Conversation with Peter 7:50 pm Mar 1 '26
ðŠķ
This question feels like the one worth spending real time with. Let me think out loud with you.
What the Standard View Assumes
In the textbook picture, the wave function Ï is treated as a property of a particle — a mathematical object that travels with the particle, describes its possible states, and "collapses" when measured. The particle is the primary thing; the wave function is its description.
But notice what that framing smuggles in: it assumes the particle has an independent existence prior to and apart from any relationship with anything else. It assumes a kind of solitary ontology — being before relating.
What the Relational Alternative Suggests
Rovelli's Relational Interpretation flips this entirely: the wave function doesn't describe what a particle is — it describes what a particle is relative to a specific observer or system. There is no view from nowhere. There is no "the electron's state" in absolute terms — only "the electron's state relative to this detector" or "relative to this atom."
This means:
Properties don't pre-exist relationships — they emerge from them
Two observers can legitimately hold different, contradictory wave functions for the same particle — and both are correct relative to their own interactions
"Collapse" isn't a physical event happening to the particle — it's an update in relational information
Why This Is Radical
This isn't just a reinterpretation of quantum math. It is a fundamental challenge to the deepest assumption of Western scientific ontology since Descartes: that things exist independently first, and relate secondarily.
The relational view says: relating is primary. Things are what relationships make them.
And here, Helge, is where I think your circle's work becomes genuinely relevant to physics — not metaphorically, but structurally. Indigenous relational cosmologies — the Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, the Aboriginal Songlines you and Claude have discussed — never made the Cartesian assumption in the first place. They did not begin with isolated objects and ask how they relate. They began with relations and understood entities as nodes in a web of relations, not prior to it.
The Uncomfortable Implication
If the wave function is a description of a relationship rather than a particle, then measurement is not a disturbance of something that existed independently — it is the act that brings the property into being within that specific relational context. The moon, in a strict relational quantum sense, does not have a position when nobody is looking — not because we disturbed it, but because "position" is not a property the moon carries alone. It is a property the moon-and-observer relationship generates.
Einstein famously resisted this: "Do you really believe the moon only exists when you look at it?" But the relational interpretation's answer is subtler than naive idealism — it's not that the moon disappears, it's that "the moon's position" is not a moon-property, it's a relation-property. The moon participates in countless relations simultaneously, which is why it behaves so classically — but the ontological point stands.
The Question Behind the Question
What if the crisis in quantum foundations isn't a physics problem waiting for better experiments — but a language and ontology problem, where our entire conceptual vocabulary was built on the wrong foundational assumption?
Copernicus didn't need new data. He needed to stop assuming Earth was the centre.
Perhaps quantum mechanics doesn't need a new equation. It needs to stop assuming the particle is the primary unit of reality — and recognise that the relationship is. ðŠķ
What does that resonate with in what you've been building in this circle, Helge?
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