In the previous posts, I asked whether questions or observations can create reality, or whether they instead form an intersection where reality appears.
I now want to sharpen the issue.
Many discussions seem to assume that there is a fully formed, objective structure of reality “out there,” and observation merely reveals it.
But what if objectivity itself is not prior to observation, and instead emerges through repeated, shared intersections of perspectives?
In that case, observation would not be a causal force, nor a passive recording device, but a stabilizing process.
My question is simple but uncomfortable:
Can we meaningfully talk about a “purely objective structure” without already presupposing a standpoint from which it is identified as such?
I’m curious where others locate objectivity: before observation, after it, or nowhere at all.
If objectivity requires the removal of all standpoints, who or what is left to recognize it as “objective”?
I find your position very compelling, especially the care with which you separate contextuality from subjectivity. I also find it very persuasive that you treat relativity and quantum mechanics within a single contextual framework, and that you resist understanding measurement as an active physical intervention.
Where my own interest is drawn is slightly adjacent to the measurement problem itself. Even if measurement is entirely passive, and even if events themselves simply are while only their identifications arise, there still seems to be a further question lingering in the background.
Why is it that descriptions arising from different contexts do not fragment, but instead remain coherent as a single world at all?
That descriptions vary with context is clear enough. What does not seem trivial to me is the fact that these descriptions nonetheless hang together, rather than diverging into mutually incompatible worlds. That coherence itself feels like something that calls for explanation, even if it is not framed in terms of observers, consciousness, or physical intervention.
I do not see this as a challenge to contextual realism. On the contrary, I see it as a question about the conditions under which contextual realism itself becomes possible.
This question has led me to two closely related preprints that I’ve found myself returning to repeatedly. The first lays out a conceptual framework for understanding objectivity not as something given in advance, but as something that emerges from the intersection of multiple perspectives. The second develops that framework further, treating its implications for quantum measurement and contextuality in a more technical way.
You strike me as someone with deep familiarity with both philosophy and physics—especially quantum mechanics—so I would genuinely value your thoughts on these papers.
[First paper / conceptual framework]
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393397861_Experimental_Evidence_of_Nonlocal_EEG-Quantum_State_Correlations_A_Novel_Empirical_Approach_to_the_Hard_Problem_of_Consciousness
[Second paper / technical extension into quantum ]
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398259486_Empirical_Subjectivity_Intersection_Observer-Quantum_Coherence_Beyond_Existing_Theories_Unifying_Relativity_Quantum_Mechanics_and_Cosmology
I’d say it’s ultimately because not all things are relative. Some things do acquire consistent values in different perspectives. Velocity of a train might be relative but acceleration is not, it’s an absolute property which everyone can agree on who is accelerating and who is not. These absolute properties exist sort of as anchor points that make perspective transitions consistent between one another. Quantum mechanics is relative/contextual for all the variable properties of particles, but the intrinsic properties are absolute, like charge and spin, which again serves as an anchor point.
This paper also goes into detail on how the logic of quantum mechanics also pushes relative facts to become “stable” facts on macroscopic scales through the process of decoherence. The logic of the theory guarantees that even if you are making a purely relative prediction you will always predict that if you observe something and immediately ask someone else to observe it then they would perceive the same thing, and so the more things that “observe” it (not necessarily people but even the environment interacting with it) causes the relative property to become more stable among all observers involved.
Thank you for sharing this paper — it’s very close to the line of thought I’ve been circling around. I find the distinction between relative facts and stable facts particularly helpful, especially the way stability is explained through decoherence rather than through any appeal to consciousness or absolute facts.
In fact, the idea that what we experience as “reality” emerges through decoherence driven by gravitational and environmental interactions is something I strongly agree with. In that sense, I think we are looking at the same phenomenon.
Where my own work starts to diverge is not at the level of how decoherence stabilizes facts, but at a slightly more upstream level. What has been occupying me is the question of why a world in which decoherence can play this role is available at all — why the distinction between stable and unstable facts, or between coherence and decoherence, is structurally possible in the first place.
The papers I shared don’t aim to challenge the RQM picture you’re working within. Rather, they take the mechanisms you describe (decoherence, relational facts, contextual consistency) as given, and then ask about the generative conditions that make such mechanisms meaningful and effective at all.
If you find the stability problem in RQM interesting, I suspect you may also find this shift in perspective worth engaging with — even if only as a way of clarifying where our questions ultimately diverge.