relationships between all events — Devans99
This is Relationalism, which I like. All seems to have to be relative/relational, since there is no outside or before Totality, thus no absolute rulers or clocks or anything to have a say. Seems there wouldn't be intrinsic properties, this still in accord with the eternal not being able to be anything specific.
Our unified symphony plays from the entities/particulars, with the conductor therein and herein proposed to be an ontological Relationalism serving both the one and the many, in a balance, just as our own Yin-Yang being appears to do, we holistically and in detail revolving in our rounded life of understanding wholes and particulars in turn.
The relations among the relata of entities would be more fundamental, ontologically, than the entities, yet, without the entities there can be no relations.
Totality, as all that exists as reality, would have relatedness as its prime characteristic, providing for both the pluralistic, as diverse, and the unitary, as unity. Every entity, then, is a unity of its constituents, its identity defined by its internal and external relations, and ontologically open to to other entities due to the ontological basis that they share.
That quark-gluon interactions make for 95% of the proton’s mass perhaps shows us how much relations count. Some quantum gravity theories strive to be relational by attempting to get rid of absolute space and time.
Because Existence cannot go away, as eternal, it is inexhaustible and it is what keeps on giving and so it can originate and sustain a plurality of particulars such as you, me, atoms, trees, and all things.
Occam might even simply put it that there are only matter points and distances, with each of the matter points distinguishing itself from all the other ones by at least one distance relation that it bears to another matter point, so there are no indecernables.
While this relationalist ontology is parsimonious, as simple, basic, and uncomplicated, its representation seems to be difficult, what with so many things connected to other things, or as quantum entanglement, from either of which we’d hope to recover the basis for the typical quantities that we can find through measurement, such as mass, charge, spin, and more.
As per Leibnitz, time derives from change, as time is the order of succession, so, there is no time without change; but change exhibits an order, and what makes this order temporal is that it is unique and has a direction.
Relationalism, then, is the belief that all relevant physical information, including Time, should be deducible by the relations between physical objects.
While atomism was apparently legitimized by the undeniable empirical successes of classical physics, nonetheless, developments in the conceptual foundations of contemporary physics — especially quantum physics — have shown to resist atomism in favor of holistic considerations.
Holism, as an emergent concept in the philosophy of quantum physics, arises from the behavior of entangled quantum systems and the associated conception of non-separability, as ‘non-locality’, casting doubts on the view of the world as consisting of concrete, unchangeable, self-contained particulars, being localized in spacetime, and existing independently of one another.
-- from arXiv paper by V. Karakostas
What about GR versus QM? Do we have to pick one?