Why subjective awareness precedes objective reality and how modern culture gets the order wrong, mistaking symbols, facts, and models for reality itself.
Love this opening already — “hello from Berlin” as a quiet declaration of context, not a location flex 😉
This is exactly what it needs to be about. What you describe here is something I’ve experienced my entire life — and still do today.
The constant need to translate knowing into information. To explain clarity in a world that only accepts validation after the fact. To see structure before it has language or permission.
It’s exhausting...
And at the same time, deeply affirming to see it articulated this cleanly and without compromise. This doesn’t argue a position — it restores the order.
And yes, it’s exhausting. The strange part is that the translation isn’t even bound by reality, yet it’s almost always read as if it is. That assumption, more than anything, is exhausting—the idea that meaning has to stay literal.
Holding both at once requires a very stark kind of clarity.
Quantum states do not require a human observer to “crystallize.” Quantum states decohere through physical interaction with the environment, not through consciousness, observation, or subjectivity. To be able to do a measurement at all, means that the apparatus would physically exchange a photon with whats being measured, leading to wave collapse (decoherence).
If you leave a measurement apparatus switched on in the double slit experiment, but never watches it, the data it gathers will be collapsed data (and not superposition data).
So you have experiment → interaction → decoherence → record → human observer looking at the measurement data a long time later.
Would you still say that the human observing the measurement data long after the fact creates the reality which has already happened long a go during the experiment?
This is a fair and important clarification — and I think it sharpens the point rather than refutes it.
You’re absolutely right that quantum states decohere through physical interaction with the environment. No human consciousness is required for decoherence, collapse, or registration. The sequence experiment → interaction → decoherence → recording is well-established physics.
But that doesn’t actually reinstate an objective world that exists “fully formed” independent of subjectivity. What it shows is that interaction, not detached observation, is primary. The measuring apparatus is not neutral — it is already part of the system.
The data may be recorded long before a human ever looks at it, but without a subject capable of meaning-recognition, those records remain uninterpreted traces, not “facts” in any lived or operational sense. Reality may crystallize physically through interaction, but reality-as-a-world only appears when a subject can orient within it.
So no — the human observer looking later does not retroactively create the physical event. But yes — without subjectivity, there is no experienced world, no timeline, no meaning, only interactions without orientation.
The question is not who collapses the wavefunction, but what makes a universe intelligible at all.
I’m not aiming to dispute the physics you’re describing—decoherence, measurement, and physical interaction are well understood, and I’m not claiming that human consciousness is what causes wavefunction collapse.
What I’m writing about is not the mechanics of measurement, but how humans relate to reality, meaning, and agency. I’m writing for human readers, not for apparatuses, robots, or abstract measurement chains—even though our own senses operate in the same manner. The example is there as a pointer, not as a technical premise.
From a human perspective, the interesting question isn’t whether a physical outcome already exists, but how reality becomes meaningful, motivating, and actionable for the person experiencing it. Everyone can observe the same external world, but that alone doesn’t determine how anyone lives, acts, or takes responsibility within it.
Love this opening already — “hello from Berlin” as a quiet declaration of context, not a location flex 😉
This is exactly what it needs to be about. What you describe here is something I’ve experienced my entire life — and still do today.
The constant need to translate knowing into information. To explain clarity in a world that only accepts validation after the fact. To see structure before it has language or permission.
It’s exhausting...
And at the same time, deeply affirming to see it articulated this cleanly and without compromise. This doesn’t argue a position — it restores the order.
Haha, thanks Ron, that was very much the point 😄
And yes, it’s exhausting. The strange part is that the translation isn’t even bound by reality, yet it’s almost always read as if it is. That assumption, more than anything, is exhausting—the idea that meaning has to stay literal.
Holding both at once requires a very stark kind of clarity.
Thanks for your comment, I appreciate it!
Quantum states do not require a human observer to “crystallize.” Quantum states decohere through physical interaction with the environment, not through consciousness, observation, or subjectivity. To be able to do a measurement at all, means that the apparatus would physically exchange a photon with whats being measured, leading to wave collapse (decoherence).
If you leave a measurement apparatus switched on in the double slit experiment, but never watches it, the data it gathers will be collapsed data (and not superposition data).
So you have experiment → interaction → decoherence → record → human observer looking at the measurement data a long time later.
Would you still say that the human observing the measurement data long after the fact creates the reality which has already happened long a go during the experiment?
This is a fair and important clarification — and I think it sharpens the point rather than refutes it.
You’re absolutely right that quantum states decohere through physical interaction with the environment. No human consciousness is required for decoherence, collapse, or registration. The sequence experiment → interaction → decoherence → recording is well-established physics.
But that doesn’t actually reinstate an objective world that exists “fully formed” independent of subjectivity. What it shows is that interaction, not detached observation, is primary. The measuring apparatus is not neutral — it is already part of the system.
The data may be recorded long before a human ever looks at it, but without a subject capable of meaning-recognition, those records remain uninterpreted traces, not “facts” in any lived or operational sense. Reality may crystallize physically through interaction, but reality-as-a-world only appears when a subject can orient within it.
So no — the human observer looking later does not retroactively create the physical event. But yes — without subjectivity, there is no experienced world, no timeline, no meaning, only interactions without orientation.
The question is not who collapses the wavefunction, but what makes a universe intelligible at all.
Thanks Jone and Ron!
I’m not aiming to dispute the physics you’re describing—decoherence, measurement, and physical interaction are well understood, and I’m not claiming that human consciousness is what causes wavefunction collapse.
What I’m writing about is not the mechanics of measurement, but how humans relate to reality, meaning, and agency. I’m writing for human readers, not for apparatuses, robots, or abstract measurement chains—even though our own senses operate in the same manner. The example is there as a pointer, not as a technical premise.
From a human perspective, the interesting question isn’t whether a physical outcome already exists, but how reality becomes meaningful, motivating, and actionable for the person experiencing it. Everyone can observe the same external world, but that alone doesn’t determine how anyone lives, acts, or takes responsibility within it.