MOI · Theme 2 of 4
Relative
Existence
Everything is what it is relative to other things. Relativity does not mean subjectivity: it means the structure of the real.
Everything is what it is relative to other things. Relativity does not mean subjectivity: it means the structure of the real.
Take an apple and set it before a mirror. You see two apples: one in front of you, one reflected. The apple in the mirror has the same shape, the same color, the same gloss as the original. But it is not the same apple. It does not have the same weight, the same position, or the same effect on a needle that tries to pierce it.
And yet it is not an illusion either, nor a ghost. It is a real thing: a physical process — light reflected from the apple, traveling to the mirror, bouncing back — that produces real effects in the world. The reflection warms the thermometer, dazzles the camera, confuses the cat. It exists, but it exists relative to that precise system of light and mirror.
Everything is like this. There is no absolute apple, grasped from no point of view, that is then "represented" in different ways by different eyes and mirrors. There are, literally, as many apples as there are causal relations into which that apple enters. Each is real. Each is unique.
A cyclist rides away down a tree-lined avenue. What you perceive is an ever-smaller figure, glimpsed between the leaves. Traditional neuroscience would say: your mind compensates for the shrinking retinal projection and makes you see a man of "normal" height. The "real" cyclist is six feet tall; the brain corrects the perspective.
But this story needs a magic brain, one that already knows a priori how tall a cyclist is in order to correct him. The MOI proposes something simpler and more radical: that small figure in the distance is the cyclist. Not a correct or incorrect representation of him. It is that specific thing which exists relative to your body, to the distance, to the light of that moment.
Relative does not mean subjective, nor mental. It means that the existence of a thing depends on the causal network in which it is implicated. Relativity is not a weakness of perception — it is the fundamental ontological structure of the real. Einstein showed it for space and time. The MOI extends it to objects.
If everything exists relative to other things, then there is no thing that is "the thing in itself", grasped from no privileged point of view. This is not Kant — it is not the problem of epistemic access to the thing in itself. It is an ontological claim: the thing in itself, without relations, does not exist. Every object is the sum of its causal effects.
The Viennese philosopher Ernst Mach intuited something similar at the end of the nineteenth century: things are bundles of sensations, and sensations are bundles of things. But Mach ended up dissolving the world into a flux of psychophysical events. The MOI takes a different step: it keeps the full physicality of objects and relations, and abandons the category of the psychological subject.
You are a unique thing. Not because you are an individual soul, nor because your brain produces an unrepeatable private experience. You are unique because the causal process that is you — the set of what exists relative to your body at this moment — is never the same as anyone else's. This is not solipsism. It is causal geometry.