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.
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?