Author: Daniel B. Newman
Published: August 09, 2026

I want to try something, and I want to declare what it is. It is a thought experiment. A supposition. I am not going to claim it is true. I am going to act as though it were true to see where it leads.  It is not the kind of thing that can be true or false in the way we usually mean. I cannot prove or disprove it. All I can do is step into it and see whether it holds together from the inside and notice whether it alters what is logically available for me.

Here is the supposition.  I call it fRadical Emergence (fRE • https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14957236). fRE is an ontology that  presumes nothing is underneath what is happening. fRE is a non-substance ontology. Within fRE there is no solid ground and there is no ground beneath the ground.  It is emergence all the way down. There is only what is, as it comes together, now.  Imagine every relation, thing, condition, idea or truth as an irreducible whole that cannot be described as its components or inputs.  To do so is to describe something else other than what is being described. I am not offering fRE as a discovered fact about reality. I am declaring it as the ontology of this thought experiment.

That is the whole move. Everything after this is just following it and refusing to flinch.

Almost none of these ideas are mine. People have been walking toward this for a long time. As I read his work, Whitehead spent a career showing that reality is process rather than a collection of things, and then kept a set of timeless forms underneath it all to hold the order in place. As I understand his position, Varela brought the observer into the observed, and kept the living organism as the one thing that stays put while it brings forth its world. As I understand her work, Barad went further: independently existing things give way to phenomena, and agential cuts enact local determinacy within them.

In each of these readings, I found the things themselves beginning to give way, not merely new relations forming between things already there. But something still remained through which becoming could become determinate: timeless forms, the living organism, or the phenomenon. I am not saying that what remained was a mistake, and I do not claim any of these thinkers would come with me. I am asking what happens if I retain none of them. What if the emergent condition is itself the stabilization?

An example. Last Thanksgiving, my brother and I sat at the same table, with the same food, on the same day, with the same people. I remember it as warm and joyous. He remembers it as tense and painful. Same table, same food, same day, same people.

So whose version of the Thanksgiving dinner is valid?

Sit with the question for a second. It feels like there should be an answer. One of us is remembering it right and one of us is coloring it. There was a real dinner. We ought to be able to agree on a description of the shared experience of the dinner.

Notice what happens when you interpret what is going on.  Maybe you see it as a Rorschach test.  Or a kind of unresolvable conundrum.  Or maybe you know the answer because you know me personally and have ideas about me and my family.  Or maybe you were there at the table as well and actually know what the dinner was like. Or maybe you are aware of how memory works and don’t see any conflict with the irreconcilable accounts.

But none of these interpretations or explanations point to the actual dinner.  Because there is no single dinner that ever existed and there is no single version of the dinner that is available for recalling from “the past.”

What can remain coherent between us is only the table, the food, the day, the people. Not because it lies beneath a shared Thanksgiving, but because it is all that is coherent across both of our Thanksgivings. My warmth is real in my account and is not coherent with his account. His tension is real in his account and is not coherent with my account. What we share is not the dinner. There was no dinner. There is only what could survive both of us telling it. And that version we did not find. We built it.

Discerning that the map is not the territory is hardly new.  Noticing that the view from nowhere is turtles all the way down is not new either. Interpreting each dinner participant as an observer is also already well explored. That a question can carry a hidden assumption is old news. What I am pointing at is different: the question is not making a mistake that a better question would fix. It is declaring a world. A fixed past, a judge who can rule on validity, a dinner we both attended. And every question declares one. There is no version of the question, however careful, that asks from nowhere.

And every question I ask is like this one. It arrives already carrying the world it expects an answer to come from. I don’t get to ask from nowhere, nor can I receive a response from nowhere. There is no nowhere to ask and answer from. I am left to notice what my question assumed, and to ask whether a different question would allow a different answer.

This is what stepping into fRE makes available for me. Not a truer account of the dinner, and not a way to settle whose account is valid. The question I ask shapes the answer I can receive. Once I see that, I can begin to declare my questions instead of inheriting them and the pre-loaded answers they embody, and notice what becomes available. I am not proving any of this. I am only noticing what becomes available when the questions change.

I can hold that his Thanksgiving was painful to him. That is true, and it is his. What I will not do is agree that it is what happened. Because the moment his account becomes what happened, mine stops being allowed to exist.

Which opens one more question, and I will leave it open. If I cannot ask from nowhere, and there is no fixed ground to check my asking against, how can I know anything at all from inside a declared perspective? Does it lead to dogma or pure relativism?  Or is there an epistemic path to another outcome?