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| Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
- Physics without ontology
- Biology without purpose
- Ethics without grounding
- Faith without realism
- Skepticism without coherence
Note: An addendum section is provided after the bibliographysection compares theories of reality to process-based reality theory.
Stuff-First Family
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Physicalist / Materialist RealismReality is fundamentally matter-energy governed by physical laws; everything else reduces to physics.
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Reductive NaturalismHigher-level phenomena (life, mind, value) are explanatory conveniences, not ontological additions.
Structure-First Family
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Mathematical PlatonismReality is fundamentally mathematical structure; the physical world instantiates abstract forms.
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Ontic Structural Realism (OSR)Relations and structures are real; objects are secondary or derivative.
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Block Universe / EternalismPast, present, and future equally exist; time and becoming are perspectival.
Information-First Family
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Information OntologyInformation is more fundamental than matter; physical reality is informationally constrained.
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ComputationalismThe universe behaves like (or is) a computation governed by algorithmic rules.
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Simulation HypothesisReality is an engineered computational environment instantiated by a deeper substrate.
Emergence-Friendly but Non-Processual
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Weak EmergentismNovel properties arise from complexity but add no new causal powers.
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Systems / Complexity OntologiesReality consists of interacting systems whose behavior cannot be predicted from parts alone (often descriptive, not ontological).
Experience-First Family
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Phenomenological RealismReality is given through lived experience and embodiment; objectivity is secondary.
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Idealism (Contemporary Forms)Reality is fundamentally mental or experiential; matter is derivative.
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Non-Process PanpsychismConsciousness is a fundamental property of matter, but treated as static or intrinsic.
Two-Tier & Constructivist Families
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Supernaturalist Dual-Tier OntologyReality consists of nature plus a transcendent realm that can intervene.
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Social / Linguistic ConstructionismWhat counts as real is shaped by language, culture, and power relations.
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.
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..
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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) | ✖ | ✔ | ◐ |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Patterns and Tensions
When viewed collectively, several patterns emerge:
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No single family adequately addresses all seven diagnostic criteria.
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Each theory explains some dimensions of reality by downplaying others.
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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..
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 |
IV. Comparative Recursions Between Contemporary Theories of Reality
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 |
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.
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 |
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.
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.
Foundations of Metaphysics & Philosophy of Reality
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Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed. New York: Free Press, 1978.
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Strawson, Galen Strawson. Real Materialism and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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Ladyman, James Ladyman, and Don Ross. Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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Lowe, E. J. Lowe. The Four-Category Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Physics, Cosmology, and the Nature of Time
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Einstein, Albert Einstein. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. New York: Crown, 1961.
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Rovelli, Carlo Rovelli. The Order of Time. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.
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Smolin, Lee Smolin. Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
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Barbour, Julian Barbour. The End of Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Quantum Theory, Measurement, and Reality
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Bohr, Niels Bohr. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. New York: Wiley, 1958.
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Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg. Physics and Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row, 1958.
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Wigner, Eugene Wigner. “Remarks on the Mind–Body Question.” In Symmetries and Reflections. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967.
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Zurek, Wojciech Zurek. “Decoherence and the Transition from Quantum to Classical.” Physics Today 44, no. 10 (1991): 36–44.
Information, Computation, and Simulation
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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.
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Tegmark, Max Tegmark. Our Mathematical Universe. New York: Knopf, 2014.
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Bostrom, Nick Bostrom. “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 243–255.
Emergence, Systems, and Biology
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Anderson, Philip W. Anderson. “More Is Different.” Science 177, no. 4047 (1972): 393–396.
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Kauffman, Stuart Kauffman. Reinventing the Sacred. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
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Noble, Denis Noble. Dance to the Tune of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Phenomenology, Consciousness, and Experience
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.
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Chalmers, David Chalmers. The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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Varela, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Theology, Naturalism, and Process Thought
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Cobb, John B. Cobb Jr.. A Christian Natural Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007.
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Keller, Catherine Keller. The Cloud of the Impossible. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
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Clayton, Philip Clayton. Mind and Emergence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.
Social Construction and Critique
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Foucault, Michel Foucault. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.
Comparison of Contemporary Theories of Reality
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
