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.
For those who make elegant arguments against freewill, there is usually a neurological basis to their position.
Scientists can measure a delay between brain activity and bodily response—not simply that we know what we’re going to say before we say it, but that the biological centers of the brain that produce the thought are not usually associated with conscious cognitive processes (which, when damaged, entirely destroy any outward sign of selfhood). Thus the cognitive centers aren’t generating thought, but interpreting and coordinating its expression. Further the part of the brain that seems to receive or generate the initial thought begins its process long before what one is responding to has finished (you’ll have known your response before I end my comment). In Therefore non-cognitive centers seem to recieve then pass along to the sense-making, self-oriented centers something which is not a fully conscious or considered reaction, and that it only feels like an individual is generating a response because the act if interpretation of thought is what it feels like to have a self—not thinking or cognizing itself. In their view, freewill is an illusion which occurs because of a few hundredths of a second delay called interpretation, or rationalization. But what is interpreted or rationalized wasn’t the result of freewill.
Memory is also important to build this coherence, but memory is flawed, and perception itself is also flawed. Thus one of the aspects of the conscious observer is to arrange memory narratively, while interpreting new data within its own framework, which is selective, and instantly rejective of anything outside of its frame of reference. This means memory isn’t based on reality (what is projected) anymore than projection is independently a basis of reality (as it depends on being observed).
Thus the many layers of ‘delay’, to be general, obscur any fundamental reality, which is at best a memory which functions as a tentative ‘present’, but which is never fully observed, since the self is constantly rationalizing it.