I’ve been thinking about the infinite regress problem in observational accounts of quantum theory. Treating observation as fact-generating seems to force either an arbitrary stopping point or an infinite hierarchy of observers.
What I’m still reflecting on is whether this regress is best avoided by reinterpreting observation as fundamentally passive, or whether the decisive move lies deeper—at the level of relational structure itself, where stability and coherence arise prior to any observer being singled out.
If so, the absence of regress may not come from where we stop the chain, but from the fact that no chain is required in the first place.
The solution lies in stopping talking about “observers” to begin with. The velocity of a moving train differs between observers as it is at rest relative to an observer riding it but in motion relative to an observer sitting next to the tracks, but there is clearly nothing special here about conscious observers nor is anything about velocity subjective in nature. If you pointed a radar gun at the train, the gun would also record different values for the velocity of the train from both perspectives, and the radar gun is clearly not a conscious observer nor is it a subject. It is a purely mechanical physical object.
We thus have to interpret velocity as not subjective or observer-dependence but as contextual in nature. The distinction here is that velocity should be interpreted as literally being physically realized to have different values in different measurement contexts. It does not differ between the two observers because they are conscious observers. There is nothing subjective about it. It is just that some physical properties of the natural reality do ontologically differ in different contexts, i.e. the difference in velocity as perceived between the two observers is a real difference.
There is no universal “true” velocity of which the relative velocities are just a subjective description of. There is only the relative velocities, and the relative velocities are ontological. They are not perceiving some illusion or veil disallowing them from seeing “true” reality. True reality really is the velocity they perceive, which really does ontologically differ between observers, not because they are observers, but because the two observers occupy different measurement contexts, and the property is context-dependent. If the two observers occupied the same context (i.e. both are aboard the train) then they would measure the same velocity.
It is thus not about observer-dependence but context-dependence. The former implies subjectivity and some special role for conscious observers, whereas the latter is more clear that properties of physical systems merely are realized differently in different contexts, that they really do ontologically differ as their values are contingent upon the context in which they are realized in relation to everything else.
Speaking of “observers” itself does lead you into an infinite regress of observers, so we should drop the language of “observers” and “observer-dependence,” but instead talk about the context under which the properties of physical systems are realized. There is no “chain” required because the introduction of “observers” in the first place is unwarranted and arises from confusing contextuality with subjectivity. We need not make any mention of the observer at all. We can simply speak about the realized properties of particles, and the context under which this realization takes place.
We should stop treating it as if the only ontological properties are non-contextual ones. There is an obsession among people to believe that if we cannot assign non-contextual values to all properties of particles, then they cannot be said to exist ontologically, i.e. there is no “objective reality.” But this is nonsense. We have known physical systems have irreducibly contextual properties since Galileo, as even long prior to quantum mechanics or general relativity, we have known things like velocity and space and time coordinates are context dependent and there is no universal coordinate system.
We thus should stop pretending like there is meaningfully a universal coordinate system, a sort of “godlike” point of view on the world. It just doesn’t exist. As Carlo Rovelli put it, we should stop pretending like there meaningfully exist a physical world “as viewed from the outside.” Such a thing is not philosophically or logically coherent, and it cannot even be made consistent with the laws of physics. Physical, ontological reality, as it really exists independent of the observer, is irreducibly dependent upon the context in which it is realized.
Even speaking of “relations” is somewhat confused because a relation between things always implies two different things, and thus we are forced to introduce the relation between the observer and what is observed, and such an interaction, as Rovelli himself admits, only makes sense if conceived of from a third-person perspective, i.e. the perspective “from the outside.” It leads into the same kind of observer-dependence and thus infinite regress if taken to be a foundational starting point.
This is my one criticism of relational quantum mechanics. To be logically consistent, it must drop talk about interactions and relations, and merely talk of context and realizations. I wrote an article on this below in The Quantastic Journal.
I would, again, implore you to read the writings of the physicist and philosopher Francois-Igor Pris (he has a dual PhD in these). He has repeatedly tried to point out that if we just stick to speaking about context and realization, then there is no issue interpreting quantum theory as a theory of the physical world independent of the observer. The conflation between subjectivism and contexutalism (observer-dependence and context-dependence) leads one into falsely thinking quantum theory is a subjectivist theory, and thus their “way out” is either to devolve into idealism, or to claim the theory is wrong because of its contextual nature.
If you drop this conflation, then quantum theory is a physical theory of reality independent of the observer like any other theory. The observer is not important. What one needs to specify is the context under which one expects the physical property of a system to be realized, such as, specifying the preparation of the experiment and the orientation of the measurement device, and then this places constraints on its realized values. The only fundamental difference between quantum theory and theories beforehand is that classical theories place complete constraints and so the value is uniquely determined by the full experimental context, whereas the full experimental context in quantum mechanics only constraints it to a probability distribution of possible realized values.
This fact has some conterinuitive implications, because whatever value is realized, this is also part of the preparation and thus context for a later measurement, and so, before the first measurement takes place, you don’t actually even fully know the context of the second measurement. You instead have to just wait until the first one is carried out to then re-orient yourself by updating your accounting of the context, i.e. by reducing the state vector based on the property of the system realized in that context, to then make a prediction as to the second measurement.
This is somewhat counterinuitive because usually the context of the first measurement should fully determine what value will be realized for the second as well, but the fundamentally random nature of quantum theory makes this not the case, and so it defies some of our basic intuition, but you can just get used to this very quickly, because nothing is logically inconsistent about it.
I’ve noticed that, while I have sent replies and shared papers in response to your comments on previous posts, those have not been addressed, and instead you continue to leave long comments on new posts.
Could you clarify why you choose to comment on new posts rather than replying to the threads where I have already responded?
I am not sending papers at random. I am sharing them because I believe they are directly relevant to the discussion.
Given that you are clearly capable of writing thoughtful and extended comments like these, I believe you are also fully capable of reading and engaging with the papers. I would genuinely welcome hearing your impressions and thoughts on them from someone with such a deep understanding of this topic.
I would therefore appreciate it if you could first respond to the content I have already sent.
You keep sending me quantum woo mysticism that I don’t care to respond to. I am a materialist. I do not believe in mysticism, and I see quantum mechanics as entirely a physical theory that describes the physical world as it exists independently of the observer. It is not mystical at all but is quite boring and mechanical.
The papers you keep sending me are from the “Subjectivity Intersection Emergence Lab,” a random unaccredited institution created by Satoru Watanabe, whose only credentials is a bachelor’s in business administration. He then publishes paper under his “lab” that are not peer reviewed and list him as the only author. One of the papers you sent me, he claimed that he found evidence that humans can consciously influence the outcomes that are fundamentally random in quantum mechanics, which if were true would directly violate the statistical rules of quantum mechanics and would surely win him a Nobel Prize! So where is his Nobel Prize? Oh yeah, it doesn’t exist, because his “research” is not peer reviewed.
These are papers from a crackpot and I don’t care to take them seriously. Another paper you linked he tries to “solve” the “hard problem of consciousness” by linking it to quantum mechanics, which the paper is so esoteric and filled with buzzwords it was probably written by ChatGPT. I do not even believe the “hard problem of consciousness” exists as it is solely a feature of indirect realist philosophy and I am a direct realist, so anyone claiming to be trying to “solve” it by combining “consciousness” with quantum phenomena is engaging in abstract metaphysical woo. There is no such thing as the “hard problem of consciousness,” and it is just bad indirect realist philosophy that deludes people into thinking it exists, and that is why every attempt to “solve” it is never taken seriously by the actual academic community because it never yields anything useful or coherent at all, because it is trying to “solve” a “problem” that is invented out of whole cloth by pure sophistry.
These are just nonsense. You have found some crackpot on the internet and are expecting me to review all their papers and they are garbage. I despise quantum woo and I was trying to be kind by ignoring it, and trying to re-articulate what I am trying to say so that you think in realist and materialist terms and stop trying to think of quantum theory in woo woo magical “consciousness” terms. I do not care to entertain that kind of stuff and don’t want to argue about it. I have replied to multiples of your own threads because you keep making new threads, and I am merely putting my point of view out there, and don’t really care to argue over bizarre idealist mumbo jumbo.
I think there may be a misunderstanding here. The hard problem of consciousness asks why experience exists at all. Satoru Watanabe’s work addresses a different question: under what structural conditions facts become well-defined.
The appearance of terms like “subjectivity” and “quantum” does not automatically imply quantum mysticism. If those terms trigger that association, the actual argument may not be getting evaluated on its own terms.
You are the one with the misunderstanding here. Sadly, most people who read Chalmers, in my experience talking to hundreds of Chalmerites, do so in such a way that they do not stop to question his premises and become immediately convinced his arguments are equivalent to unquestionable fact without actually stopping to think about the assumptions going into his arguments and having the intellectual curiosity to investigate those assumptions.
To call “experience” something that is about “consciousness” is already a huge leap, it is to adopt an indirect realist stance, one that needs to be philosophically justified. To not adopt that stance renders the question meaningless, as, in a direct reality stance, “why does experience exist” is equivalent to asking “why does reality exist,” but existence and reality are synonyms, so the question is tautological.
You have to first establish that there is genuinely a good reason to believe that what we perceive is not reality and is instead “consciousness” or “subjective” or “phenomenal” in order for the question to even make sense. The question itself is ultimately just a reformulation/rediscovery of the mind-body problem. Ludwig Feuerbach realized, in his 1866 essay “On Spiritualism and Materialism,” that the mind-body problem is ultimately not solvable because to solve it is to contradict oneself. If you start from the premise that there is a gulf between what we perceive and the material world, then you will never be able to fill that gulf later as that contradicts your own premises. You thus have to abandon the idea that there is a gulf to begin with as the starting point of your philosophy.
That is to say, the mind-body problem / hard problem of consciousness is a proof by contradiction that indirect realism is not tenable, and so something must be wrong with indirect realist premises. (If you choose to believe in indirect realism, then you must solve the hard problem, not me!) They may seem “intuitive” but they must necessarily be wrong. The materialist philosopher Friedrich Engels would then write a book in 1883 called Dialectics of Nature where he insists on abandoning metaphysical abstractions and tying reality directly to real-world observation, showing that the origin of the mind-body problem stems from abandoning the connection. Alexandr Bogdanov in his 1913 book The Philosophy of Living Experience steps through many of the arguments in favor of indirect realism, such as those from dreams and illusions, and demonstrates them to all be horribly flawed as they always conflate experience with the interpretation of experience (which requires thought) which are not the same thing.
This same kind of thinking was later rediscovered through the writings of the late Wittgenstein. In 2021, the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist published a book Toward a Contextual Realism where he also analyzes these sames kinds of arguments, such as those from illusions, and shows them to all be faulty from a Wittgensteinian perspective, and that there is a constant conflation among philosophers between subjectivity and contextuality: things that differ between observers because they are observers (subjectivity), and things that differ between observers because they are really ontologically different in reality independent of the observer as they have dependence upon the context of their realization (contextuality).
Inspired by the materialist school of philosophy that goes through Feuerbach to Engels to Bogdanov, the physicist Carlo Rovelli published a book called Helgoland in 2021 where he discusses interpretations of quantum mechanics and criticizes the confusion as stemming from the presumption that there is a disconnect between physical reality and what we observe, and all we observe are things in discrete observation and the relations between those observations. If we understand reality to thus merely consist of relational objects which cannot be meaningfully conceived of as autonomous entities in complete isolation but can only be conceived of in their relations with everything else, then it logically follows that the kind of “god’s eye view” of the world “from the outside” that Chalmers proposes doesn’t even exist:
Inspired by the realist and anti-idealist school of philosophy that goes through Wittgenstein to Benoist, the physicist Francois-Igor Pris published a book in 2020 called “Contextual Realism and Quantum Mechanics,” where in it he argues a very similar thing but from a Wittgensteinian perspective, that we should abandon the notion of autonomously existing things that can be considered in complete isolation. To consider something in itself (non-contextuallty) is to consider it metaphysically. One must instead only assign real ontology to things which are realized in a particular context (“Independently from the means of their identification, there are no events”).
Without specifying the context of its realization then it is metaphysical and not physical, it is akin to talking about a tree in the abstract and not an actual tree in a real-world context. The mathematics on their own are merely a language used to describe reality and thus is normative and socially constructed. You will not find “reality” within the mathematics. Reality is what the mathematics are used to predict and describe, which is the real world, which is what is actually perceived in experimental observation, and is not the mathematics themselves. To actually perceive something in experimental observation means that what the mathematics describes must be realized in a real-world context. There is a distinction between the pure mathematics of the parabola used in trajectories in Newtonian mechanics, and an actual real-world observable object in a real-world context that is taking on a trajectory that can be identified as a parabola.
It is a bit intellectually dishonest to say that, “the appearance of terms like ‘subjectivity’ and ‘quantum’ does not automatically imply quantum mysticism. If those terms trigger that association, the actual argument may not be getting evaluated on its own terms,” as you are dishonestly portraying it as if I am merely claiming the existence of the word “subjective” means it is metaphysics. You are not evaluating the argument on its own terms, as that is obviously not the argument.
Eugene Wigner put forward his famous thought experiment whereby two different observers can assign different quantum states to the same system. Since he believed anything that differs between observers is “subjective” and therefore deals with “consciousness,” he concludes that quantum mechanics must fundamentally be about “consciousness” and takes an explicitly idealist stance. The argument is clearly not that Wigner is wrong because he used the word “consciousness.” That is intellectually dishonest. The argument is that Wigner is wrong because two observers describing a system differently does not imply their descriptions are subjective in nature, as the physical properties they are describing are relational (Rovelli) or contextual (Pris) in nature. The former implies their descriptions are not of objective reality but of the subjective mind, and thus quantum theory is not a theory of the physical world independent of the observer, whereas the latter does not imply this.
This conflation between subjectivity and contextuality, or between subjectivity and relationality, are prevalent throughout the academic literature, even among physicists, and much of the confusion goes away if one is clear with this distinction. But making the distinction is rather counter-intuitive from an indirect realist standpoint, which is very popular in academia these days despite its glaring flaws, and thus there is a constant tendency to conflate subjectivity and contextuality together, to treat “objective reality” as dealing with things that are non-contextual and thus cannot be realized differently in different measurement contexts, and “subjective experience” to be things which can differ between measurement contexts. But this whole narrative is the source of so much confusion.
As Pris argues, it is a philosophical error that is both the source of the measurement problem and the hard problem, as both deal with a supposed gulf between what we observe (measure, experience) and a supposed “true” reality that is beyond it and unreachable by any observation, in any context, with any tools. To drop the assumption thus dissolves both problems, as they cannot arise in the first place in direct realist philosophy.