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.
Who is observing the observer…?
If we are allowed to discuss Vedanta, which is most popularly described with the Advaita conclusion, then we are left with a possibility that nothing truly ‘exists’, except as a projection—even the projection of the body through which two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, two halves of the tongue, and two hands do all the heavy lifting…as a projection of the ‘sense organs’, which have as their product the ‘objects of the senses’ (not the reverse). The senses, as subtle instruments of perception, project their results, rather than recieve them and interpret them.
What we have as forms, or knowledge, lies beyond the projection, and can become enmeshed, as a rope being mistaken as a snake, causing one to recoil at its sight.
But if one can have an incorrect inference, then how does this ‘projection’ occur? Did we accidentally projection a rope when we meant to projection a snake? Obviously not. Thus it is the very possibility of false perception that exposes the possibility of an underlying reality, though it is not ‘in the world’, it is before the world is perceived as a reflection.
The world is a projection of what we reflect. Our knowledge is not important, but our act of projecting is necessary. What is ‘out there’ actually is somewhere else. The organs of the senses are producing the projection based on a reflection of what is actually occurring somewhere else, which is why material occurrences require ‘observation’, which is projection. Though what the mind-parts are actually doing is receiving and reflecting that onto a canvas of material particles, which require our participation, but which don’t on their own constitute Reality. Reality is somewhere else.
Just as with Plato’s cave, we watch images on a wall which are shadows of their true being. Why don’t we perceive directly what we are reflecting and projecting? This is called ignorance, or false identification. We identify with the projection, because we believe we are the sense-mind, endowed with ego (sense of separate existence), whereas the whole show is operating as a single entity which is all entities and happenings all at once, without division.
When one lets-go of their individual identity, it becomes easier to understand. You have a true identity as a form beyond the material projection, but you identify with the projection, which is only one small aspect of the entire flow. Wave vs. Ocean argument. The projection is just inside the mind. One remains trapped inside their mind.
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.
Treating observation as fact-generating seems to force either an arbitrary stopping point or an infinite hierarchy of observers.
Can you explain? I don’t understand
Good question — I’ll try to explain what I mean in a very simple way.
Suppose we say that an observation itself creates a fact. Then we immediately have to ask: for whom is that observation a fact?
If observer A observes a system and that act is supposed to generate a fact, then from the perspective of observer B, what exists is not yet a fact, but an interaction involving A. So for it to become a fact for B, B would have to observe A’s observation.
But then the same question repeats: for whom is that observation a fact?
Unless we arbitrarily declare that “this level counts as final,” we are pushed toward an infinite chain of observers observing observers.
That’s all I mean by saying that treating observation as fact-generating seems to force either an arbitrary stopping point or an infinite hierarchy. My worry is not empirical, but structural: where does the chain legitimately stop, and why?
Ah I see what you mean. Thanks for explaining.
I think one way to get around this is to frame changes in the double slit experiment as changes in physical state. Changes of physical state are of course changes in fact, but this framing avoids the regress problem because these facts are publicly accessible and viewable by all observers (there is no question of for who it is a fact for).
For example, if I turn on the tap, it is a fact for me that I turned on the tap, but it’s also a fact for everybody; anyone can come and see that the water’s running. There is no infinite regress. And as far as I’m aware the set-up is similar for the double-slit experiment: if you collapse a wave function through observation, I can come along and see what you’ve done. So this change in state is publicly accessible: it’s not a change in state for anyone in particular.
Of course matters are a bit more complex than that because in some interpretations of quantum mechanics you could construct a technically possible in principle (though impossible in practice) scenario where I am in a superposition but you are not, so what wave forms appear to be collapsed is no longer publicly accessible information; these become facts to particular observers. There are ways of getting around this that avoid infinite regress but we don’t need to deal with them here. Because those scenarios are impossible under interpretations where observation is responsible for collapsing the wave function. If I can collapse superpositions just by observing them, then I could never be in a scenario where I’m in a superposition, because I’m always observing myself (at least peripherally)
Thank you — your position is much clearer now.
I agree that framing the double-slit experiment as a change in physical state, and moreover as a publicly accessible fact, does seem to dissolve the infinite regress at first glance. The analogy with turning on a tap is especially helpful in making that intuition clear.
Building on that, a paper I was recently influenced by shifts the question just slightly. Its focus is not on who observes, but on when and by what mechanism a physical state becomes stable as something publicly accessible in the first place.
From that perspective, treating observation as an active, fact-generating process tends to reintroduce the question of “for whom” the observation itself is a fact. To avoid this, the paper treats observation as fundamentally passive, and locates the stabilization of facts not in the act of observation itself, but at the level of relational structure and global constraints (for example, decoherence).
In this view, it’s not that a fact becomes settled because someone observes it; rather, it is because it is already structurally settled that it can be confirmed in the same way by anyone. For me, this reframing seems to offer one possible way of addressing the regress without introducing a privileged observer.
Yes, the way you described sounds like it should work too. Are you describing the ‘relational quantum mechanics’ interpretation?
That’s a very natural way to read it, and I can see why it sounds close to Relational Quantum Mechanics.
I do think there’s a strong overlap — especially in rejecting a privileged observer and in treating facts as non-absolute. But the position I’m circling around is not quite RQM as such. It’s more a hesitation about where the explanatory work is being done.
In RQM, facts are still said to come into being through interactions between systems, relative to one another. What I find myself questioning is whether treating interaction itself as the point where facts are generated already assumes a kind of stability that hasn’t yet been accounted for.
The line of thought I’ve been exploring shifts the burden slightly: observation and interaction are treated as fundamentally passive, while the stabilization of facts is located at a deeper structural level — not in “who interacts with whom,” but in the relational constraints that make certain outcomes stable and publicly confirmable at all.
So it’s close to RQM in spirit, but I’d say it’s probing a layer just underneath it, rather than offering an alternative interpretation in the usual sense.
Are you using ChatGTP to generate these responses?
@ageedizzle @Laura
I’m using ChatGPT for computer help and search of book and movie onlyI do sometimes use tools to help with phrasing or to think things through more clearly. That said, the questions and positions I’m raising are my own, and I’m here in good faith to explore the ideas together.
I should also mention that I’m Japanese and not fluent in English, so I use ChatGPT to help translate my thoughts into English. Because of that, some phrasing may come across a bit unnatural.
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observation is in awareness. Awareness is where “the buck stops”. I believe that the experiment has been done, where the 2-slit experiment is done while checking which slit the particle goes through, thus forcing particle-not-wave, but then the observation is obliterated, … unfortunately I don’t know the result of that experiment ( been too many years: don’t remember )
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?Jacob? or something, in one of Curt Jaimungal’s videos, explained that he’d been trying to convert QM to something comprehensible, & so that meant probability-theory … but what he ended-up-with worked too well: then he discovered that the ONLY difference between normal probability-theory & QM is that QM is non-Markovian: KNOWING is a fundamental-property of QM.
The knowing ALTERS probabilities.
Without knowing, “observation” is bogus.
& all the physicists who go on about how “information” is fundamental, but who simultaneously reject that knowing is physics-real … they’re just doing ideological-gymnastics, in my view.
IF knowing is altered, THEN observation has happened.
That elegant experiment, years ago, running a beam of particles through a superconducting-ring’s center, with a superconducting toroid-envelope around that ring, so IF there was any current flowing 'round-&-'round in it, THEN electromagnetism COULDN’T POSSIBLY affect the stream of particles going through the center: the envelope blocked all electromagnetic-action…
yet it DID affect the beam/stream…
proving that it isn’t the interactions-between-particles’ forces, it is the interaction through the underlying-field…
or, as another interpretation of it would be: “spooky action at a distance”.
Coherences are being formed & destroyed all the time: & Sabine Hossenfelder has stated so, too.
It isn’t something that only-sometimes exists, it is always existing, & always being impinged-on by collisions, collapsing the existing-wave-function, creating replacement-wave-functions…
the point of observation being rooted in awareness, though, is something that the Physicalism/Existentialism religion rejects, since it insists that awareness isn’t real, it is only an emergent delusion/mirage.
Only matter is real, in that religion.
& while “anomalies” may exist, they are powerless to falsify any axioms, of course.
Hofstadter’s “Godel Escher Bach” book was entirely on how axioms control what one cannot know, & what one can.
IF awareness doesn’t exist in a universe … THEN … who gets to claim that there are any “facts” in that universe??
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Thank you for this thoughtful comment. I want to be clear that I’m not denying the reality or importance of awareness itself. I agree that “knowing” plays an essential role in how facts appear to us.
Where I find myself hesitating is in treating awareness as the final stopping point. If awareness alone is taken as the ultimate ground, it becomes difficult to explain why facts stabilize across different observers, or why many physical processes appear to proceed coherently even in situations where awareness does not seem to be present.
A paper that has strongly influenced my thinking approaches this problem without rejecting awareness. Instead, it shifts the ontological work elsewhere: facts are not generated by observation or knowing itself, but stabilize at the level of relational structures and constraints (such as decoherence). Awareness, on this view, emerges within those stabilized structures rather than grounding them.
From this perspective, awareness is real and meaningful, but not required to do the fundamental work of producing facts. I consider this shift to be a key move in addressing the infinite regress problem.
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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.
Even if it can never be fully observed, do you think there is a fundamental reality?
The paper I support does not simply assume reality as a given; it addresses the structure by which reality itself becomes possible.
