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.
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?
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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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