Is the world made of things or of relations?
The world is made of relations. Give every observer its own private labels, the way three programming teams choose their own variable names for one specification, and let them repair their disagreements. In a run of 81,920 observers and 122,880 shared boundaries, every boundary ended in agreement, while 102,333 of them had different labels at their two ends. What settled was the translation between neighbors. The values each one held never converged, and they could not have, because no procedure anywhere reads them. Physical content lives in round trips. Chain the translations around a closed loop and you learn whether you came back unchanged, a reading no relabeling can move. Electric charge is a residue trapped in such a loop. On a twelve-coin network, the settled record held thirty comparisons and never once returned a coin.
Also in Chapter 11: What Does Everybody Actually End Up Holding?.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 12: Why Is the World Made of Relations and Not of Things?watch a universe make its own particles