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 want to make sure I understand your position correctly, Ron and Wout.
First, nothing exists as detached observation, that would simply be impossible. Observation = Interaction always. So when you say interaction is primary, I agree, but I don’t see that as introducing subjectivity into the physical process.
Second, I fully agree that meaning, interpretation, and lived experience require subjects. This is a lot of what we humans do, interpret things, impose meaning. However, we are also very good at imposing meaning and subjectivity which is ultimately at odds with reality. Beliefs we have about how reality works are most often wrong. This is how science progress, by continuously falsifying wrong beliefs about reality, and forcing us to come up with new updated beliefs.
What I want to clarify is whether you are making an ontological claim or a semantic one. Saying the world is not “fully formed” without subjectivity, is it meant that physical reality itself depends on subjects to exist, or only that meaning and world-experience depend on subjects?
If it is the latter, then I think we largely agree. If it is the former, then I would need to understand how that claim is supported, given that physics describes a universe evolving for billions of years before conscious beings emerged.
Thanks for laying this out clearly. I think this gets to the crux of where we differ.
I don’t see this as a choice between a purely semantic or ontological claim, and I think that its framing is part of the difficulty. The issue, as I see it, is that science tends to separate physical process from subjectivity in order to study the former more cleanly—which is enormously powerful—but then quietly treats that separation as if it were fundamental rather than methodological.
With interaction being primary, I do see subjectivity as already connected there. Not because consciousness magically alters physical laws, but because there is no access to objective reality except through interaction—and we ourselves are part of that interaction chain. Our bodies, senses, neural processing, temporal delays, and interpretive structures are not outside the system; they are part of that very apparatus.
So with reality not being fully formed without subjectivity, it is not about denying physical evolution or causal structure, but pointing to the fact that physical description alone does not yield a world. A world requires orientation, salience, meaning, and agency. It’s the level at which reality becomes something lived rather than merely described. It cannot be semantics on its own.
Science is extremely good at falsifying incorrect models of physical behavior. But meaning, value, motivation, and responsibility are not errors that need fixing or control. They’re the conditions under which questioning itself makes sense. Treating subjectivity as something added after the physical story completely misses how deeply the two are intertwined.
In that sense, I don’t think the way forward is to detach physics and subjectivity more cleanly, but rather to integrate them more honestly. Science without meaning becomes symbolic without purpose; spirituality without grounding becomes meaning without direction. What’s interesting to me personally is the middle ground, where thinking and experience support each other rather than to compete.
I’m not trying to prove a metaphysical claim here in the scientific sense. I’m questioning whether our current conceptual splits are helping us see more clearly or are quietly limiting what kinds of understanding we allow ourselves to reach.
PS: If you’re interested, you might find Irreducible by Frederico Faggin an interesting read. It’s a technical articulation of ideas that have long existed in the spiritual field.
>> So with reality not being fully formed without subjectivity, it is not about denying physical evolution or causal structure, but pointing to the fact that physical description alone does not yield a world.
But again, given this sentence here. Before consciousness evolved, was the world not fully formed? Did the pure physical interactions of the universe without consciousness not yield a world? Is that your position?
>> I’m questioning whether our current conceptual splits are helping us see more clearly or are quietly limiting what kinds of understanding we allow ourselves to reach.
And to this, you need to define understanding. Would not all understanding (or knowledge about the world) have to be something fundamental about how the world works, where this understanding can be used to reproduce/produce a certain outcome? Would not all such understanding be captured by the scientific method? Can one have an understanding, but about something which is not reproducible given similar conditions? Is that not just hand waving?
I think the difficulty here is that you’re still trying to fit my point into a strictly scientific frame, and that’s exactly where it stops working.
I’m not saying the world didn’t exist before humans, nor that consciousness “appeared” inside an otherwise complete reality. I’m questioning the split itself. World and consciousness are co-implicated. They are not separable layers where one comes first and the other later.
The same applies to your definition of understanding. You seem to be treating understanding as something that must be symbolically captured, reproduced, and validated by the scientific method. That’s a powerful form of knowledge, but it’s not the whole of understanding. Scientific models are interpretations of reality, not reality itself.
There is a point where symbolic, reproducible explanation reaches its limit. Beyond that, understanding becomes experiential—knowing from within rather than describing from outside. That isn’t hand-waving; it’s simply a different mode of knowing, one that science alone cannot (yet) exhaust.
The interesting work, to me, is not choosing science or spirituality, but integrating both. That’s where understanding actually deepens, and that’s the level I’m pointing at.
My background makes it really hard to separate the two. I just don't understand how one can justify experiental understanding as understanding. It seems impossible to separate such understanding from delusions or false beliefs if its not testable or reproducible.
You’re still trying to justify this from the outside in.
You say it’s hard to separate the two, yet in the last sentence you dismiss anything that isn’t testable or reproducible. That is a full separation, and it’s a scientific one. I’m explicitly not making the claim you keep attributing to me.
I’m not arguing that experiential knowing should replace scientific understanding, nor that it can be “validated” in the same way. It can’t be, by definition. That doesn’t make it delusion; it means you’re applying the wrong criteria.
If you insist that only what can be externally justified counts as real, then of course this won’t make sense. That limit isn’t a flaw in the point, it’s a limit of the frame you’re using.
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.
I want to make sure I understand your position correctly, Ron and Wout.
First, nothing exists as detached observation, that would simply be impossible. Observation = Interaction always. So when you say interaction is primary, I agree, but I don’t see that as introducing subjectivity into the physical process.
Second, I fully agree that meaning, interpretation, and lived experience require subjects. This is a lot of what we humans do, interpret things, impose meaning. However, we are also very good at imposing meaning and subjectivity which is ultimately at odds with reality. Beliefs we have about how reality works are most often wrong. This is how science progress, by continuously falsifying wrong beliefs about reality, and forcing us to come up with new updated beliefs.
What I want to clarify is whether you are making an ontological claim or a semantic one. Saying the world is not “fully formed” without subjectivity, is it meant that physical reality itself depends on subjects to exist, or only that meaning and world-experience depend on subjects?
If it is the latter, then I think we largely agree. If it is the former, then I would need to understand how that claim is supported, given that physics describes a universe evolving for billions of years before conscious beings emerged.
Thanks for laying this out clearly. I think this gets to the crux of where we differ.
I don’t see this as a choice between a purely semantic or ontological claim, and I think that its framing is part of the difficulty. The issue, as I see it, is that science tends to separate physical process from subjectivity in order to study the former more cleanly—which is enormously powerful—but then quietly treats that separation as if it were fundamental rather than methodological.
With interaction being primary, I do see subjectivity as already connected there. Not because consciousness magically alters physical laws, but because there is no access to objective reality except through interaction—and we ourselves are part of that interaction chain. Our bodies, senses, neural processing, temporal delays, and interpretive structures are not outside the system; they are part of that very apparatus.
So with reality not being fully formed without subjectivity, it is not about denying physical evolution or causal structure, but pointing to the fact that physical description alone does not yield a world. A world requires orientation, salience, meaning, and agency. It’s the level at which reality becomes something lived rather than merely described. It cannot be semantics on its own.
Science is extremely good at falsifying incorrect models of physical behavior. But meaning, value, motivation, and responsibility are not errors that need fixing or control. They’re the conditions under which questioning itself makes sense. Treating subjectivity as something added after the physical story completely misses how deeply the two are intertwined.
In that sense, I don’t think the way forward is to detach physics and subjectivity more cleanly, but rather to integrate them more honestly. Science without meaning becomes symbolic without purpose; spirituality without grounding becomes meaning without direction. What’s interesting to me personally is the middle ground, where thinking and experience support each other rather than to compete.
I’m not trying to prove a metaphysical claim here in the scientific sense. I’m questioning whether our current conceptual splits are helping us see more clearly or are quietly limiting what kinds of understanding we allow ourselves to reach.
PS: If you’re interested, you might find Irreducible by Frederico Faggin an interesting read. It’s a technical articulation of ideas that have long existed in the spiritual field.
>> So with reality not being fully formed without subjectivity, it is not about denying physical evolution or causal structure, but pointing to the fact that physical description alone does not yield a world.
But again, given this sentence here. Before consciousness evolved, was the world not fully formed? Did the pure physical interactions of the universe without consciousness not yield a world? Is that your position?
>> I’m questioning whether our current conceptual splits are helping us see more clearly or are quietly limiting what kinds of understanding we allow ourselves to reach.
And to this, you need to define understanding. Would not all understanding (or knowledge about the world) have to be something fundamental about how the world works, where this understanding can be used to reproduce/produce a certain outcome? Would not all such understanding be captured by the scientific method? Can one have an understanding, but about something which is not reproducible given similar conditions? Is that not just hand waving?
I think the difficulty here is that you’re still trying to fit my point into a strictly scientific frame, and that’s exactly where it stops working.
I’m not saying the world didn’t exist before humans, nor that consciousness “appeared” inside an otherwise complete reality. I’m questioning the split itself. World and consciousness are co-implicated. They are not separable layers where one comes first and the other later.
The same applies to your definition of understanding. You seem to be treating understanding as something that must be symbolically captured, reproduced, and validated by the scientific method. That’s a powerful form of knowledge, but it’s not the whole of understanding. Scientific models are interpretations of reality, not reality itself.
There is a point where symbolic, reproducible explanation reaches its limit. Beyond that, understanding becomes experiential—knowing from within rather than describing from outside. That isn’t hand-waving; it’s simply a different mode of knowing, one that science alone cannot (yet) exhaust.
The interesting work, to me, is not choosing science or spirituality, but integrating both. That’s where understanding actually deepens, and that’s the level I’m pointing at.
My background makes it really hard to separate the two. I just don't understand how one can justify experiental understanding as understanding. It seems impossible to separate such understanding from delusions or false beliefs if its not testable or reproducible.
You’re still trying to justify this from the outside in.
You say it’s hard to separate the two, yet in the last sentence you dismiss anything that isn’t testable or reproducible. That is a full separation, and it’s a scientific one. I’m explicitly not making the claim you keep attributing to me.
I’m not arguing that experiential knowing should replace scientific understanding, nor that it can be “validated” in the same way. It can’t be, by definition. That doesn’t make it delusion; it means you’re applying the wrong criteria.
If you insist that only what can be externally justified counts as real, then of course this won’t make sense. That limit isn’t a flaw in the point, it’s a limit of the frame you’re using.
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.