Reality Isn’t Sequential—It’s Relational

 How Achronosism reframes existence as a network of differences, not a timeline.

Reality Isn’t Sequential—It’s Relational: a visual metaphor for a universe structured by relationships, not chronology.

Let me begin with a claim stated plainly, then defended with care: what we call “time” is not a universal substance flowing past us but a bookkeeping framework we devised to coordinate changes in the world. It is indispensable for science and daily life, yet it is not fundamental in the way mass or charge seems fundamental. The conflict at the heart of modern physics, the behavior of precise clocks in gravity, and the emerging computational pictures of nature all converge on that conclusion. And because this is a serious claim for a serious readership, I will name the stance I am advancing, define it with precision, and place it among the live options in contemporary thought.

First, the scientific pressure. Physics has long rested on two master theories: general relativity and quantum theory. Each is astonishingly successful in its proper domain—relativity for gravitation and the large-scale structure of spacetime; quantum theory for the small, where fields and particles are quantized and measurement is probabilistic. Trouble begins when you try to put them in a single formalism. The knot is not merely technical; it is conceptual. In relativity, “time” is part of a dynamical geometry: what clocks measure depends on gravitational potential and motion. In ordinary quantum theory, by contrast, “time” typically appears as an external parameter that orders evolution but is not itself dynamical. This clash produces what the literature calls the Problem of Time in quantum gravity: the notion of time in GR and the notion of time in QT are mutually incompatible, so attempts to quantize gravity face frozen or ambiguous dynamics unless time is reinterpreted or eliminated at the fundamental level. That is not a blog trope; it is a standing result in the foundational literature.

A related, often-misquoted voice amplifies the pressure. In a letter written days before his death, Albert Einstein consoled the family of his friend Michele Besso with a striking line: “For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” The remark is not a proof, but it is a faithful expression of what relativity already made hard to ignore: there is no universal, observer-independent “now.” Simultaneity becomes local and frame-dependent; spacetime geometry ties clock readings to motion and gravitational potential. Treating past, present, and future as absolute compartments is therefore a habit of mind, not a property demanded by the equations.

Consider concrete evidence that our clocks do not share one cosmic rate. The Global Positioning System would drift into uselessness within hours if engineers failed to correct the satellite clocks for relativistic effects. Relative to a standard on Earth’s geoid, a GPS satellite’s clock runs faster by roughly 38 microseconds per day once you combine gravitational redshift (which speeds the satellite clock) and special-relativistic time dilation (which slows it). The “net +38 μs/day” is not a curiosity; it is a daily operational correction baked into the system’s design. Your navigation app works because time is not absolute.

We can see the same fact at almost human scales. In 2010, NIST compared two state-of-the-art optical clocks and found detectable gravitational time dilation for height differences under one meter and relative speeds under ten meters per second. Raise a clock by centimeters, and its tick rate measurably changes. “Your head is older than your feet” is not a metaphor; it is a laboratory result. This is general relativity rendered domestic.

Now widen the lens to the cosmos. In “timescape” cosmology, David Wiltshire and collaborators emphasize that the universe is not a uniform fluid but a patchwork of gravitational environments—dense “walls” (galaxies, clusters) and vast low-density voids. On that view, gradients in gravitational energy entail gradients in average clock rates between regions. Some have argued that if you average the universe without respecting those gradients you can mistake inhomogeneity for “dark energy,” seeing apparent acceleration where none is fundamental. The viability of that specific explanatory ambition is debated, but the general lesson holds: time, as read by physical clocks, is inextricable from context; there is no single cosmic “now” that all regions share unaltered.

A second stream of pressure comes from computation and information. Stephen Wolfram’s program—controversial but rigorous in its own idiom—models the universe as the evolution of discrete hypergraphs according to simple rules. In that picture, “time” is the parameter indexing rule applications; in certain regions, when the system reaches fixed points or repeating substructures, updates stall and “time” effectively halts there. Even if one rejects the specific machinery, the moral is familiar across multiple approaches: what we experience as temporal order may be emergent from deeper update dynamics rather than an independent substance that “flows.”

With that stage set, I can finally name and define the stance I am advancing:

Achronosism. From the Greek a (“without”) + chronos (“time”), Achronosism is the theoretical rule by which the Universe structures itself. Every instantiation $X'$arises at a relational locus $R_{i\to j}$. Each diastasis—a differentiation that makes a new branch possible—initiates sequences of spatial-sequential actualizations. These sequences fold, propagate, and interact across the network of relations, encoding the totality of realized, potential, and unactualized states. In short: the Universe does not exist in time; it exists as a web of relations. Things are defined by their positions relative to one another, by how they differ, and by how those differences propagate. Everything unfolds through sequences of actualized states, not moments on a clock.

Two clarifications guard against misunderstanding. First, Achronosism is not presentism in a new suit; it makes no assertion that only the “present” is real. Nor is it simple block-universe eternalism. It brackets the metaphysics of tense and focuses on operational structure: how observers extract order from relations and residues. Second, Achronosism is compatible with standard physics where those frameworks are predictive. It does not ask engineers to abandon GPS corrections or cosmologists to ignore Friedmann–Lemaître solutions. It asks theorists to stop mistaking a useful parameterization for an indispensable ingredient of ontology.

Why prefer such a view? Because it offers a unified answer to phenomena that otherwise look scattered. In relativity, clock rates vary with potential and velocity; in quantum gravity, canonical approaches meet frozen equations unless “time” is demoted or reinterpreted; in computation-based models, update order plays the role we naïvely assign to time. Achronosism treats these not as independent curiosities but as symptoms of a deeper pattern: temporal metrics are local, instrument-dependent encodings of relational change. The sequences that matter are sequences of actualization in a network, not beads strung on a background flow.

The familiar objections deserve an answer.

• Objection 1: “If time is only relational structure, what do we make of cosmological ‘initial conditions’ or the question ‘before the Big Bang’?”

On an Achronosist reading, the phrase “before the Big Bang” misfires for the same reason “north of the North Pole” misfires. When the macroscopic relations that support stable clock degrees of freedom are absent, the question “what happened earlier?” lacks a referent. This is not evasive; it mirrors the stance many quantum-gravity programs already take when they treat time as emergent at the semiclassical level and absent (or radically reinterpreted) at the Planck regime.

• Objection 2: “But we measure time precisely—doesn’t that show it is real?”

We measure regularities in physical oscillators and call the result “time.” The transition from ephemeris time to atomic time in 1967 and the current push to redefine the second with optical clocks demonstrate how profoundly our timekeeping depends on chosen physical processes. The point is not skepticism; it is sobriety. Measurement theory tells us that what we measure inherits the constraints of the instrument. When NIST lifts a clock by centimeters and its tick changes, we learn that our unit is relational, not absolute. Precision demonstrates robust relations, not a universal temporal fluid.

• Objection 3: “Does Achronosism trivialize causation?”

No. It centers causation. The partial order on the network is not window dressing; it is the rule by which diastases generate new nodes and authorize actualizations. The realized set tracks the path the world has in fact taken. The potential set tracks nodes licensed by current constraints but not yet fired. The unactualized set tracks nodes whose realization would demand counterfactual relations the network does not provide. What we call “future” is the region of the potential poised near threshold. What we call “past” is the durable residue and record of realized sequences. Temporal language is a useful gloss once those structures exist.

Let me make the idea more tactile. Think of three different “clocks” you already trust. An atomic clock orbiting Earth, corrected for gravitational and kinematic effects, keeps GPS honest at the tens-of-nanoseconds level. An optical lattice clock in a laboratory is sensitive enough to register a change in tick when it is raised by centimeters. A metabolic clock in a mammalian circadian system, entrained by light and temperature, keeps biological rhythms roughly aligned with solar days. These clocks do not agree in any absolute sense; they instantiate distinct oscillatory degrees of freedom coupled to different environments. What you call a “second” is, operationally, a conventional mapping from these oscillations to a shared unit. The success of that convention depends on stable relations, not on time as an external fluid. The world gives you structured change; you supply a scale and a synchronization protocol.

So what, then, is a responsible philosophical payoff? Here is a concise statement. 

• Temporal order is derivative structure. At base, physics evolves states by dynamical rules. “Time” enters as a parameterization of that evolution or, in background-independent approaches, as a label introduced after the fact to describe correlations among subsystems. The cleanest statement of the Problem of Time is precisely that the two master theories disagree on where such a parameter should come from, or whether it should appear at all, until semiclassical limits are taken. Achronosism recommends taking that disagreement literally: treat temporal talk as emergent bookkeeping on a dependency network of diastases and actualizations, not as a primitive of reality.
• “Now” is local by construction. Special and general relativity deny a global simultaneity slicing respected by all observers. There is no experiment you can perform that promotes your “now” to a cosmic invariant. The GPS system’s 38 microsecond-per-day correction is a daily demonstration that “now” is a protocol, not an object.
• Duration is instrument-relative. Your best clocks—cesium fountains, strontium lattices, aluminum-ion traps—are exquisitely sensitive to potential, velocity, and environment. The march toward optical standards underscores the point: our “time” is only as universal as our ability to stabilize and share the same dynamical reference.
• Emergence is not evasion. If a computational substrate underlies physics, “time” can be identified with update depth, causal depth, or similar graph-theoretic quantities. But even if the computational program fails, the broader moral survives across quantum-gravity strategies: time appears late, as a semiclassical or thermodynamic construct riding on correlations and coarse-graining. In Achronosist terms, the relevant object is the evolving network; temporal language is our index for its sequences of actualization.

A practical closing reflection matters, because philosophy fails if it never returns to use. If you accept Achronosism, you do not deny calendars, deadlines, or ephemerides; you place them in their proper category. They are coordination tools anchored in specific dynamical references. The second is not a metaphysical bead sliding along the abacus of the universe. It is the name we give to a repeatable, well-specified change in a chosen system. That perspective does not cheapen science; it clarifies it. It helps explain why “time” fractures conceptually when we force GR and QT into one box. It explains why cosmology’s “global now” keeps dissolving under scrutiny. It even explains something about our psychology: the elastic feel of minutes in boredom or absorption is not merely subjective noise but a reminder that experience is keyed to relations—attention, energy, environment—rather than to an external flow.

One final concern often surfaces in responses to pieces like this: isn’t it reckless to call time an “illusion” when so much science depends on it? The answer depends on how carefully we use the word. If by “illusion” we mean a systematic projection that helps us predict and coordinate, then yes, time in the human sense is an illusion—one of the most productive illusions ever conceived. If by “illusion” we mean “merely unreal,” then no; that would be glib. Our clocks, schedules, and dynamical equations are as real as any other empirically grounded structure we use. The point is that their “temporal” character is not primitive; it is emergent from relations among events and the behavior of particular instruments.

Einstein’s phrase remains a helpful provocation, not a creed: the neat division of past, present, and future is a “stubbornly persistent illusion” precisely because our best physics will not support an absolute partition—and our best engineering quietly corrects for that fact every day. The sober path forward is not to abolish time talk, but to use it with conceptual discipline: to remember that what we really have are networks of dependency, local protocols of synchronization, and instruments whose ticks tell us how particular degrees of freedom evolve in particular contexts.

That, in essence, is Achronosism. Not a rejection of science, but a clarification of what our most successful sciences already imply. Not a license for metaphysical bravado, but a framework that reduces confusion where the foundations of physics currently rub raw. If the next century succeeds where the last could not—if a satisfactory quantum gravity emerges—it will almost certainly treat “time” not as a universal river but as a derivative structure distilled from relations. Until then, it is intellectually honest, and practically useful, to live and work as if that were already true.