Reality coefficient

Reality is a coefficient of inter-objective correspondences, not a singular or absolute state, but a dynamic field of relational entanglements among all entities. It is not a fixed or monolithic totality but a distributed meshwork of influences, continually inflected by the simultaneity of presence and the deferred resonance of absence. It is not an independent substance but a variable product of interactions—its value contingent on the interplay of entities. Each object, whether mineral, vegetal, animal, human, or artificial, is implicated in a network of reciprocal exchanges that constitute the fabric of the real. Even entities that appear isolated or withdrawn contribute to this coefficient by exerting pressures, constraints, and affordances upon one another, whether through direct physical causation or through deferred and mediated effects.

Still, Reality cannot be exhausted by the relations that ratify it. It is shared by those immediately present but reverberates no less in total absence. It exceeds the relational frameworks by which it is rendered intelligible. While reality expresses itself through networks of interaction—physical causation, perceptual apprehension, material entanglements, and conceptual mappings—it is not exhausted by these expressions. The relations that bring it into contact with other entities or into the purview of observation do not deplete or fully circumscribe it. Reality retains a surplus, a remainder that resists assimilation into any system of interrelation, whether perceptual, epistemic, or structural.

Although physical coexistence, however fleeting, forms a tangible field of shared presence. Two stones placed side by side affect each other through their gravitational pull, however minuscule. Two beings occupying the same room exchange heat, breath, and motion. In such instances, reality is co-ratified by the mutual inscription of entities upon one another—it is rendered manifest through interaction. And yet reality points to a more profound ontological independence. A capacity to endure, persist, and even proliferate beyond the horizons of co-presence. The stone persists when no gaze beholds it, the forest continues to grow in the absence of a hiker, and a thought, once had, remains inscribed in the world even after its thinker perishes. Absence does not negate reality; it merely dislocates it from immediate apprehension. Indeed, it is often in absence that reality asserts itself most forcefully: the missing person whose absence transforms the atmosphere of a room, the faded echo of a voice in a vacated hall, or the absent sun still felt in the lingering warmth of a stone.

If reality is impossible to behold in its entirety, if its autonomy marks the inherent insufficiency of all models, descriptions, or systems of correspondence, it does not make partiality any less real. Simultaneity abounds across spatial and temporal disjunctions. The mountain glimpsed from afar, the star no longer radiating light but still visible, or the archived trace of a forgotten event all demonstrate how presence is not bound by immediate accessibility. The incompleteness does not amount to illusion or deficiency. The fragment is not a distortion of the whole but a legitimate mode of reality’s expression. Partiality carries the full weight of reality within its limits, as every fragment is entangled with the whole through gravitational, material, and conceptual threads. A shard of glass still refracts light, a letter still signifies a broader language, and a memory still harbors the absent event it recalls.

The scale of reality’s inter-objective meshwork cannot be apprehended from any singular perspective—it unfolds across scales, from subatomic interactions to galactic motions, and through temporal sedimentations that exceed human lifetimes. Thus, reality is not a singular or static phenomenon to be observed but an incessant unfolding of correspondences—a lattice of presence and absence, immediacy and deferral, form and withdrawal. Its partial revelations are not mere appearances but genuine enactments of its distributed fullness.