The Real Without Witness

To affirm that the real exists without witness is to categorically refuse any ontological dependence between being and its symbolic inscription. The world does not begin when it is seen, named, or thought. Matter — in its flows, condensations, and transformations — does not await recognition to operate. A volcanic eruption, the fusion of nuclei inside a distant star, the slow drift of a tectonic plate: all this happens independently of any observer, recording system, or language capable of translating it. The real, here, is neither a correlate of experience nor a product of relation; it is a self-sufficient material field that transforms according to its own internal dynamics.

In this perspective, the absence of perception is not the absence of existence. What is not seen is not thereby less real. The Ontology of Emergent Complexity (OCE) breaks with the phenomenological and idealist heritage that, from Berkeley to Husserl, made the consistency of the real dependent on its presence to a consciousness. To exist is to maintain material presence in the world, independently of any inscription, interpretation, or record. To recognize is to convert that presence into a legible element within a symbolic system — linguistic, mathematical, visual, or technical. The confusion between these two planes underlies theories that subordinate being to consciousness or relation.

In existence, there is no need for an audience: a subatomic particle interacts, a planet orbits, an electromagnetic field propagates, whether someone perceives them or not. In recognition, there is always a mediation: material presence is transformed into a sign, indexed to a code, situated in a network of meanings. The idealist tradition and classical phenomenology collapsed these two planes, treating what is not recognized as non-existent or, at the very least, as ontologically irrelevant. The OCE separates them categorically: recognition can reconfigure how something is integrated into experience and action, but it is not a condition of its occurrence. What exists can remain ignored; and, even ignored, continue to transform itself.

This affirmation is not sustained merely as an abstract principle; it can be situated in the concrete materiality of processes that, long before the existence of any observer, unfold in the universe. Physical cosmology itself offers an eloquent framework: primordial nucleosynthesis occurred about three minutes after the beginning of cosmic expansion, long before the formation of the first stars or the possibility of any life. No gaze witnessed the fusion of the first hydrogen and helium nuclei; yet, this transformation determined the elemental composition of the cosmos. The same can be said of the slow aggregation of interstellar dust into planetary bodies or the evolution of binary stellar systems — dynamics entirely independent of any symbolic codification.

In geology, Wegener's continental drift, today confirmed by plate tectonics, proceeded for hundreds of millions of years without the intervention of any being endowed with language. Mountains rose and were eroded; oceans opened and closed; ecosystems emerged and disappeared without there being a single record or consciousness of the event. These processes not only existed without witness: they operated according to their own material rules, indifferent to the eventual arrival of a mind capable of symbolizing them.

Biology adds equally decisive examples. Long before any complex life, self-organized chemical reactions in primordial seas generated molecular chains capable of rudimentary replication. The emergence of these structures did not depend on them being identified as “life” or as a “genetic process.” Their continuity and transformation were sufficient with the present physicochemical conditions.

Historically, philosophy wavered before this ontological independence. Berkeleyan idealism (“esse est percipi”) denied that anything could exist without being perceived, while classical empiricism maintained the belief that knowing was, ultimately, capturing an already given reality — even if only validated by sensible experience. Contemporary scientific realism, in turn, partially recovers the thesis that the real exceeds the field of experience, but often without questioning the central role of observation as legitimizing factor. The position of the OCE shifts this axis: observation is not an ontological condition; it is merely one of the forms, late and contingent, through which the real can inscribe itself in a symbolic regime.

In Husserlian phenomenology, the being of things is always the intentional correlate of a consciousness — there is no “thing in itself” outside the phenomenological constitution relation. Heidegger, even shifting the center of analysis to the question of Being, maintains the world as a horizon of meaning opened by Dasein: without the clearing of human presence, being would not manifest itself. This heritage, shared in different ways by Neo-Kantian currents and contemporary correlationism, preserves a common core: the real and experience are coextensive.

The OCE rejects this core. If the real is a self-sufficient material field, its existence requires neither a horizon of manifestation nor a structure of constitution. Symbolic inscription, far from being a transcendental condition of being, is a localized event that occurs in a small fraction of organized matter. From this point of view, phenomenology incurs a scale error: it takes a local phenomenon — human reflexive consciousness — as a universal ontological key. The OCE inverts the relationship: the symbolic is an operative exception, and the world not only can but inevitably exists and transforms without any need to be inscribed.

This critique is not a return to a naive realism that ignores the mediation of knowledge. It is, rather, a repositioning of analysis: the real precedes, exceeds, and survives all inscription. Philosophy, by subordinating being to experience, created a closed circle that excludes vast zones of the existent. The ontological task is to break this circle and restore the real to its structural independence.

Saying that the real does not depend on an observer does not imply that philosophy, science, or art can dispense with the work of inscription and interpretation. On the contrary, intelligibility requires a practice of symbolic translation that transforms the real into something legible for a specific cognitive regime. The difference is that this practice, however elaborate, does not create the object it refers to; it merely reinscribes it into a system of meanings.

The OCE emphasizes that the absence of a witness does not mean the absence of possible inscription. An unobserved event — for example, the collision of two galaxies in a remote region of the universe — remains open to the possibility of being inscribed in the future, should a material chain capable of capturing, processing, and symbolizing it be created. This possibility, however, does not retroact upon existence: the event occurred without waiting for its legibility.

Thus, both correlationism, which binds the real to consciousness, and simplistic realism, which takes being as an absolute and self-evident given, are avoided. Between the two, the OCE maintains a rigorous distinction: the real does not need to be known to exist, but knowing is always a situated symbolic gesture that reorganizes how that real can interact with other systems.

Intelligibility — whether scientific, philosophical, or artistic — requires the mediation of symbolic systems that cut out, stabilize, and articulate aspects of the real to make them legible. What is at stake is not denying this necessity, but preventing it from being confused with a condition of existence.

The real without witness is neither absence nor void: it is an excess of occurrence, a multiplicity of processes that do not await a name. Recognizing this does not close the investigation — it opens it to a vaster field, where thought is obliged to interrogate what occurs before or outside its own capacity for registration. It is in this space of anteriority and latency that the next challenge is inscribed, not as a necessary sequence, but as a new possibility for symbolic reorganization.

"The world does not begin when we see it
it begins without us and continues despite us."

—— David Cota — Founder of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity ——