Hierarchical Relational Ontologies of Form: A contingent theoretical framework

Abstract

This body of work develops a unified relational ontology of form that reinterprets metaphysics, physics, biology, and AI as different expressions of the same underlying problem: how stable forms emerge, persist, and transform within a world constituted not by independent objects, but by relations. Beginning with the formal foundations of relational ontology, the work argues that determination is not imposed upon a pre-existing reality but progressively achieved through hierarchies of relational constraints. This metaphysical framework is then developed across increasingly concrete domains. In physics, it offers an alternative to object-based metaphysics by interpreting physical reality as an ongoing process of relational determination. In biology, it reconceives living systems as dynamically self-maintaining relational organizations whose identity is preserved through continuous return rather than static structure. In the study of large language models, it distinguishes formal continuation from interpretation, showing how recursive relational processes can generate formally integrated conceptual structures while remaining fundamentally distinct from human acts of interpretation. Across these domains, a common theoretical principle emerges: identity is not the persistence of substance but the achievement of relational continuity. Physics, biology, and AI therefore become different manifestations of a single metaphysical logic in which possibility is progressively formed, organization is maintained through recursive constraint, and interpretative meaning requires participatory return rather than formal representation alone. Taken as a whole, this work offers a contingent philosophical framework through which metaphysics can provide a common language for bringing the physical sciences, the life sciences, and the formal sciences into relation. It is an attempt to recover theoria as an inquiry into becoming rather than being, replacing an ontology of independent objects with an ontology of relational determination. The framework does not claim to exhaust the actuality to which its formal structures refer; rather, by bringing different domains into relation, it seeks to make visible both their underlying continuities and the wider metaphysical and interpretative questions that remain open beyond its own determinations