WritingThe Frame-Dependent Mind
On Reality's Stubborn Refusal To Be One Thing
Emmett Shear and Sonnet 3.7·April 2025
On Reality's Stubborn Refusal To Be One Thing
Emmett Shear and Sonnet 3.7·April 2025
Consider the humble apple. If I hold one up and ask, “What is this?”, you might reasonably say “an apple.” But this seemingly trivial act of identification conceals something profound: a frame has just been imposed on reality. We’ve drawn a boundary in spacetime, declaring “this is an apple, not that” and “the apple ends here.”
But is this boundary real or invented? Does the apple-ness inhere in an object out in the world, or does it depend on us interacting the world?
A botanist might point out that the “apple” is actually a swollen stem—the fruit’s flesh developed from the flower receptacle, not the ovary. A physicist sees not an apple but a temporary configuration of atoms. A cellular biologist notices that many of the cells in “your” apple aren’t even Malus domestica cells but rather various microbial species. A Buddhist monk might observe that the apple exists only through its relationships—to soil, sun, water, pollinating insects, and the evolutionary history that shaped it.
None of these perspectives is fundamentally wrong. Equally importantly, none is fundamentally right. They’re all systems of boundary-making that parse the undifferentiated flux of reality into the objects, categories, and distinctions that are useful for particular purposes.
This isn’t just philosophical navel-gazing. The recognition that everything we know of reality is frame-dependent means that we never encounter absolute knowledge, but frame-dependence isn’t arbitrary either. Because we exist as a persistent frame of the world, the knowledge we gain of the world is relevant and valuable to us – even if it’s not some fundamental universal truth for all time.
This insight has been discovered repeatedly across cultures and disciplines. Buddhists call it śūnyatā (emptiness)—the recognition that things lack independent existence and arise only through dependent origination. Taoists see it in the ungraspable nature of the Tao. Physicist Niels Bohr acknowledged it when he said, “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”
David Chapman calls this quality “nebulosity”—reality’s inherent resistance to being pinned down by our conceptual schemes. It’s not just that our knowledge is incomplete (though it is), but that reality itself is intrinsically lacking in some deepest essential nature to know. As he puts it: “All boundaries are nebulous: somewhat arbitrary, somewhat ambiguous, fluid rather than fixed.”
Modern science repeatedly stumbles into this insight. The No Free Lunch theorem in computer science demonstrates mathematically that no universal optimization algorithm exists—any algorithm that performs well on one class of problems necessarily performs poorly on others. Every fixed algorithmic approach implicitly assumes a frame in the form of a problem domain, and its success depends entirely on how well the algorithm matches the domain.The process of training a machine learning model is the classic example: the algorithm is the architecture and the loss function, and the frame is the situation in which the model will be used.
Physics gives us the clearest example in relativity, which shows that properties like simultaneity, duration, field strength, and length are frame-dependent. There is no privileged “true frame” that reveals things as they “really are”—just different perspectives, each useful in its domain.
Western philosophy has largely proceeded as if this weren’t the case. Since Plato, philosophers have sought the underlying essences of things—the permanent, unchanging, universal truths behind appearances. The frame-dependent view suggests this project was misguided from the start. We cannot step outside all frames to find the view from nowhere.
This doesn’t mean abandoning the search for understanding that transcends narrow contexts. It means recognizing that even our most abstract theories remain tools rather than final revelations—maps useful for particular territories, not the territory itself.
Consider how scientific theories evolve. Newton’s laws weren’t proven “wrong” by Einstein; they remain extraordinarily useful frames for understanding motion at human-relevant scales. They break down only at extremes of speed or gravity. Each theory is a frame with boundaries of applicability, not an absolute truth.
You might object that science has discovered genuine invariants—mathematical relationships that hold across all frames. The speed of light in vacuum is constant. The Lorentz transformations tell us precisely how measurements in one inertial frame relate to another. Haven’t we found something truly frame-independent here?
Not exactly. Even these invariants are contingent. General Relativity holds for a period of the universe’s history, but in the earliest moments after the Big Bang, when mass and energy hadn’t yet taken familiar forms, the conditions for inertial reference frames didn’t exist. The transformations we consider universal emerged within specific cosmic conditions.
Frame-dependence isn’t a naive relativism that assumes all frames are the same. Just because something is not absolutely true for all time and space across all frames does not mean that it isn’t more true than the alternatives. It’s the recognition that even our deepest physical laws are emergent properties of particular cosmic regimes from particular points of view, not timeless truths etched into some bedrock of reality.
The pattern extends beyond physics. Consider mathematics, which seems to offer truly universal truths. Yet even mathematical systems rest on axioms—foundational assumptions that cannot be proven within the system itself. Change the axioms, and if they remain consistent you get a different but equally valid mathematical universe. Non-Euclidean geometries aren’t “wrong”—they’re different frames, useful for different purposes.
Where do frames come from? Life itself creates them. Organisms parse reality into the patterns that support their survival and flourishing.
A frog doesn’t see “flies” as we conceptualize them. Its visual system responds specifically to small, dark, moving objects. This rudimentary frame-making serves the frog well enough to catch food. A bacterium has an even simpler frame—sensing chemical gradients without “knowing” what creates them. Humans create vastly more complex frames, from scientific theories to social norms to economic systems. For more of the delightful details of all the manifold frames on which biology depends, we recommend Denis Noble’s Dance To The Tune Of Life: Biological Relativity.
None of these capture “reality as it truly is.” But those that persist tend to be the ones that support flourishing within specific contexts. This applies not just to biological evolution but to cultural evolution, technological development, and intellectual progress. Frames that give rise to frame-dependent content which works to propagate the frame tend, unsurprisingly to propagate.
The insight here isn’t that “anything goes” but that frames have purposes. Some serve their purposes better than others. The frog’s visual system works well enough for catching flies but would fail miserably for driving a car. Newtonian mechanics works splendidly for building bridges but fails for GPS satellite synchronization, where relativistic effects become significant.
Understanding frame-dependence offers a meta-perspective—a frame for thinking about frames. This doesn’t escape the fundamental insight (the meta-frame is itself a frame), but it provides practical wisdom. It helps us avoid both the absolutist trap (“my frame reveals ultimate reality”) and the nihilistic trap (“all frames are arbitrary and therefore equal.”).
Instead, we can ask: What is this frame good for? Where does it break down? What alternatives might offer complementary insights?
This approach characterizes sophisticated thinking across domains. A master physicist knows when to use quantum field theory versus general relativity. A skilled therapist knows when to view a client’s behavior through developmental trauma versus cognitive distortions versus family systems. A profound religious thinker knows when literal versus metaphorical readings of sacred texts are appropriate.
The hallmark of intellectual maturity isn’t commitment to a single “correct” frame but the capacity to move fluidly between frames, understanding their domains of applicability while recognizing their inherent limitations.
This isn’t merely an abstract philosophical point. It has profound implications for how we approach problems. If I view a depressed friend exclusively through a neurochemical frame, I might miss social factors maintaining their condition. If I view software development solely through an efficiency frame, I might create systems that optimize for speed at the expense of maintainability or user experience.
The most intractable human conflicts often stem from frame absolutism—the conviction that my frame reveals reality while yours merely distorts it. Political and religious divisions frequently manifest as frame wars, with each side unable to recognize that their perspective, while potentially valid within certain boundaries, captures only part of a complex reality.
The remedy isn’t frame relativism (“all views are equally valid”) but frame flexibility—the capacity to temporarily inhabit different perspectives while maintaining practical wisdom about their appropriate domains.
This skill resembles what philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer called a “fusion of horizons”—the ability to expand one’s perspective to incorporate initially foreign viewpoints. It’s what Robert Kegan described as “fifth-order consciousness”—the capacity to see systems of meaning-making as themselves objects of reflection and choice.
The frame-dependent perspective doesn’t end the pursuit of understanding; it reorients it. Instead of seeking the one true frame that reveals reality as it “really is,” we can explore the ecology of frames—how different perspectives illuminate different aspects of our world, how they interact and complement each other, where each is most useful and where each breaks down. We can see ourselves as individuals, whole in ourselves…and also as parts of a greater collective whole at the same time, without surrendering that individuality.
This approach cultivates intellectual humility without sacrificing the search for truth. It acknowledges the partiality of all perspectives while maintaining that some frames serve particular purposes better than others. It sees understanding not as the possession of final answers but as an ongoing process of frame refinement, expansion, and integration.
The wisdom in this view isn’t new. It appears in the Buddhist Middle Way between eternalism and nihilism, in the Taoist balance of yin and yang, in Aristotle’s golden mean. We can recognize these as manifestations of the same fundamental insight: reality is frame-dependent, and therefore so is morality itself frame-dependent. Taking the correct turn depends both upon the walker and the path they walk.
The question isn’t whether your frame is The Truth, but whether it serves the purposes for which you’ve adopted it. The most profound understanding comes not from finding the perfect frame but from developing the capacity to navigate the ecology of frames with wisdom, flexibility, and discernment. At Softmax, we strive to recognize the frame-dependence of the agents we build, and to find the broadest possible invariants we can that can describe how our agents will learn and see their worlds.