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.
I would frame it slightly differently. Reality is not “somewhere else” behind or beyond the world as a projection.
What is fundamental is not elsewhere — it is prior. Not spatially prior, but generatively prior.
The world is not a shadow cast from another place. It is what stabilizes when coherence forms.
So the issue is not that reality hides behind appearance, but that appearance is the first stabilized layer of what precedes it.
And a paper that deeply impressed me argues that, when we adopt this generative-priority framework, the relationship between observation, stability, and reality can be explained in a fully coherent way.