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’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.