Categorial Apparatus

The "factual aspect'' is captured by means of a categorial apparatus, which consists of the following components respectively:

(a) a metrical space-time continuum,

(b) a classical Boolean logical predication space,

(c) a classical scheme of efficient causality, and

(d) an epistemological setting based on the notion of absolute separability between observer and observandum.

Facticity Imprisonment of Thinking and A Novel Way Out: The Inverse Transitions

Both, the enigmatic character of Quantum Physics (QP) and its incompatibility with the General Theory of Relativity (GRT) are rooted in a historically grown one-sidedness of the categorial underpinnings on which modern science is erected. Metaphorically speaking this deprivation could be characterized as a "facticity imprisonment'' of our thinking. By this we inadvertently reduce reality to its factual footprints and time to its sequential structure. Both are correct and important, but only partial aspects of time and reality. In order to overcome the rift between the two foundational theories ofmodern physics we need to unearth their different, hitherto overlooked categorial underpinnings, and develop a richer, overarching categorial framework.

In the novel account, facts turn out to be just the traces of the actual taking place of reality, left behind on the co-emerging canvas of local spacetime. The actual taking place of reality, instead, occurs still in a primordial form of time, the non-local "time-space of the present'' (TSP). Interestingly enough, already Albert Einstein complained vis-`a-vis Rudolf Carnap, in their discussions in Princeton between 1952 and 1954, about the "painful, but inevitable abandonment'' of the present in physics. The necessity of this abandonment, however, exists only as long as time is reduced to its linear-sequential aspect, and, directly related to that, the notion of the present to a point-like now. A non-local TSP as an aspect of time in its own right, and even as its primordial form (from which the sequential structure of time emerges as a derivative feature) is, instead, fully compatible with GRT. One can even argue that GRT implicitly contains such a richer notion of time and reality, e.g. for what there remains once the local space-time fabric unravels in singularities.

The TSP provides the primordial "stage'' or "ontophainetic platform'' on which reality can occur in the first place. Only by "taking place'' (!) there, reality gains the chrono-ontological format of facticity. In the novel account, our human experience of a present needs no longer to be derogated as just a subjective confabulation. In the new framework our experience of a present turns out to be the hitherto most advanced adaptation of cognitive evolution to the actual taking place of reality, as occurs in this primordial form of time, the TSP. Obviously, this richer notion of time changes also our notion of reality. Without the sequential structure of time there is e.g. no causality. In the TSP, reality occurs as a constellatory self-unfolding: Out of itself, within itself and towards itself.

Based on this richer notion of time and reality, QP can now be understood as addressing the transition of time and reality into the chrono-ontological format of facticity, respectively into local spacetime. Classical and relativistic physics, instead, turn out to be focused on the resulting factual portrait. The singularities of GRT, an integral part of the factual portrait, indicate the possibility of an inverse transition. They are the instance where fabric of local spacetime, and with it the chrono-ontological format of facticity, dissolve again. Quantum physical reduction and the singularities of GRT, thus, turn out to describe inverse transitions: Into and out of the chrono-ontological format of facticity, respectively spacetime locality.