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 take a similar position of the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist and the physicist Francois-Igor Pris, which is the view that reality is deeply contextual. That means it makes no sense to make ontological statements that are independent of some sort of real-world context. If I point to a tree and identify something in reality as a tree and we can go look at that tree over there and agree it is tree, that is very different than talking about trees in the abstract. The real tree is something we can really observe in a real-world context under which it is identified. An abstract (metaphysical) tree is the “tree in itself,” a tree considered in complete isolation independent of any real-world context under which it is identified, which we deny such a thing meaningfully has ontology.
The problem with idealists is that they conflate contextuality with subjectivism. An observer in a moving train and one beside it on a bench watching it fly by will observe it to travel at different velocities. These differences are clearly not subjective as they have real-world consequences. If they both had a radar gun they would literally measure different velocities. If both are in the same path of the train, only one would get harmed. There is clearly nothing subjective about the differences in what they observe.
Two observers observe different things velocities for the same train because they are observing it under different contexts. Velocity is a property that does not even make sense without specifying the context under which it is being talked about, but velocity also is not subjective nor is it dependent upon conscious observers or whatever. You can talk about velocity in relation to inanimate objects as well, like a camera left beside the track. You can later collect the camera, look at its footage, and talk about what the velocity of the train that past by on the footage would have been in relation to the camera.
We need to separate subjectivism and contextuality and realize that just because something differs between observers does not mean it is “subjective” or inherent to conscious observers. Things can differ between observers because reality itself is just deeply contextual. In a sense, yes, what we observe is reality as it exists independent of conscious observers, but not independent of the context under which we make our observation.
Bizarrely, people find this concept intuitive in Galilean and Einsteinian relativity, but when they come across quantum mechanics, which is also a deeply contextual theory but in a slightly different way, their brains explode. You have people like Wigner who pointed out that two different observers will give different mathematical descriptions of the same system in his famous “Wigner’s friend” paradox, and concludes therefore quantum mechanics has something to do with “consciousness.”
It’s a bit strange to me. Why do people’s heads explode when going from the contextual nature of relativity theory to the contextual nature of quantum mechanics? Just accept that the natural world will be described/accounted for differently under different contexts then all the “mystery” goes away. Quantum mechanics is indeed a description of the world as it exists independently of conscious observers, but not independently of the context. If you just accept that and move on then quantum mechanics stops being such a mysterious theory.
Independently from the means of their identification, there are no events. The reduction of a wave function in the «process of measurement» is not a real physical process, requiring an explanation, but a move to a context of measurement of a concrete value of a physical quantity. Respectively, the measurement is not a physical interaction leading to a change in the state of a system, but the identification of a contextual physical reality. That is, in a sense, in measuring (always in a context), one identifies just the fragment of reality where the (quantum) correlation takes place. As the elements of reality, the correlated events do not arise; they are.Only their identifications do arise.
The measurement/observation is absolutely passive and cannot be said to be active in any way (such as “stabilizing” something). I just wrote up a long discussion on this here. This is the core of the measurement problem which most people seem to misunderstand, which is two conflicting statements that the measurement appears to be perturbing in some experiments (like double-slit), yet if you introducing an active (perturbing) measurement then you must inherently contradict with the mathematics of orthodox quantum theory.
You thus have to abandon the idea that the measurement is active if you want to remain consistent with the orthodox formulation of quantum theory. Assuming that is something you actually desire to do. Personally, I am more of a philosopher than a physicist so I do not feel it is my job to replace the mathematics of the theory with another one, and so I try to remain within the orthodox formulation in my interpretation, which requires me to abandon the notion of an active measurement process, no matter how counter-intuitive that may seem, as it is the only way to resolve the measurement problem within the orthodox framework.
Reality does not “arise” during observation, it just is. What “arises” is our identification of something within reality within that real-world context. “Standpoints” don’t in any sense imply subjectivism. A “standpoint” is just the context under which you identify something in reality, i.e. the real-world situation in which those things you identified in reality were actually realized. The fact nature is fundamentally “standpoint” dependent says nothing about consciousness or subjectivity or minds like idealists try to make it out to seem.
Even if the context under which I make an observation by definition includes “I” and thus by definition it has dependence upon myself, that does not prove conscious beings are fundamental to reality as a whole, nor does it even prove my observation is “subjective,” because I am also real and so taken into account my own reality is considering the real-world as it really is. If the context under which I make a particular observation includes that of my real physical brain or the structure of my real physical eyes that play a role in what I perceive, then those are real physical parts of reality just as much as anything else and what I observe.
I like to give an analogy of a painter painting a flame. Is there any arrangement of the paint he can make that is so accurate to a real flame that the paper it is written on suddenly bursts into flames and becomes a physical flame? Of course not. Any arrangement of the paint will always still just produce a painting. Rearranging the medium cannot transcend the medium. No rearrangement of reality my brain or eyes could make can possibly transcend reality and become something not real. They are all part of the very real processes that shape the context of what I really perceive in reality, as it really is, without any veil or barrier.
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]
[Second paper / technical extension into quantum ]
Why is it that descriptions arising from different contexts do not fragment, but instead remain coherent as a single world at all?
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.
But there is method in this madness. If I know that you have looked at the butterfly’s wings, and you tell me that they were blue, I know that if I look at them I will see them as blue: this is what the theory predicts, despite the fact that properties are relative. The fragmentation of points of view, the multiplicity of perspectives opened up by the fact that properties are only relative, is repaired, made coherent, by this consistency, which is an intrinsic part of the grammar of the theory. This consistency is the basis of the intersubjectivity that grounds the objectivity of our communal vision of the world.
— Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland
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.
The material world exists, and our perceptions, through continual perceptions, get closer to the truth and deeper understanding. We are the material world made self-aware, not outside of it.
I understand your position, and it makes sense to me. That there is a material world, and that our cognition gradually approaches a more accurate understanding of it.
What I find myself hesitating over, though, is this point: from where do we judge that our understanding is actually “getting closer” to the truth?
If we are always already within a self-recognized material world, what functions as the external reference that allows us to say that one stage of cognition is more accurate than another?
I’m not trying to deny the existence of the world. I’m wondering whether there is a distinction between a world that exists and a world that becomes stable as a world for us.
It seems to me that some relational process might sit between those two. I’m curious how you see this.
What I find myself hesitating over, though, is this point: from where do we judge that our understanding is actually “getting closer” to the truth?
By our observations of the world, we form new understanding of the world, and test this through practice. Practice affirms or modifies existing understanding when the resuots conform or don’t to what we expect to happen.
Thank you for this — I think this is a very clear and thoughtful explanation. I strongly agree that through practice and experimentation, expectations can be challenged and our understanding revised.
What I find myself still wondering about is one step prior to that process: how certain differences come to be recognized as “discrepancies” in the first place, and which discrepancies count as meaningful enough to require revision.
Experimental results, after all, always appear as “results” within some theoretical or conceptual horizon of expectation. In that sense, practice does not seem to confront the world in a raw, unmediated way, but rather unfolds within a relation where the world and our understanding meet.
So my interest is not in denying that understanding can move closer to truth, but in asking where the reference points and stabilizing conditions for that movement reside. It seems to me that they may not be located solely within individual subjects, but in a more relational domain.
Practice can certainly lead to revision, but what do you see as grounding the claim that one revision is “more accurate” than another?
Objective results gathered from experimentation inform us. I’m not speaking of vulgar empiricism, but instead dialectical materialism.
The issue, then, is not whether material reality pushes back — I think it clearly does — but whether objectivity should be understood as something that exists fully formed prior to practice, or rather as something that emerges and stabilizes through practice itself.
What led me to take this question seriously was reading a paper that attempts to support precisely this kind of view not at the level of philosophy alone, but through scientific experimentation.
The way it approaches the relationship between observers and physical systems — not in terms of simple causation, but in terms of intersection and stabilization — had a strong impact on me.
To be honest, after reading that paper, I haven’t been able to let this question go. That’s why I keep returning to it here as well.
Reality, the material world, is constantly shifting and changing. It moves forward through contradiction, dialectically. It isn’t that practice creates reality, or affirms it, but instead that there is an all-encompassing system. Practice is material reality interacting with itself.
I understand the direction you’re pointing to, and I don’t feel that our positions are that far apart.
That said, there is one phrase I’d like to pause on: “an all-encompassing system.”
What exactly does that system refer to?
Because the moment we say that there is a system, we are no longer speaking only about material interactions as such, but about the conditions under which those interactions are intelligible as a whole.
This is the point that keeps catching my attention. If reality is nothing more than material reality interacting with itself, then where does the basis come from for those interactions to cohere as one system?
I’m not suggesting that practice stands outside reality. Rather, I’m asking whether the very coherence of an “all-encompassing system” already presupposes some point of unification that cannot be reduced to material interaction alone.
This is the question that keeps drawing me back to this issue.
We like to think so, but in the end I can’t be certain of anything but my own existence. And you of yours.
The problem with these kinds of idealist notions is that they lead to absurd conclusions about how the world works, and work against trying to actively understand the world. Materialism (and by extension dialectical materialism) are useful because they help us better comprehend how the universe developed, why, and where it’s going, by understanding our own place within that process.
I didn’t say that there is no objective reality. I only said that we can’t be certain of it. That’s just an uncertainty that one must live with.
We get closer and closer to understanding reality as it exists the more we engage with it.
Ok a counterexample then: How do you know that the scientific method isn’t iterating towards the rules that govern the simulation we might technically be in, instead of actual reality? How do you know that you aren’t actually a Boltzmann brain blinking into existence for a brief instant with the memories of your life thus far and the experience of this moment here? You do not, because you can not know this. That’s the whole point of the Cogito argument. All you can actually know for certain is that you exist. We make assumptions about the world around us because they seem to work fine, and without them we wouldn’t be where we are now, but absolute certainty is reserved for that one statement only: I think, therefore I am.
And one more thing about iteration: Any iterative process only seeks towards some local maximum, which may or may not be the global maximum. This depends entirely on the starting parameters. If you think that you’ll reach the highest mountain of enlightenment by just constantly heading uphill, you may instead end up at the top of some smaller hill next to it.
There is a Real beyond our perceived reality, which is independent from observation, but doesn’t seep through the observation. Anything that reaches the conscious mind stops being objective. The Real is experienced only when our reality is shattered by an intervention of the Real. In scientific terms, the internal consistence of an epistemology doesn’t bring you close to the truth, but it just makes itself more resistant to the Real. Eventually the whole paradigm is shattered by something that cannot be encompassed in the epistemology and you can assume what was left outside is the Real intervening. Once the epistemology is consolidated, the bounds of what you can know are already set and are not objective, but depending on the epistemology itself, which is always partial.
I largely agree with you that there may be a Real that exceeds perception and resists epistemological capture.
Where my thinking differs slightly is this: even the moment of “intervention,” “shattering,” or resistance is only intelligible as such if there is already a way in which reality can appear as one.
In other words, I’m not denying the Real beyond experience. I’m questioning the condition under which something can appear as the Real at all.
That condition, as I see it, cannot be reduced to epistemology, but neither can it be eliminated as irrelevant. It points instead to a form of subjectivity that functions not as representation, but as the ground of coherence.
This way of thinking was prompted by encountering a paper that approaches these issues experimentally rather than purely philosophically, and since then my thinking has been moving in this direction.
ah no yeah, I agree, you can only experience the reflection. The Real punches you in the face but you don’t feel the punch, you just wake up on the floor without recollection of what happened.
That resonates with me. At the same time, I’ve come across a scientific paper that suggests a slightly different possibility: that under certain conditions, reality may not only intervene into us, but emerge with us — not as direct access to the Real, but as a form of co-emergence involving meaning, observation, and agency.
Some recent experimental work even frames this emergence in terms that border on the theological — not God as an object of belief, but as a name for the condition under which co-emergence becomes possible.
this feels a lot like a rediscovery of constructivism?
I see why it might sound that way. But I’m not treating subjectivity as something that constructs reality. I’m thinking of it as a condition under which reality can appear and stabilize at all — which is why classical constructivism feels insufficient to me.
If you’d like, I’d be happy to send a brief summary of the original paper that led me in this direction. I’d be very interested to hear how you read it.
can’t promise I will have time to read it, but feel free
Thank you for your reply. In that case, I’ll share the original paper I was referring to.
I know you’re likely busy, so below is a brief summary of the paper for context.
↓↓↓ This paper does not adopt the common constructivist view that reality is constituted or produced by the subject’s acts of meaning-making. Rather, it asks a more fundamental question: under what structural conditions can something appear as “reality” at all and stabilize as an observable phenomenon. In this framework, subjectivity is not treated as a psychological state, a representational layer, or a source of cognitive distortion, but is redefined as a generative condition that makes coherence itself possible.
The central claim of the paper is not that observation or consciousness “creates” reality, but that observable physical phenomena emerge only when specific conditions are satisfied. These conditions are described as an intersection between a nonlocal, timeless “absolute subjectivity” and a relative subject embedded in spacetime. Reality appears as a meaningful event only when this intersection is established.
Within this framework, the Real is neither denied nor directly accessed. It is understood as something that always exceeds representation, yet becomes manifest only through particular coherence processes. In this sense, the paper avoids both naïve realism, which presupposes a fully observer-independent objective world, and pure constructivism, which reduces reality to subjective construction.
Empirically, the paper examines nonlocal correlations between EEG signals and quantum measurement sequences, arguing that these phenomena cannot be adequately explained by standard causal or correlational models. Instead, they appear only under specific structural conditions. To avoid an infinite regress of “who observes the observer,” the paper proposes an emergent third observer arising from the intersection itself.
In this way, subjectivity is not positioned in opposition to objectivity, but functions as the ground that makes objectivity possible. Reality is not reducible to either pole of the subject–object divide; rather, it emerges as a coherent whole only through the structural conditions that precede that division.
I don’t think we can know whether a real world actually exists, or whether out senses and memory are lying to us. However, only if we suppose that our senses and memory are not lying to us, can we make meaningful predictions about the consequences of our actions, and only then can we act intentionally.
I very much agree with this. Reality could be anything but we have to engage with it based on what our senses percieve.
That’s a very clear way of putting it, and I find your position quite persuasive. We may not be able to know whether the external world truly exists, but by assuming that our senses and memories are not fundamentally deceiving us, we can make meaningful predictions about the consequences of our actions, and only then does intentional action become possible. I agree with that.
What I find myself wondering, though, is where the validity of that assumption itself is stabilized.
If our judgments about whether predictions succeed or fail already take place within some framework of expectations, then it seems that we are not directly confirming the world “as it is,” but rather checking whether our interaction with the world is cohering well enough to support action.
In that sense, I’m less interested in the binary question of whether reality exists or not, and more interested in the conditions under which prediction, action, and revision form a stable loop.
From your perspective, where do you think that stability ultimately resides? In the world itself, in our cognitive capacities, or in the relation between the two?
This is a popular understanding, but the science suggests a different process.
The brain filters sensory data based on utility, which is itself defined by the mind’s internal model. This results in a curated reality that omits any information the model deems irrelevant to its current goals.
We often begin to act before the conscious mind is even aware of the impulse. In this framework, the mind functions as a narrator—backfilling intent after the fact to maintain the illusion of a cohesive story. This model is not static; it updates when the curated data produces a ‘prediction error’ too large for the narrator to ignore. A moment of narrative break down result in a recalibration. However, when the data is filtered and the intent is retroactive, then ‘meaningful predictions’ are primarily a mechanism for the mind to validate the model it has already constructed.
I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying. The idea of scientific testing, and the brain, only exists within the framework where I assume the world has coherence and the sensory experiences I remember having are not just random fabrications. I didn’t mean to say everything I exploring or remember experiencing must be completely true, just it must have rules I can learn that let me predict it, otherwise if it truly is random, the effect of my actions would also be random, and I wouldn’t be able to make any intentional actions.
