Reality Is Relational and That Changes Everything

From quantum mechanics to plasma physics, the science of the very small and the very hot is pointing toward the same unsettling conclusion: substance is a myth, and relation is all there is.

Here is a fact that most people encounter in undergraduate physics and immediately file away under 'weird quantum stuff that doesn't affect real life': an electron does not have a definite position until it interacts with something else. Not unknown, but undefined. It exists as a superposition of possibilities, a smear of potential, until a relationship is formed. At that point a value crystallises. Not because we looked. Because something else in the universe entered into relation with it.

That is not a measurement problem. It is not a gap in our knowledge waiting to be filled when the physics gets better. According to a growing number of serious physicists and philosophers, it is a fundamental feature of reality. And once you genuinely sit with it and stop treating it as an interesting anomaly and start treating it as information about the nature of existence, almost everything else shifts.

The universe isn't made of things.

It is made of interactions, and the interactions are primary.

Is relation the ultimate creator of our reality?

Rovelli and the view from nowhere that doesn't exist

Carlo Rovelli's Relational Quantum Mechanics is the most rigorous working out of this idea in contemporary physics. Its central claim is deceptively simple: physical properties do not exist absolutely. They exist only relative to other systems. There is no God's-eye inventory of the universe, no master list of every particle's position, spin, and momentum. Properties arise in the encounter. They are constituted by the relationship.

This is not idealism in the Berkeley sense, as the claim is not that matter requires a mind to perceive it into existence. It is something stranger and more interesting: that what we call matter, at its most fundamental level, is a structure of mutual determinations. System A has a definite property relative to system B, and a different, or entirely indeterminate, property relative to system C. Not because our measurements disturb the system. Because that is what having a property means.

Leibniz argued something like this in 1715, in his correspondence with Newton's defender, Samuel Clarke. Space, he insisted, is not a container, not a vast empty box in which objects sit. Space is the system of relations between objects.

Einstein, two centuries later, proved Leibniz substantially right. Spacetime is not a stage on which matter performs. It is shaped by, and is inseparable from, the matter it relates.

Rovelli takes this to its logical conclusion. If space is relational, and if quantum mechanics describes the fundamental level of physical reality, then the relational structure goes all the way down. There is no bedrock of self-subsistent stuff. There are only systems in relation, constituting one another's properties through their interactions.

Plasma and the field that thinks

Now bring that framework into contact with plasma physics and things get genuinely interesting.

Plasma is the fourth state of matter: ionised gas, the substance of stars, of lightning, of the aurora borealis, of the Sun, and of roughly ninety-nine percent of the visible universe. It is also the state in which the brain, to a significant degree, operates. Neural tissue generates electromagnetic fields. Ions move. Currents flow. And crucially, plasma does not behave as a collection of discrete particles each doing their individual thing. It behaves as a correlated medium, a field, a dynamic whole in which disturbances propagate across the system as oscillations that cannot be reduced to any single component.

Susan Pockett has argued, in precise and testable terms, that the electromagnetic field generated in and around neural tissue is not merely correlated with conscious experience. It is conscious experience. Not a by-product of the firing of neurons. Not a representation produced by computation. The field itself, this relational, distributed, dynamic field, is what we mean when we say someone is aware of something.

Johnjoe McFadden's Conscious Electromagnetic Information (CEMI) theory approaches the same territory from a different angle. The brain, on this account, is not a digital computer executing a programme in neurons. It is an analogue field system in which information is integrated across the whole through electromagnetic dynamics. The unity of conscious experience, the fact that seeing red and hearing a trumpet and feeling the warmth of a room are not three separate events but one experience, reflects the unity of the field, not some mysterious binding mechanism running on top of neural computation.

The field is not something the brain produces.

The field is what the brain is, when viewed from the inside.

What makes this more than speculative is that it is, in principle, testable. The electromagnetic field generated by neural plasma has measurable properties. If consciousness is constituted by field dynamics, specific predictions follow about what kinds of field perturbation should disrupt or alter conscious experience, and about the relationship between field coherence and the quality of awareness. The framework is not sealed off from empirical engagement. It is waiting for better instruments and braver experiments.

What this means for the self

If you accept the relational ontology seriously, and I think the physics gives you increasingly little choice, then certain assumptions about selfhood become very hard to sustain.

The commonsense picture of a person is roughly this: there is a self, a subject, a locus of experience that has relationships with the world. I am here, the world is out there, and my mind is the mechanism by which the two get connected. This picture is very old, very intuitive, and increasingly difficult to defend at any level of analysis.

At the quantum level, as we have seen, there is no view from nowhere, no subject that simply is what it is, independent of its relations. At the plasma field level, what we call the self is a pattern of electromagnetic dynamics that is constituted by its embedding in a broader field environment: the body, the sensory inputs, the electromagnetic conditions of the surrounding world. The boundary between self and environment, on this account, is not a sharp metaphysical line but a matter of degree, of coupling strength, of field gradients.

This is not a new idea in philosophy. Process philosophers from Whitehead onward have argued that reality at every level consists of events and processes rather than static substances. Whitehead's 'actual occasions' are not things that then enter into relations. They are, fundamentally, relational events, constituted by their prehension of the world around them. The self, on this view, is not a substance that has experiences. It is a process, a temporally extended pattern of relational events, that we retrospectively and usefully label as a subject.

The Buddhist philosophical tradition arrived at something structurally similar through phenomenological analysis rather than physics. The doctrine of anatta, or no-self, does not claim that experience does not occur. It claims that what we take to be a unified, persisting, self-identical self is a construction, a convenient fiction layered over a stream of interdependent arising. Everything that appears to exist does so in dependence on conditions, in relation to other things. The self is no exception.

Why the hard problem might be dissolving

David Chalmers coined the phrase 'the hard problem of consciousness' to name the explanatory gap between physical processes and subjective experience. You can, in principle, give a complete functional account of information processing in a system, for instance, you can explain why it behaves as if it is in pain, as if it sees red, as if it desires something, and still, Chalmers argues, leave open the question of why there is something it is like to be that system. Why is there experience at all, rather than just function?

The hard problem has loomed over philosophy of mind for three decades because the dominant framework assumes a sharp distinction between the physical (objective, third-person, quantitative) and the experiential (subjective, first-person, qualitative). On that assumption, bridging the gap looks impossible by definition.

The relational framework does not dissolve the hard problem by wishing it away. It dissolves it by questioning the assumption that generates it. If physical properties are not intrinsic features of self-subsistent substances but are constituted through relations, and if experience is one of the properties that arises in the relational structure of a sufficiently complex, dynamically unified electromagnetic field, then the gap between the physical and the experiential looks less like an unbridgeable chasm and more like a conceptual artefact of an inadequate ontology.

Put differently: the hard problem is hardest when you assume that matter, at bottom, is experience-free. That assumption is not forced on us by the physics. It is inherited from a Cartesian framework that the physics is actively undermining. If relationality goes all the way down, and if experience is a property that can arise in the right kinds of relational structure, then the question is not "how does experience get into the physical world?" but "what kinds of relational structure give rise to what kinds of experience, and why?"

That is still a hard question. But it is a scientifically tractable one.

You are not a substance that has relationships.

You are a pattern of relationships that has, for now, the impression of being a substance.

Living with this reality

I am aware that this is the point at which a certain kind of reader begins to feel slightly vertiginous. If the self is relational rather than substantial, if what I take to be the solid interiority of my experience is a pattern of field dynamics rather than a ghost in a machine, does anything important follow for how I live?

I think it does, but perhaps not in the direction of anxiety.

If you are a relational process rather than an isolated substance, then your boundaries are genuinely more porous than the commonsense picture suggests, not metaphorically, but in a physically meaningful sense. The electromagnetic fields of different organisms do interact. The boundaries are gradients, not walls. The degree of permeability is real and variable. What you might call sensitivity, attunement, or presence may reflect actual differences in the coupling between your field dynamics and those of the environment.

This does not licence every claim made under the banner of energy work or field medicine. But it does suggest that the sharp boundary between 'inside' and 'outside' that most of Western modernity has taken as axiomatic is not as well-grounded as we assumed. The skin is not the edge of the self. It is one region of a field.

More practically: if the self is constituted through relation rather than prior to it, then the quality of your relations is not incidental to who you are. It is constitutive. You are, in a non-trivial sense, made of your relationships, not merely shaped by them after the fact, but brought into being through them, moment by moment, in the way an electromagnetic pattern is brought into being through the ongoing interaction of its field with the fields around it.

The furniture of the universe turns out to be verbs, not nouns.

The physics knew this before the philosophy caught up, and the philosophy is still catching up. In the meantime, it seems worth asking what it might mean to live as a verb, not as a thing moving through the world, but as a pattern of relation that is, for now, coherent enough to write this sentence and curious enough to wonder what comes next.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and is researching the intersection of plasma physics, quantum mechanics, and consciousness. To get in touch, please email kathy@magicinharmony.com.