Black Holes and the Collapse of Meaning: A Relational Ontology of Instantiation

Black Holes and the Collapse of Meaning: A Relational Ontology of Instantiation

In a relational model of space and time, rooted in a Systemic Functional perspective, space and time are not observer-independent absolutes but dimensions of meaning: space is the dimension of co-instantiation, and time is the dimension of unfolding. Neither exists apart from the instances that actualise them. In this framework, the universe is not a container of meaning, but an outcome of its instantiation.

This has profound implications when applied to extreme environments—especially black holes. Traditionally, black holes are described in general relativity as regions where gravity becomes so strong that not even light can escape. The boundary beyond which escape is impossible is known as the event horizon, and at the centre lies the singularity, where curvature becomes infinite and classical physics breaks down. But how does this appear when reinterpreted through a relational model of meaning-making?

Let us begin with a ticking clock falling toward a black hole. As it nears the event horizon, distant observers register its time as increasingly dilated. But from the clock's own perspective—i.e., for the meaning-maker co-located with it—nothing seems to change. Time continues to unfold normally. The clock remains a viable system for the instantiation of meaning. This already reveals a crucial point: meaning-making is always internal to the system of instantiation. Observers outside the black hole may lose contact with what happens beyond the event horizon, but that is a boundary to their observation, not to the internal unfolding of meaning.

However, the event horizon is not irrelevant. It marks the limit at which shared instantiation—i.e., mutual experiential reference—becomes impossible. The meaning-maker who crosses the event horizon continues to instantiate meaning, but now in a domain that is no longer co-instantiable with the outside. This renders the event horizon a boundary condition to the possibility of shared meaning, not of meaning per se.

As the meaning-maker continues inward toward the singularity, a new condition arises. It is not time that 'stops'—that language misleads us—but rather space that contracts. Specifically, the radial spatial dimension collapses as one approaches the singularity. Since spatial structure is required for meaning to unfold (it provides the differentiable field across which processes are construed), its annihilation leads to the inability to instantiate difference.

To instantiate a meaning instance, a meaning-maker requires:

• A potential field: a backdrop of experiential possibility;

• A structured system of oppositions: i.e., a meaning potential;

• A spatial-temporal field in which differences can be realised and related.

As radial space collapses completely at the singularity, there ceases to be a spatial structure in which unfolding can occur. Without the ability to differentiate 'here' from 'there', even within the meaning-maker’s own system, the conditions for instantiation dissolve. It is not the destruction of the body that ends meaning, but the relational impossibility of process.

Thus, within a relational ontology:

The singularity is the point at which the relational conditions for instantiating meaning cease to obtain.

This interpretation suggests that black holes are not merely physical anomalies but zones of relational annihilation, where not only signals but processes themselves come to an end—not because time stops, but because structure collapses.

The event horizon, then, is not a metaphysical wall, but a threshold of co-instantiability. Beyond it, meaning may continue to unfold locally, but it cannot be shared or referenced externally. The singularity, however, marks the true end of meaning, not in violence but in relational silence—the collapse of the very medium that makes experience meaningful.

This view opens compelling avenues for rethinking other cosmological phenomena—like white holes or baby universes—not as oddities of physics, but as transitions in the relational geometry of meaning.