Laura

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.

If reality is one, is your position simply that it just exists, full stop? The paper I’m referring to actually proposes a clear account even at that level.

Thank you for taking the time to elaborate — I really appreciate how thoughtfully you’re engaging with this.

You’re pointing to what I think is the central tension here: the difference between how reality is experienced and how facts themselves are constituted.

I completely agree that questions reorganize experience. They shift attention, interpretation, and meaning. In that sense, a question reshapes the “lived world.” What changes is the structure through which reality is perceived.

But the more difficult question — and the one I’m still thinking through — is whether this reorganization only alters experience, or whether it also participates in the very process by which reality becomes determinate.

What I’m really asking comes down to this. Does a question merely illuminate what is already fixed? Or does it, in some way, participate in selecting or stabilizing one possibility rather than another when things are not yet fully determined?

If it’s the former, then we’re talking about revealing. If it’s the latter, then a question is participating in the process by which reality settles into form.

The distinction may seem subtle, but I think it’s decisive.

I think there may be a misunderstanding here. The hard problem of consciousness asks why experience exists at all. Satoru Watanabe’s work addresses a different question: under what structural conditions facts become well-defined.

The appearance of terms like “subjectivity” and “quantum” does not automatically imply quantum mysticism. If those terms trigger that association, the actual argument may not be getting evaluated on its own terms.

I should clarify something important. The paper I’m drawing from introduces a different definition of “observer,” and it does not equate subjectivity with human consciousness. In that framework, “subjectivity” refers to a structural condition underlying fact formation, not to a mental state.

It also distinguishes between relative and absolute levels of subjectivity, but this is not about minds influencing physics. It’s a claim about the structural preconditions for facts to exist at all.

I’ve noticed that, while I have sent replies and shared papers in response to your comments on previous posts, those have not been addressed, and instead you continue to leave long comments on new posts.

Could you clarify why you choose to comment on new posts rather than replying to the threads where I have already responded?

I am not sending papers at random. I am sharing them because I believe they are directly relevant to the discussion.

Given that you are clearly capable of writing thoughtful and extended comments like these, I believe you are also fully capable of reading and engaging with the papers. I would genuinely welcome hearing your impressions and thoughts on them from someone with such a deep understanding of this topic.

I would therefore appreciate it if you could first respond to the content I have already sent.

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Thank you for such a thoughtful and sincere comment. I really appreciate the openness of how you approached this.

Just to say upfront, I’m not an academic and I don’t claim any formal or specialized training. Still, I genuinely enjoy having careful, serious conversations with people who are thinking honestly about these questions.

I think your example captures something very real: a question can meaningfully reshape how someone experiences their world, by reorganizing attention, meaning, and interpretation. Once a question is introduced, it can change what stands out and how connections are perceived.

Where I’m still reflecting is on a gentle distinction between how reality is experienced and how facts themselves are constituted. I fully agree that questions can transform the former, and I’m curious how far that transformation should be taken when we talk about reality itself.

In any case, I really value the spirit of your comment — this kind of thoughtful exchange is exactly why I’m here.