order through becoming, then intelligibility itself presupposes a processual dimension of reality.

This does not yet specify what kind of process reality is. It does not require commitment to any particular metaphysical system. It establishes only this: a reality that is intelligible must be capable of ongoing, coherent becoming.

The next section turns to a more pointed pressure point - one where the insufficiency of static ontology becomes even clearer.

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II. Actuality, Possibility, and the Problem of Quantum Measurement

From Potential to Event:

The unresolved question of how indeterminate quantum possibilities

become determinate physical events.

Few issues place greater pressure on contemporary metaphysics than the question of actuality - how something becomes this rather than that, here rather than there, now rather than later. Across scientific and philosophical domains, reality is increasingly described in terms of possibility spaces rather than fixed outcomes. Yet the transition from possibility to fact (an actualized event) remains one of the least well-accounted-for features of contemporary ontology.

Quantum theory brings this issue into sharp relief whether one appeals to wavefunction collapse interpretations, Many-Worlds theories, decoherence-based approaches, or relational, QBist, and informational views. Static ontologies describe structures. Probabilistic ontologies describe possibilities. But neither explain event-production.

The present argument does not depend on any specific interpretation of quantum mechanics. What matters is that all interpretations must account, in some manner, for the transition from possibility to determinate event.

Possibility Is Not Yet Reality

Modern quantum physics does not describe the world as a set of determinate states evolving smoothly through time. Instead, it describes systems in terms of probabilistic amplitudes, superpositions of possible states, and distributions of possible outcomes. These formal structures define what may occur under given conditions, but they do not, by themselves, explain why a particular outcome is realized.

This distinction is crucial. A space of possibilities, no matter how precisely defined, is not yet an actuality. Mathematical description alone cannot account for the fact that one possibility becomes real while others do not. The question of actuality is therefore not merely technical; it is ontological.

Many contemporary accounts attempt to minimize this gap. Some reinterpret probabilities epistemically, as reflections of incomplete knowledge. Others posit branching realities in which all possibilities are realized. Still others appeal to decoherence or environmental interaction as explanatory closure. Yet in each case, the core question remains: what makes an event occur as an event?

Measurement as an Ontological Pressure Point

The so-called measurement problem is often treated as a specialized concern within quantum foundations. In fact, it functions as a diagnostic site for broader metaphysical assumptions.

Measurement marks the moment when an indeterminate range of outcomes yields a determinate fact. Regardless of interpretation, something decisive occurs. An event happens. A record is produced. A history branches or collapses. The system is no longer merely describable in terms of potentialities.

What matters for present purposes is not which interpretation of quantum mechanics is preferred, but that no interpretation can avoid the actuality problem. Whether actuality is said to emerge through collapse, branching, interaction, or contextualization, it must emerge somehow. Theories that deny this do so only by redefining actuality out of existence.

Static Ontologies and the Brute Fact of Actualization

Non-processual ontologies tend to treat actualization as either illusory or brute. If reality is fundamentally static - composed of timeless laws, fixed structures, or complete mathematical objects - then the occurrence of a particular event is either fully determined from the outset or inexplicable.

In deterministic accounts, actuality is merely the unfolding of what was already built-in, or implicit. In indeterministic accounts, actuality is a selection without cause. In both cases, becoming is reduced to description rather than explanation.

The difficulty is not that these accounts fail mathematically. It is that they lack ontological resources to explain why actuality happens at all, rather than remaining indefinitely suspended in possibility.

Actuality as Event

The pressure exerted by quantum measurement suggests that actuality cannot be treated as a static property. It must be understood as something that occurs. An event is not simply the instantiation of a pre-existing state, but a moment of resolution in which relational conditions yield a determinate outcome.

This language of eventhood already pervades scientific practice. Physicists speak of interactions, detections, transitions, and decays. What is often left implicit is that these terms describe ontologically productive moments, not merely observational conveniences.

To acknowledge this is not to abandon realism, but to deepen it. Actualization is not less real because it is eventful; it is more so.

The Quiet Return of Process

Here again, process reenters the discussion not as a doctrine, but as a necessity. If actuality is not simply given, but achieved - if events are moments in which possibilities become actualized events/facts through relational interaction - then reality cannot be adequately described as a completed structure.

Actuality requires becoming. It requires a reality capable of producing determinate outcomes from indeterminate conditions. It requires time not merely as a coordinate, but as the medium in which events occur.

This conclusion does not yet specify the nature of process, nor does it resolve the interpretive debates within quantum theory. It establishes something more basic:

any ontology that treats actuality as derivative, illusory, or as brute fact, fails to account for what scientific practice already presupposes -  intelligible becoming.

The next section turns to a related pressure point - one that extends beyond physics into biology, cognition, and culture - the problem of emergence.

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III. Emergence - Why Novelty Cannot Be Epiphenomenal

From Complexity to Creative Advance

Emergence marks one of the most widely acknowledged and least comfortably explained features of contemporary reality. Across the sciences, it is increasingly clear that complex systems give rise to behaviors, capacities, and organizations that are not readily predictable from their constituent parts alone. Life emerges from chemistry, consciousness from biology, and culture from social interaction. These developments are not rare anomalies; they are pervasive (processual) features of the world we inhabit.

The metaphysical question is not whether emergence occurs, but what kind of occurrence it is.

Weak Emergence and Its Limits

Many contemporary frameworks accept what is often called weak emergence. On this view, emergent phenomena are real in a descriptive or explanatory sense, but not in an ontologically robust one. Higher-level properties are said to supervene entirely on lower-level processes, adding no new causal powers of their own. Emergence becomes a matter of epistemic limitation rather than ontological novelty.

This approach has practical advantages. It preserves continuity with physical explanation and avoids invoking mysterious forces or exceptions to natural law. Yet it does so at a cost. If emergent properties possess no causal efficacy, then they are explanatorily idle. Life, mind, and agency become names for patterns that do no real work.

The difficulty is not merely philosophical. Scientific practice routinely treats emergent phenomena as causally significant. Biological regulation, neural integration, and social coordination are not epiphenomenal glosses; they are operative realities. Weak emergence explains complexity, but it does not explain why higher-level organization matters.

Strong Emergence and Ontological Anxiety

In response, some accounts posit strong emergence - the claim that genuinely new causal powers arise at higher levels of organization. This view acknowledges novelty as real, but often does so reluctantly. Strong emergence is frequently treated as metaphysically suspect, a last resort invoked only when reduction fails.

The hesitation is understandable. If emergence introduces new causal powers, how are they related to lower-level processes? Do they violate physical closure? Do they introduce ontological discontinuities?

These concerns reveal a deeper problem. They assume that causation must be exhaustively bottom-up, and that novelty is incompatible with continuity. Under such assumptions, emergence can only appear as an anomaly.

Emergence as Productive Organization

A processual perspective reframes the issue. Rather than asking whether emergence violates lower-level causation, it asks whether organization itself can be causally productive. On this view, higher-level patterns are not additions to reality, but structured modes of activity that shape how lower-level processes are taken up, coordinated, and constrained.

Emergent phenomena do not float above their components; they arise through relational integration of experiential interaction over time. What is new is not the material substrate, but the pattern of activity it sustains. Novelty, in this sense, is not ex nihilo creation, but genuine creative/novel advance - the generation of new forms of order within continuity (creatio continua)

This understanding aligns more closely with scientific practice than either strict reductionism or metaphysical dualism. Systems biology, neuroscience, and ecological theory increasingly emphasize feedback, regulation, and multi-level interaction. These are not reducible to simple aggregation. They describe how systems become more than the sum of their parts through sustained relational dynamics.

Downward Influence Without Violation

One of the most persistent objections to strong emergence concerns downward causation - the idea that higher-level structures can influence lower-level processes. Within a static ontology, this appears incoherent or threatening. Within a processual framework, it is expected.

If reality is composed of events rather than inert substances, then causation is not a one-directional push from fundamental units upward. It is a network of influences unfolding across levels of organization. Higher-level patterns constrain possibilities, guide interactions, and shape outcomes without overriding physical laws. They do so by modulating relational contexts, not by injecting new forces.

Downward influence, on this account, is not an exception to causation but an expression of it.

Emergence and the Reality of Novelty

The persistence of emergence across domains suggests that novelty is not an illusion generated by complexity, but a real feature of the world. A reality in which nothing genuinely new can arise would be a reality in which explanation ultimately collapses into repetition. Yet the world we observe is not static repetition; it is an unfolding history marked by increasing differentiation, organization, and value. It's evolving, creational unfolding, is novel.

To account for this, ontology must do more than catalogue entities and laws. It must account for how new forms come to matter. Emergence, understood as productive organization over time, cannot be accommodated within a framework that treats reality as fundamentally complete.

Here again, process appears not as an optional metaphysical embellishment, but as an explanatory requirement. A world capable of genuine emergence must be a world in which becoming is real, novelty is operative, and organization has causal depth.

The next section turns to the most pervasive expression of this requirement - the nature of time itself.

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IV. Temporality and Becoming - Time as Constitutive

Why an Unfinished World Cannot Be Reduced to a Timeless One

Time occupies an ambiguous position in contemporary accounts of reality. It is indispensable in practice and frequently minimized in theory. Scientific models rely on temporal ordering, causal sequence, and irreversible processes, yet many ontological frameworks treat time as secondary - a coordinate, an illusion, or a subjective projection.

This tension is not accidental. It reflects a deeper uncertainty about whether reality is fundamentally finished or unfinished.

Time as Parameter and Its Limits

In many physical theories, time functions as a parameter within mathematical formalisms. Equations describe how systems evolve relative to time without committing to time as an ontologically active feature of reality. On this view, all events are equally real, and temporal distinctions such as past, present, and future are perspectival rather than fundamental.

This approach has undeniable explanatory power. It allows for precise prediction and elegant representation. Yet it also introduces a metaphysical difficulty. If time is merely a coordinate, then becoming is not real. Change is reduced to difference across a dimension, not the coming-into-being of new states of affairs.

Such a picture struggles to account for irreversibility, historical contingency, and the felt asymmetry of time. More importantly, it conflicts with the way explanation itself operates. Explanations trace sequences. Causes precede effects. Understanding unfolds. A timeless ontology can describe order, but it cannot explain why order persists through change.

The Block Universe and Its Discontents

The block universe model provides a clear example of this tension. By treating spacetime as a complete four-dimensional structure, it renders all events equally existent. From this perspective, becoming is an illusion generated by local consciousness moving along a worldline.

While internally coherent, this model carries a significant cost. It renders novelty illusory, undermines agency, and collapses the distinction between what has happened and what has not yet occurred. Ethical responsibility becomes difficult to ground, and historical development loses its ontological force.

The problem is not that the block universe is mathematically incoherent. It is that it fails to account for the reality of temporal production - the fact that the future is not merely unknown, but genuinely open.

Irreversibility and Temporal Asymmetry

One of the strongest indicators that time is more than a parameter is the pervasive presence of irreversibility. Entropy increases. Systems age. Records accumulate. Decisions foreclose possibilities. These are not artifacts of perspective; they are structural features of physical, biological, and social systems.

Irreversibility indicates that time does work. It is not simply a dimension along which events are arrayed, but a condition under which events occur and transform reality. A world in which nothing is lost, gained, or altered would be a world without history.

The accumulation of structure over time - whether in the formation of galaxies, the evolution of life, or the development of cultures - points toward a reality that is not fully given at once. Explanation, once again, presupposes an unfinished world.

Becoming as Ontological Commitment

To affirm becoming is to make a substantive ontological claim. It is to say that reality is not exhausted by what already exists, but includes the production of what does not yet exist. This claim does not deny stability, lawfulness, or structure. It situates them within a temporal process that sustains and transforms them.

Becoming, in this sense, is not opposed to being. It is the mode through which being is achieved.

This view aligns with scientific practice more closely than static alternatives. Experimental results occur. Measurements happen. Organisms develop. Societies change. These are not merely different descriptions of a fixed totality; they are events that alter the state of the world.

The Return of Process Through Time

Once time is acknowledged as constitutive rather than incidental, the need for a processual ontology becomes difficult to avoid. A reality that genuinely unfolds must be capable of carrying itself forward, integrating past conditions into present actuality while opening toward future possibilities.

This does not yet specify the metaphysical details of process. It establishes only that any ontology which denies the reality of becoming undermines the very practices of explanation, responsibility, and meaning it seeks to support.

With intelligibility, actuality, emergence, and temporality now considered, the argument has reached a point of convergence. The final section draws these strands together and names explicitly what has thus far appeared only as a recurring requirement.

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V. Process as Ontological Constraint

The Minimal Remainder

The preceding sections have approached the question of process indirectly, by following the pressure points that emerge within contemporary accounts of reality themselves:

• Intelligibility requires coherence through change.
• Actuality requires the resolution of possibility into event.
• Emergence requires novelty with causal depth.
• Temporality requires a world that is not yet finished.

In each case, static ontologies strain to accommodate what scientific practice and lived experience already presuppose.

At this point, the question is no longer whether process is useful, but whether it is avoidable.

Constraint, Not Completion

To describe process as an ontological constraint is to make a deliberately modest claim. It does not specify the ultimate nature of reality, nor does it dictate a comprehensive metaphysical system. It names only what any adequate ontology must allow for if it is to remain coherent with contemporary knowledge.

A constraint differs from a theory. Theories propose explanatory frameworks. Constraints identify conditions without which explanation fails. The argument of this essay has been that becoming, relational actualization, and temporal production function as such conditions. Attempts to exclude them repeatedly reintroduce them implicitly, under alternative descriptions.

Process, in this minimal sense, is not a rival to matter, structure, information, or experience. It is the mode through which these become actual.

The Irreducible Remainder

Once all static accounts have spoken, something remains. That remainder is not an object, a law, a structure, or a symbol. It is the fact that reality happens.

Events occur. Possibilities resolve. Relations generate outcomes. Systems organize themselves into new forms. Time carries the world forward. None of these features can be reduced to a timeless inventory without distortion. They are not optional metaphysical add-ons; they are what make explanation, agency, and meaning possible at all.

This is why process continues to recur across disciplines, even where it is officially denied. It appears as dynamics in physics, development in biology, learning in cognition, history in culture, and responsibility in ethics. Each instance names a different aspect of the same underlying requirement - that reality be capable of producing itself over time.

Process Without System

It is important to emphasize what has not yet been claimed. This essay has not argued for any particular historical form of process philosophy, nor has it introduced a detailed account of how process operates at the deepest levels of reality. Those tasks belong to later stages of the project.

What has been established here is prior to such elaboration. If reality is intelligible, if events are real, if novelty matters, and if time is constitutive, then reality must be processual at least in this minimal sense.

This conclusion does not end metaphysical inquiry. It disciplines it.

Conclusion - From Necessity to Construction

Essay I established that contemporary theories of reality, despite their diversity, repeatedly circle the same unresolved questions. Essay II has shown that these questions are not accidental. They arise because static ontologies cannot carry the explanatory load demanded by contemporary science, philosophy, and lived experience.

Process emerges here not as a speculative preference, but as a condition of coherence. It names the minimal remainder that must be acknowledged if reality is to be understood as something that unfolds rather than merely exists.

The task that remains is constructive. If reality is processual, what kind of process is it? How are events related? How does value arise? How might such an ontology reframe questions of meaning, responsibility, and transcendence?

Those questions guide what follows in Essay III.

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Reality's Processes

Not things alone,

stacked like answers already given.

Not laws suspended,
outside the world they govern.

 
Not time frozen,
into a picture that never arrives.

Reality does not wait
to be discovered whole.

It cannot be.

It forms.
It selects.
It becomes.

Possibility leans forward,
and something answers.

Events gather relationships,
take up the past,
opens what is not yet,
and holds -
for a moment -
before yielding again.

What cannot be removed
is not matter or mind,
nor structure or sign,
but the happening itself:
    the quiet insistence
    that the world is still underway

    becomed and becoming.

R.E. Slater

January 24, 2026

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Process Philosophy & Metaphysics

• Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed. New York: Free Press, 1978.

• Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967.

• Rescher, Nicholas Rescher. Process Metaphysics. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.

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Intelligibility, Explanation, and Ontology

• Ladyman, James Ladyman, and Don Ross. Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

• Nagel, Thomas Nagel. Mind and Cosmos. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

• Cartwright, Nancy Cartwright. The Dappled World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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Quantum Theory, Measurement, and Actuality

• Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg. Physics and Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row, 1958.

• Bohr, Niels Bohr. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. New York: Wiley, 1958.

• Zurek, Wojciech Zurek. “Decoherence, Einselection, and the Quantum Origins of the Classical.” Reviews of Modern Physics 75, no. 3 (2003): 715–775.

• Kastner, Ruth E. Kastner. The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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Emergence, Systems, and Novelty

• Anderson, Philip W. Anderson. “More Is Different.” Science 177, no. 4047 (1972): 393–396.

• Kauffman, Stuart Kauffman. Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

• Noble, Denis Noble. Dance to the Tune of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

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Time, Becoming, and Temporality

• Smolin, Lee Smolin. Time Reborn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

• Rovelli, Carlo Rovelli. The Order of Time. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.

• Prigogine, Ilya Prigogine. The End of Certainty. New York: Free Press, 1997.

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Theological & Philosophical Extensions (Without Commitment)

• Cobb, John B. Cobb Jr.. A Christian Natural Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007.

• Keller, Catherine Keller. The Cloud of the Impossible. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

• Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.

What Is Reality? Theories & Questions (1)

Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

Essay 1

What Is Reality?

Contemporary Theories and the Question of Process

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

The task of metaphysics is not to name the Sacred, but to describe the

conditions under which the Sacred could meaningfully be named at all.

- R.E. Slater

“The universe is not a collection of things,

but a communion of concrescing events.”

- A Paraphrase of process thought

We now think Reality is an ongoing, self-conditioning,

relationally-unfolding metaphysic in which novelty, coherence,

beauty, meaning, and value are intrinsic rather than imposed.

- A Paraphrase of process thought

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A Compact Inventory of Contemporary Reality Theories

The contemporary theories listed below are either i) non-processual or, ii) weakly processual. Each of them map almost everything people currently mean when they say “reality” to one another.

These theories can be found in physics, philosophy of mind, biology, theology, or cultural theory. None of them is caricatured in Essay 1's introduction. All are treated here as serious attempts to answer the same question, "What Is Reality?"

Crucially, every one of these theories leaves behind the same residual pressures (becoming, actualization, emergence, relational production, experience, value). The result, is fragmentation:

• Physics without ontology
• Biology without purpose
• Ethics without grounding
• Faith without realism
• Skepticism without coherence

What is missing is a shared metaphysical platform - not a shared belief system. Hence, any adequate account of reality today must be processual, because static substance metaphysics cannot survive the combined pressures of intelligibility, quantum measurement, emergence, and relationality.

Note: An addendum section is provided after the bibliography

section compares theories of reality to process-based reality theory.

Stuff-First Family

1. Physicalist / Materialist Realism
   Reality is fundamentally matter-energy governed by physical laws; everything else reduces to physics.

2. Reductive Naturalism
   Higher-level phenomena (life, mind, value) are explanatory conveniences, not ontological additions.

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Structure-First Family

3. Mathematical Platonism
   Reality is fundamentally mathematical structure; the physical world instantiates abstract forms.

4. Ontic Structural Realism (OSR)
   Relations and structures are real; objects are secondary or derivative.

5. Block Universe / Eternalism
   Past, present, and future equally exist; time and becoming are perspectival.

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Information-First Family

6. Information Ontology
   Information is more fundamental than matter; physical reality is informationally constrained.

7. Computationalism
   The universe behaves like (or is) a computation governed by algorithmic rules.

8. Simulation Hypothesis
   Reality is an engineered computational environment instantiated by a deeper substrate.

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Emergence-Friendly but Non-Processual

9. Weak Emergentism
   Novel properties arise from complexity but add no new causal powers.

10. Systems / Complexity Ontologies
    Reality consists of interacting systems whose behavior cannot be predicted from parts alone (often descriptive, not ontological).

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Experience-First Family

11. Phenomenological Realism
    Reality is given through lived experience and embodiment; objectivity is secondary.

12. Idealism (Contemporary Forms)
    Reality is fundamentally mental or experiential; matter is derivative.

13. Non-Process Panpsychism
    Consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, but treated as static or intrinsic.

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Two-Tier & Constructivist Families

14. Supernaturalist Dual-Tier Ontology
    Reality consists of nature plus a transcendent realm that can intervene.

15. Social / Linguistic Constructionism
    What counts as real is shaped by language, culture, and power relations.

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Preface

Processual description is first - before sacred naming.

Reality is the event, the relation, the self-conditioning process.

Before questions of meaning, faith, or value can be responsibly addressed, a more basic question must be faced: What is reality like?

Not what we wish it to be, nor what our traditions have said it must be, but what its structure appears to be when examined through contemporary science, philosophy, and metaphysical reflection.

This essay begins the series by attending to the question, "What is Reality Like?" - prior to theological interpretation, moral evaluation, or existential commitment.

It asks whether the inherited picture of reality as a static, materialistic collection of substances remains adequate, or whether a process-based account offers a more coherent, comprehensive, and intelligible framework for understanding the world we inhabit.

Why the Question Returns Now?

Every age inherits a picture of reality. Most of the time, that picture operates silently in the background - guiding scientific inquiry, shaping religious imagination, informing moral judgments, and framing political and cultural expectations. Only when that picture begins to fracture does the question it once answered return with urgency:

What is Reality, Really?

This essay emerges from such a moment.

Across the sciences, we possess unprecedented explanatory power - precise mathematical formalisms, predictive models, and scientifically experimental confirmations - yet find ourselves increasingly uncertain about what, ontologically speaking, those formalisms describe. Physics debates the meaning of measurement and time; biology grapples with emergence, agency, and life’s directional character; cognitive science struggles to situate consciousness within a natural world; social systems strain under questions of meaning, beauty, value, and responsibility that resist reduction to data or mechanism.

At the same time, religious traditions face their own crisis of intelligibility. Classical metaphysical frameworks - often inherited from premodern or early modern thought - no longer integrate coherently with contemporary scientific accounts of the world. Appeals to supernatural intervention increasingly ring hollow to skeptics, while purely secular accounts often fail to ground value, purpose, or moral obligation in a way that feels existentially adequate.

What results is not a lack of theories about reality, but a labyrinth of competing accounts, each illuminating certain aspects of the world while obscuring others:

• Physicalism explains structure but struggles with experience.
• Mathematical realism captures order but not becoming.
• Information theories model complexity yet presuppose actualization. 
• Phenomenological approaches recover lived meaning but lack cosmological scope. 
• Supernatural frameworks preserve transcendence at the cost of continuity.
• Postmodern critiques expose hidden assumptions but dissolve reality altogether.

How to Begin?

This series - What Is Reality? - does not begin by proposing a new metaphysical system. It begins by listening.

The task of this first essay is therefore modest but foundational: to review, organize, and clarify the dominant ways reality is being understood today - across science, philosophy, theology, and culture - so that their core claims, strengths, and limits can be seen plainly. Before any constructive proposal can claim legitimacy, the field itself must be rendered intelligible.

Only after this work of clarification can a deeper question be asked: whether the persistent tensions across these theories point not merely to disagreement, but to a shared metaphysical remainder (a missingness) - something real, necessary, and yet insufficiently named.

This essay prepares the ground for that inquiry. It does not seek to settle the question of reality, but to make clear what is at stake when we ask it, and why the question can no longer be postponed..

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Introduction

Mapping the Contemporary Landscape of Reality

The question “What is reality?” no longer belongs to any single discipline. It is asked - often implicitly - across multiple disciplines such as physics and cosmology, biology and neuroscience, philosophy and theology, cultural theory and ethics. Yet, it is rarely asked together with one another. The result is a fragmented intellectual landscape in which powerful explanatory frameworks coexist without a shared metaphysical grammar.

In the natural sciences, mathematical models achieve remarkable predictive success while leaving unresolved questions about what, if anything, those models describe as real. Quantum theory challenges classical assumptions about objectivity and determinacy; cosmology raises questions about time, origin, and totality; biology confronts the emergence of life, agency, and purposiveness without clear ontological footing. Across these fields, explanation often outruns interpretation.

In philosophy, metaphysics has reemerged after decades of suspicion, but without consensus. Competing ontologies - materialist, structural, informational, experiential, pluralist - offer partial clarity while disagreeing at foundational levels. Meanwhile, theology and religious reflection struggle to articulate accounts of divine presence, meaning, and value that neither retreat into supernaturalism nor dissolve into metaphor. Skeptical and secular perspectives, for their part, frequently reject theological claims while inheriting metaphysical assumptions that remain unexamined.

This essay begins from the observation that we are not lacking theories of reality. We are lacking a clear way to organize, compare, and assess them.

Purpose and Method

The aim of this essay is therefore not to advance a new metaphysical system, nor to defend a single tradition against others. Its purpose is preparatory and diagnostic: to review and categorize the dominant contemporary accounts of reality, identify what each explains well, and clarify where each encounters unresolved tensions.

To accomplish this, the essay proceeds in three steps.

First, it surveys the major families of reality theories currently in circulation. While the literature is vast, most positions can be grouped into a small number of recurring orientations - those that treat reality as fundamentally material, structural, informational, experiential, dual-tiered, or socially constructed. Organizing the discussion in this way allows patterns to emerge without oversimplifying the diversity within each family.

Second, each family of theories is examined using a shared set of diagnostic criteria. These criteria reflect pressure points that contemporary accounts of reality must address if they are to remain coherent in light of current knowledge. Among them are:

• the status of time and becoming,
• the relation between possibility and actuality,
• the role of relationality, the meaning of quantum measurement,
• the reality of emergence,
• the place of experience, and
• the grounding of value.

The goal is not to rank theories, but to make their tradeoffs visible.

Third, the essay attends to what remains unresolved across these accounts. When stated in their strongest forms, many contemporary theories converge on a set of residual questions - features of reality that are presupposed, minimized, or left unexplained. It is here, and only here, that the question of process begins to emerge - not yet as a solution, but as a persistent remainder that resists elimination.

Scope and Limits

This essay is intentionally restrained. It does not attempt to adjudicate between scientific models, nor to settle debates internal to theology or philosophy. Its concern is more basic: to ask what kind of world must exist for these diverse forms of theoretical inquiry to make sense at all. By clarifying what contemporary theories of reality affirm, deny, or leave undecided, the essay seeks to establish a common conceptual ground upon which further discussion can proceed.

Subsequent essays in this series will take up the constructive task more directly. They will ask whether the unresolved tensions identified here point toward a deeper metaphysical necessity - one that reframes reality not as a static inventory of things, but as an ongoing, relational, and temporally structured becoming. For now, however, the task is simple and more fundamental:

to understand what we are already saying when we speak about reality today.

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I. Contemporary Families of Reality Theories

Despite the diversity of contemporary discussions about reality, most prevailing accounts can be organized into a small number of recurring orientations. These orientations differ not merely in conclusions, but in what they take to be ontologically primary - that is, what reality is most fundamentally made of. This section introduces six broad families of reality theories currently in circulation across science, philosophy, theology, and cultural theory. Each family includes multiple internal variations, but the grouping helps clarify the conceptual landscape without reducing it to a single axis.

1. Stuff-First Accounts

(Substance, Matter, or Energy as Fundamental)

Stuff-first theories hold that reality is fundamentally composed of things - whether quantum particles, fields, matter-energy, or physical entities governed by laws. On this view, objects exist independently of observers, and change is something that happens to things rather than something constitutive of their being.

This orientation underlies most forms of physicalist realism and reductive materialism. Consciousness, meaning, value, and purpose are typically treated as secondary phenomena: emergent descriptions, functional byproducts, or higher-level summaries of more basic physical processes. Time is often regarded as a parameter rather than an ontological driver.

Stuff-first accounts excel at describing stability, regularity, and prediction. They struggle, however, with explaining how novelty arises, how experience fits into a purely physical ontology, and how possibilities become actual without appealing to unexplained brute facts.

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2. Structure-First Accounts

(Relations, Laws, or Mathematics as Fundamental)

Structure-first theories shift the focus away from individual things toward relations, patterns, or formal structures. Reality, on this view, is not primarily a collection of objects but an organized network of relations governed by mathematical or logical form.

This family includes mathematical Platonism, ontic structural realism, and certain interpretations of spacetime physics. Laws of nature are not merely descriptive but ontologically basic, and physical entities are often treated as instantiations of deeper structural relations.

Structure-first accounts explain the effectiveness of mathematics and the relational features of modern physics with great elegance. Yet they tend to render becoming, temporality, and lived experience derivative or illusory. While they describe what is structured, they often leave unanswered how structure becomes actual, dynamic, or historically situated.

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3. Information-First Accounts

(Information or Computation as Fundamental)

Information-first theories propose that reality is fundamentally informational rather than material or structural. Physical processes are understood as information processing, and laws of nature as constraints on informational flow.

This orientation appears in quantum information theory, computational models of the universe, and simulation hypotheses. It provides powerful tools for modeling complexity, discreteness, and entropy, and it aligns well with contemporary technological intuitions.

However, information-first accounts typically presuppose the very things they seek to explain: interpretation, actualization, and temporal unfolding. Information requires a context in which it is instantiated and becomes effective. Without an account of how information becomes lived reality, these theories risk remaining abstract or circular.

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4. Experience-First Accounts

(Consciousness or Lived Experience as Fundamental)

Experience-first theories begin with the claim that experience is irreducible. Reality is known, and in some cases constituted, through consciousness, embodiment, perception, or affective engagement with the world.

This family includes phenomenology, certain forms of idealism, enactivist approaches in cognitive science, and some versions of panpsychism. These accounts take subjective life seriously and resist explanations that dissolve experience into epiphenomenal byproducts.

Their strength lies in restoring meaning, agency, and interiority to the real. Their limitation is often cosmological: experience-first accounts can struggle to scale beyond human or organismic domains, or to explain how experiential reality integrates with physical and mathematical descriptions of the universe as a whole.

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5. Two-Tier or Supernatural Accounts

(Nature + Transcendent Intervention)

Two-tier theories maintain a distinction between natural reality and a transcendent or supernatural order that can intervene in or override natural processes. Reality is thus (artificially) layered/imposed, with different modes of causation operating at different levels.

This orientation characterizes many classical theological frameworks and remains influential in popular religious discourse. It preserves transcendence, intentionality, and moral grounding by locating them beyond nature (largely encompassing "classical theology" as taught across churches, their institutions, and educational bodies.

At the same time, two-tier accounts face increasing difficulty integrating with contemporary science. Appeals to intervention or exception often conflict with methodological naturalism, and the division between natural and supernatural realms can fragment the unity of reality rather than explain it.

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6. Construction-First Accounts

(Reality as Social, Linguistic, or Cultural Construction)

Construction-first theories emphasize the extent to which reality is shaped by language, culture, power, and social mores, or practices. What counts as real, meaningful, or true is understood as historically and socially mediated.

This family includes strong social constructionism, postmodern anti-realism, and certain strands of critical theory. These approaches excel at uncovering hidden assumptions, exposing ideological distortions, and challenging naive objectivism.

Their weakness lies in ontological grounding. When pushed too far, construction-first accounts risk undermining the very notion of reality they seek to critique, making it difficult to explain scientific success, material constraint, or shared factual reference.

*Often MAGA theology and Christian Nationalism are socially constructed religious narrative that borrows supernatural language to absolutize a culturally produced vision of reality, while resisting process, emergence, and moral becoming. Of course, there are more socially constructed movements that may be categorized here but lately these are the most affective groupings.

Characteristics of constructionist movements:

• Reality is narrative-driven, not correspondence-driven
• Truth is validated by identity, power, or solidarity
• Facts matter only insofar as they serve the story
• Language doesn’t describe reality - it creates and enforces it
• Moral certainty/certitude precedes inquiry

Constructionism is not wrong by default - but becomes pathological when it denies constraint, emergence, or correction.

In such groups such as Maga and Christian Nationalism, their political and ideological movement describes:

• Reality = as divinely sanctioned national myth
• History = as a decline from a sacred past
• Truth = as loyalty to it's shared narrative + mythic leader
• God = as its narrative Legitimator

Bottom-line: "Any movement that treats its narrative as immune to correction, constraint, or becoming, has crossed from interpretation into constructionism."

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Concluding Orientation

These six families do not exhaust every nuance of contemporary thought, nor are they mutually exclusive. Many current positions combine elements from multiple families, producing hybrid accounts that attempt to compensate for individual weaknesses. Nevertheless, this simplified taxonomy provides a workable map of the dominant ways reality is being understood today.

The next task is to examine these families side by side, using shared diagnostic criteria. Only then can their respective strengths, limits, and unresolved tensions come fully into view.

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II. Diagnostic Criteria for Contemporary Accounts of Reality

To compare contemporary theories of reality meaningfully, it is not sufficient to catalogue their claims. Each theory must be examined in light of their shared ontological pressures  - typically defined as features of reality that any adequate account of reality must address if it is to remain coherent with current scientific knowledge, philosophical reflection, and lived experience. These criteria do not privilege one metaphysical tradition in advance; rather, they arise from the conditions under which reality is now investigated and inhabited.

What follows are seven diagnostic criteria that will be used throughout this essay to assess the strengths and limits of the six families of reality theories introduced above.

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1. Temporality and Becoming

Any contemporary account of reality must clarify the status of time. Is time an illusion, a coordinate, or a constitutive feature of reality itself? Is it becoming real, or is it merely apparent?

Modern physics complicates the question by offering both timeless formalisms and time-asymmetric processes, while actual lived experience insists on a linear order of time-irreversibility, anticipation, and past-memory. A theory of reality must therefore explain not only how time is measured, but whether change and becoming are ontologically basic or derivative.

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2. Actualization: From Possibility to Fact

A central metaphysical question concerns how possibilities become actualized. Mathematical descriptions, physical laws, and informational constraints often define spaces of possibility, but they do not by themselves explain why a particular outcome occurs rather than another.

This issue is especially acute in quantum theory, but it also appears in discussions of emergence, decision-making, and creativity. Any account of reality must say something - explicitly or implicitly - about how indeterminacy resolves into fact.

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3. Relationality and Dependence

Contemporary science increasingly reveals that entities do not exist in isolation. Quantum entanglement, ecological systems, and social networks all suggest that relations are not merely external links between independent things, but play a constitutive role in what entities are and are becoming in influence upon one another.

A theory of reality must therefore clarify whether (experiential) relations are secondary properties, structural features, or ontologically primary. It must also address how relational dependence affects notions of individuality, causation, and identity.

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4. Quantum Measurement and Observation

Few issues expose metaphysical assumptions as sharply as the problem of measurement in quantum physics. Whether measurement is treated as a physical interaction, an informational update, or an observer-relative event, each interpretation carries ontological commitments.

While this essay does not adjudicate among varied quantum interpretations, it treats the measurement problem as a diagnostic site: any theory of reality must be compatible with a world in which observation, interaction, and outcome-selection are not trivially separable.

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5. Emergence and Novelty

Reality appears very capable of producing genuinely new-and-radical forms: life from chemistry, consciousness from biology, historic enculturation from social interaction. The question is whether such emergence is ontologically real or merely epistemic - a convenient way of describing complex arrangements of lower-level constituents.

A coherent metaphysical account must explain whether novelty has causal efficacy, whether higher-level organization can influence lower-level processes, and how complexity accumulates without invoking unexplained (natural) exceptions.

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6. Experience and Interior Reference

No account of reality can avoid the fact that reality is experienced. Consciousness, perception, valuation, and meaning are not optional add-ons to the world; they are among its most immediately known features.

The diagnostic question is not whether experience exists, but how it is situated within the broader ontology. Is experience fundamental, emergent, epiphenomenal, or illusory? And can an account of reality that marginalizes experience still claim to be complete?

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7. Value, Normativity, and Meaning

Finally, any theory of reality must confront the status of value. Moral obligation, aesthetic judgment (beauty), truth-seeking, identity, and purpose all presuppose normative dimensions of existence. Whether these are treated as objective features, emergent properties, or human projections has significant implications for ethics, politics, and religious life.

A metaphysical framework that explains the structure of the universe but cannot account for why anything matters risks explanatory incompleteness, regardless of its technical sophistication.

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Orientation for What Follows

These seven criteria do not function as a checklist to be satisfied exhaustively. Rather, they serve as lenses through which the contemporary families of reality theories can be viewed side by side. Each theory will meet some criteria with clarity while struggling with others. The point is not to eliminate contenders prematurely, but to bring their implicit commitments into view.

Only after this comparative work is done will it be possible to ask whether the unresolved tensions across these accounts point toward a deeper metaphysical requirement - one that concerns not merely what reality contains, but how reality happens.

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Table 1 — Diagnostic Performance

Reality Family	Time / Becoming	Actualization	Relationality	Emergence	Experience	Value
Stuff-First (Physicalism)	◐ (parametric)	✖ (assumed)	◐ (external)	◐ (descriptive)	✖	✖
Structure-First (Math / OSR)	✖	✖	✔ (static)	✖	✖	✖
Information-First	◐	✖	✔ (formal)	◐	✖	✖
Experience-First	✔ (phenomenal)	◐	✔	◐	✔	✔
Two-Tier (Supernatural)	◐	◐	✖	◐	✔	✔
Construction-First (#6)	◐ (historical)	✖	✔ (social)	✖	✔	◐

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III. Comparative Assessment of Contemporary Reality Theories

With i) the major families of contemporary reality theories identified and ii) a shared set of diagnostic criteria established, it is now possible to iii) examine how these accounts perform when viewed side by side. The purpose of this section is not to refute any position, but to clarify the tradeoffs each entails - what each theory explains well, and what each must either minimize, reinterpret, or leave unresolved.

1. Stuff-First Accounts Revisited

Stuff-first theories perform strongly with respect to stability, regularity, and predictive control. They integrate well with classical scientific methodology and provide clear accounts of causation at fundamental physical levels. Their explanatory success in physics and engineering is undeniable.

Yet when examined through the diagnostic lenses, tensions emerge. Temporality is often treated as a parameter rather than a constitutive feature of reality, leaving becoming ontologically thin. Actualization - the transition from possibility to fact - is frequently assumed rather than explained, especially in quantum contexts. Emergence is acknowledged descriptively but resisted ontologically, and experience is typically relegated to an epiphenomenal status.

The result is a powerful but incomplete picture: a reality that behaves predictably but struggles to account for novelty, agency, and meaning without additional assumptions.

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2. Structure-First Accounts Revisited

Structure-first theories excel at explaining order, symmetry, and relational coherence. They offer compelling accounts of why mathematical formalisms map so effectively onto physical reality and why relations often appear more fundamental than objects.

However, their diagnostic weakness lies in their treatment of becoming and actuality. Structures are described, but rarely shown to happen. Temporality is frequently reduced to geometric representation, and experience becomes difficult to situate within a world defined primarily by abstract relations. While these theories clarify what is structured, they often lack resources to explain how structure becomes concrete, dynamic, or historically situated.

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3. Information-First Accounts Revisited

Information-first theories bring clarity to issues of complexity, entropy, and constraint. They integrate well with digital technologies and provide useful metaphors for understanding physical and biological systems.

Yet information, by its nature, presupposes instantiation and interpretation. Without a clear account of how information becomes actualized - how it is realized in time and given efficacy - these theories risk circularity. Temporality is often implicit rather than foundational, and experience appears as a downstream effect rather than an integrated feature of reality.

Information-first accounts thus explain how patterns propagate, but not fully how they become lived facts.

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4. Experience-First Accounts Revisited

Experience-first theories correct a major omission in many scientific ontologies by taking subjectivity, embodiment, and meaning seriously. They offer rich descriptions of lived reality and resist the reduction of consciousness to mere byproducts of matter.

However, when scaled beyond human or organismic domains, these accounts often encounter difficulty. Their cosmological reach is limited, and their integration with physical and mathematical descriptions of the universe can remain underdeveloped. While experience is clarified locally, its place within a comprehensive ontology of reality is less clear.

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5. Two-Tier Accounts Revisited

Two-tier or supernatural accounts provide clear grounding for transcendence, intentionality, and moral value. They preserve a sense of ultimacy and purpose that many other frameworks struggle to explain.

At the same time, they introduce a metaphysical discontinuity between natural and supernatural orders. This division complicates integration with scientific explanations and raises questions about causal coherence. Temporality and becoming are often subordinated to timeless divine action, and emergence is explained through intervention rather than intrinsic development.

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6. Construction-First Accounts Revisited

Construction-first theories illuminate the role of language, power, and social mediation in shaping what is personally-and-socially believed to be real. They provide important correctives to naive realism and expose the historical contingency of many assumed facts.

Yet their diagnostic weakness lies in ontological grounding. When reality is treated primarily as constructed, it becomes difficult to explain scientific constraint, material resistance, or shared reference. Temporality is often reduced to historical narrative, and value (ethics) risks becoming purely relative to social context.

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Patterns and Tensions

When viewed collectively, several patterns emerge:

• No single family adequately addresses all seven diagnostic criteria.

• Each theory explains some dimensions of reality by downplaying others.

• Many accounts implicitly rely on (processual) concepts such as - becoming, actualization, relational emergence - that they do not fully theorize.

Most strikingly, across these otherwise divergent theories, certain features of reality repeatedly appear as assumed but under-explained. These features do not belong exclusively to any one family, yet they recur wherever explanation presses deepest.

The next section turns explicitly to these shared residuals..

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Table 2 — Comparative Strengths & Limits

Reality Family	What It Explains Well	Where It Struggles
Stuff-First	Stability, prediction, mechanism	Novelty, agency, meaning
Structure-First	Order, symmetry, mathematical success	Becoming, concreteness
Information-First	Complexity, constraint, discreteness	Instantiation, lived reality
Experience-First	Meaning, embodiment, consciousness	Cosmology, physical integration
Two-Tier	Transcendence, moral grounding	Scientific coherence, continuity
Construction-First (#6)	Power, identity, social meaning	Constraint, correction, realism

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IV. Comparative Recursions Between Contemporary Theories of Reality

The comparative assessment of contemporary reality theories reveals a striking pattern. Despite their diversity - ranging from physicalist realism to experiential phenomenology - these accounts converge on a common difficulty. When stated in their strongest and most coherent forms, they consistently leave certain metaphysical, ontological, and ethical features of reality unresolved, underexplained, or tacitly assumed.

These unresolved features do not appear as minor technical gaps. They arise precisely at the points where explanation presses most deeply - where reality is no longer treated as a static object of description, but as something that happens, unfolds, and matters. What follows identifies the most persistent of these residual tensions.

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1. Becoming Without Ontology

Across contemporary theories, change is everywhere acknowledged but rarely grounded. Time is measured, modeled, or parameterized, yet becoming - that which is coming-to-be of new states of affairs - is often treated as secondary, derivative, or illusory.

Stuff-first and structure-first accounts tend to describe reality as fundamentally complete, with change represented as rearrangement or traversal within a fixed space. Information-first theories describe transformation but often abstract away from the ontological status of transition itself. Even experience-first accounts treat temporality phenomenologically rather than cosmologically.

The result is a world in which change is described but not fully owned by the ontology.

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2. Actualization as a Brute Fact

Possibility spaces are ubiquitous in contemporary science and philosophy. Mathematical models define ranges of outcomes; physical laws constrain what may occur; informational frameworks describe states and transitions. Yet the philosophical movement from possibility to actuality - why this outcome occurs rather than another - frequently remains unexplained.

In many accounts, actualization is treated as a brute fact, a selection without mechanism, or a collapse without cause. This is particularly evident in quantum theory but appears as well in discussions of creativity, decision-making, and emergence. The assumption that actuality simply “happens” marks a significant ontological gap.

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3. Relationality Without Production

Modern science strongly suggests that relations are constitutive, not merely external. Nevertheless, many theories describe relations statically, as structures, correlations, or constraints, rather than as productive interactions that generate new realities.

Relationality is acknowledged, but its dynamic role - its capacity to bring about novel states of affairs - is often left implicit. Relations connect what already exists, but rarely explain how new forms arise through interaction.

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4. Emergence Without Causal Depth

Few contemporary thinkers deny the phenomenon of emergence. Life, mind, and culture are widely acknowledged as emergent phenomena. The disagreement concerns whether emergence is ontologically real or merely a descriptive convenience.

Many accounts allow emergence epistemically while resisting it causally. Higher-level patterns are said to depend entirely on lower-level processes, even as they appear to exert organizing influence. This tension leaves novelty both affirmed and denied - real in appearance, but ontologically thin.

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5. Experience as an Afterthought

Experience remains the most immediate datum of reality, yet in many frameworks it is treated as an anomaly - something to be explained away rather than integrated. Physicalist and structural accounts often reduce experience to functional states; informational accounts reframe it as data processing; constructionist views treat it as socially mediated.

Experience is present everywhere in discourse, but rarely given ontological standing proportional to its centrality in life and inquiry.

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6. Value Without Grounding

Finally, nearly all contemporary theories struggle to situate value within reality itself. Ethics, meaning, and purpose are frequently relocated to subjective preference, evolutionary advantage, or cultural agreement. While such accounts explain how values arise, they often fail to explain why values matter - why truth, goodness, or beauty should exert normative force.

The difficulty here is not moral disagreement, but metaphysical location: where, if anywhere, value belongs in the structure of reality.

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The Pattern of Residuals

Taken together, these tensions point to a shared pattern. Contemporary theories of reality describe what is, what is structured, what is processed, or what is experienced, but they consistently struggle with how reality comes to be what it is, moment by moment, in time.

Becoming, actualization, relational production, emergent novelty, lived experience, and value repeatedly appear as necessary assumptions rather than explicated features. They are invoked where explanation reaches its limit, then quietly set aside.

These unresolved elements do not constitute a single problem, but they do form a coherent cluster. Their persistence suggests that something essential about reality is being addressed indirectly, but not yet named directly.

The final section of this essay turns to that question.

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Table 3 - Residual Tensions

Residual Feature	How It Appears Across Theories
Becoming	Presupposed but rarely grounded
Actualization	Treated as brute fact or collapse
Relational Production	Relations described, but not generatively
Emergence	Accepted descriptively, denied causally
Experience	Central yet ontologically displaced
Value	Explained socially or biologically, not grounded

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V. The Question of Process

The residual tensions identified in the preceding section do not point toward a missing object, substance, or structure. Rather, they point toward a missing mode of reality - one that concerns not what reality contains, but how reality occurs.

Across contemporary theories, becoming is everywhere presupposed and nowhere fully owned. Actualization is assumed without explanation. Relationality connect entities but rarely generate them. Emergence is described but denied causal depth. Experience is acknowledged yet ontologically displaced. Value is affirmed while left without grounding. These features recur not as isolated anomalies, but as a patterned remainder.

It is at this point that the question of process enters - not as a metaphysical system to be adopted, but as a conceptual necessity that arises when other accounts reach their explanatory limits.

To ask whether reality is processual is not to deny the existence of matter, structure, information, experience, or value. It is to ask whether these features are better understood as outcomes of ongoing activity rather than as static givens. Process, in this minimal sense, names the idea that reality is fundamentally eventful, relational, and temporally productive—that what exists does so by continuously coming into being.

Importantly, the question of process does not belong exclusively to any single discipline. In physics, it appears in debates over measurement, indeterminacy, and temporal asymmetry. In biology, it emerges in discussions of life, development, and adaptive organization. In philosophy, it surfaces in attempts to reconcile emergence, causation, and experience. In theology and ethics, it reappears as the problem of divine action, moral responsibility, and meaning in an unfinished world.

What unites these appearances is not agreement, but pressure. Process is repeatedly invoked - not always explicitly - where other ontological categories fail to carry the explanatory load placed upon them.

This essay does not claim that process resolves all metaphysical difficulties. Nor does it argue that process philosophy, in any particular historical form, should be adopted wholesale. Its claim is more modest and more demanding: that any contemporary account of reality which hopes to integrate science, experience, and value must reckon seriously with process - ot as metaphor, but as ontology.

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Table 4 — The Key Pattern (Interpretive Summary)

Observation	Result
No theory satisfies all criteria	Fragmentation
Each theory explains by omission	Partial truth
Residuals recur across frameworks	Ontological pressure
Process appears implicitly everywhere	Unnamed necessity

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Conclusion

Opening the Field

The question “What is reality?” cannot be answered by returning to inherited metaphysical frameworks, nor by multiplying theories without shared criteria. Contemporary thought is not short on explanations; it is short on coherence across levels of inquiry.

This essay has sought to clarify the present situation. By reviewing and categorizing dominant contemporary theories of reality, it has shown that each offers genuine insight while leaving significant features of reality unresolved. These unresolved features - becoming, actualization, relational production, emergence, experience, beauty, meaning, identification, and value - form a persistent (metaphysical) remainder that resists elimination.

Naming this remainder does not settle the metaphysical question. But it does reframe it.

Rather than asking which theory of reality is correct, the more pressing question may be this:

What must reality be like for all these partial truths to coexist without contradiction?

The remainder points toward a conception of reality that is not exhausted by objects, structures, information, or experiences taken in isolation, but understood as an ongoing, relational, and temporally creative unfolding. Whether such a conception can be articulated with sufficient rigor - and whether it can support a shared metaphysical platform for science, philosophy, theology, and public life - remains to be seen.

That task belongs to what follows in Essay II.

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What Remains

Not things alone,

nor laws that never move,

nor numbers dreaming

of a world they never touch.

Not matter frozen

in the grammar of equations,

nor time denied

by maps that show it whole.

Not information

waiting for a reader,

nor minds adrift

inside a silent machine.

What remains

is the happening itself -

the fragile grammatical

crossing from may to is,

from relation into form,

from before into now.

Reality does not sit.

Complete. Finished.

Untouched.

It arrives.

Again.

And again.

R.E. Slater

January 22, 2026

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Foundations of Metaphysics & Philosophy of Reality

• Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed. New York: Free Press, 1978.

• Strawson, Galen Strawson. Real Materialism and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

• Ladyman, James Ladyman, and Don Ross. Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

• Lowe, E. J. Lowe. The Four-Category Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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Physics, Cosmology, and the Nature of Time

• Einstein, Albert Einstein. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. New York: Crown, 1961.

• Rovelli, Carlo Rovelli. The Order of Time. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.

• Smolin, Lee Smolin. Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

• Barbour, Julian Barbour. The End of Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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Quantum Theory, Measurement, and Reality

• Bohr, Niels Bohr. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. New York: Wiley, 1958.

• Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg. Physics and Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row, 1958.

• Wigner, Eugene Wigner. “Remarks on the Mind–Body Question.” In Symmetries and Reflections. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967.

• Zurek, Wojciech Zurek. “Decoherence and the Transition from Quantum to Classical.” Physics Today 44, no. 10 (1991): 36–44.

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Information, Computation, and Simulation

• Wheeler, John Archibald Wheeler. “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links.” In Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, edited by W. H. Zurek. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990.

• Tegmark, Max Tegmark. Our Mathematical Universe. New York: Knopf, 2014.

• Bostrom, Nick Bostrom. “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 243–255.

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Emergence, Systems, and Biology

• Anderson, Philip W. Anderson. “More Is Different.” Science 177, no. 4047 (1972): 393–396.

• Kauffman, Stuart Kauffman. Reinventing the Sacred. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

• Noble, Denis Noble. Dance to the Tune of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

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Phenomenology, Consciousness, and Experience

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.

• Chalmers, David Chalmers. The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

• Varela, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

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Theology, Naturalism, and Process Thought

• Cobb, John B. Cobb Jr.. A Christian Natural Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007.

• Keller, Catherine Keller. The Cloud of the Impossible. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

• Clayton, Philip Clayton. Mind and Emergence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

• Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.

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Social Construction and Critique

• Berger, Peter L. Berger, and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor Books, 1966.

• Foucault, Michel Foucault. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.

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ADDENDUM

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Comparison of Contemporary Theories of Reality

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A. Intelligibility (Reality Must Be Understandable from Within)

Modern science presupposes that reality is:

• structured,
• relational,
• internally coherent,
• and dynamically intelligible.

But substance metaphysics treats change as secondary, accidental, or derivative.

Process metaphysics reverses this:

• Change is primary
• Stability is achieved
• Identity is enacted
• Laws describe patterns of becoming, not frozen furniture

If intelligibility arises within reality, then reality must be self-ordering in time, not pre-packaged.

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B. Quantum Measurement (Actuality Is Not Pre-Given)

The measurement problem is not a technical glitch - it is a metaphysical alarm bell.

What it tells us:

• Physical properties are not fully determinate prior to interaction
• Observation is not merely epistemic
• Reality actualizes through relational events

Any metaphysic that insists on:

• fully formed objects,
• observer-independent properties,
• or timeless states

…simply contradicts what quantum theory already uses successfully.

A processual account treats:

• events as primary,
• relations as constitutive,
• and actuality as achieved, not assumed.

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C. Emergence Theories (The World Makes New Things)

Life, mind, meaning, culture, and value are not:

• reducible illusions,
• nor supernatural intrusions.

They are emergent realities with causal efficacy.

Substance metaphysics can only say:

• “They’re really just physics”
• or “They’re something extra”

Process metaphysics says:

• novelty is real,
• creativity is fundamental,
• higher-order organization is ontologically significant.

Emergence is not an embarrassment nor a conundrum - it is a signature of reality.

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D. Reductionism Breaks Down (But Explanation Doesn’t)

Reductionism promised clarity and delivered fragmentation.

We now know:

• The universe is not built from independent parts
• Wholes condition parts as much as parts build wholes
• Context is causal

A processual framework preserves explanation without collapsing levels:

• physics → chemistry → biology → mind → culture
  …as nested, relational processes, not stacked substances.

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E. Why This Creates a Shared Platform for Faith and Skepticism

This is the quiet revolution in your work.

A processual metaphysic:

• does not require God-talk,
• does not smuggle theology into science,
• does not depend on supernaturalism.

And yet it:

• allows divine action without violation,
• grounds value without magic,
• supports meaning without illusion,
• honors science without reduction.

In other words:

Process metaphysics is the first ontological language in which atheists, agnostics, scientists, and theologians can genuinely argue about reality without talking past one another.

Not agreement - processual coherence.