Why Physicists Disagree Wildly On What Quantum Mechanics Says About Reality

A Nature survey (here) highlights a familiar but unresolved paradox: the most precise and successful theory in modern physics—quantum mechanics—still lacks a shared interpretation of what it means. Is the wavefunction real? Is quantum theory about particles, probabilities, information, or something else? After a century of extraordinary predictive power, physicists still disagree on whether the theory describes reality or merely models outcomes.

From the perspective of relational ontology, this confusion isn’t surprising. In fact, it’s precisely what we’d expect when modern physics is still working within metaphysical assumptions that quantum theory itself has already undermined.

Here are four key reframings:

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1. There is no “quantum world”—because there is no unconstrued world.

The debate assumes there’s a physical reality “out there” that quantum theory either does or does not describe. But relational ontology begins from a different starting point: phenomena are not things but construed events. A theory like quantum mechanics isn’t a mirror of a pre-existing world—it’s a structured potential for construal. The quantum wavefunction isn’t a “real object” or “just information”—it’s a system, a theory of possible instances, awaiting a perspectival cut.

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2. The observer–observed divide is not a mystery—it’s a misconstrual.

Quantum puzzles often hinge on the observer’s role in measurement. Does the observer collapse the wavefunction? What happens when no one is watching?

These questions presuppose a dualism between subject and object, knower and known. But relational ontology treats this distinction not as an ontological given, but as a cut within the system. The observer and observed are co-constituted in the act of construal. Measurement is not epistemic interference—it is actualisation within a potential.

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3. Wavefunction “reality” is a category mistake.

Physicists in the survey disagree on whether the wavefunction is real. But this assumes that “reality” is a simple category—either you exist or you don’t.

Relational ontology makes a sharper distinction: structured potentials are not actual entities, but neither are they fictions. The wavefunction belongs to the realm of system—a theoretical space of possibility. Its instantiation—what physicists call a measurement—is a perspectival shift, not a metaphysical transformation.

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4. Meaning precedes measurement.

Quantum experiments don’t generate raw data that later acquires meaning—they produce phenomena only through construal. The apparatus, the observable, the notion of “collapse”—these are not neutral or passive. They are symbolic selections within a semiotic system. The meaning of quantum events is not discovered but enacted.

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In sum: the survey reveals not just disagreement, but the limits of the metaphysical frame in which these debates are taking place. As long as quantum theory is interpreted through a lens that separates reality from construal, observer from observed, and theory from meaning, confusion will persist.

Relational ontology doesn’t offer another interpretation of quantum mechanics. It offers a reorientation: from what the theory says about the world to how the world arises in and through construal.

Why Quantum Theory Confounds Physicists: A Relational Ontology Perspective

For decades, physicists have struggled to make sense of quantum mechanics. Wavefunctions, superpositions, entanglement — these concepts seem almost magical, defying intuition and conventional logic. But the confusion isn’t a failure of intellect or mathematics; it’s a structural feature of how quantum theory construes reality.

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Quantum Mechanics as Systemic Potential

At its heart, quantum theory is a systemic potential — a formal structure that defines relational constraints among observables, probabilities, and measurement contexts. It is not a thing floating in the world, waiting to be discovered. It is a framework of possibility, a landscape of what can be instantiated when we perform specific symbolic cuts.

Physicists often make a critical misstep: they treat the wavefunction as an object with inherent reality, instead of recognising it as a potential for construal. This misalignment is the first source of the persistent “weirdness.”

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The Role of Symbolic Cuts

Every interpretation of quantum mechanics is a way of performing a symbolic cut — a perspectival act that selects which aspects of the potential become actualised instances:

• Copenhagen: Measurement creates the instance; the wavefunction “collapses” in this construal.

• Many-Worlds: All possible instances exist in branching universes; each observer experiences one branch.

• Bohmian Mechanics: Particles are guided by hidden variables; the instance is aligned with the system potential.

• Objective Collapse: Stochastic laws embedded in the system define which instances emerge.

• QBism: Outcomes are personal experiences; the agent updates beliefs based on the construal.

Each cut produces a coherent phenomenon — but only within its own symbolic frame.

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Instance Formation and Collective Uptake

An instance — the measured outcome, the particle observed, the branch experienced — emerges only through the cut. Without the cut, there is no event to observe.

But physics doesn’t operate in isolation. Stability of phenomena depends on collective uptake: alignment of observers, instruments, and institutional conventions. Textbooks, lab practices, peer review, and shared protocols all fix which cuts are treated as “normal” or “objective.” Confusion arises when the collective favours one cut rhetorically while multiple cuts remain valid.

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Paradoxes as Artefacts of Misaligned Cuts

Famous quantum paradoxes — Schrödinger’s cat, Wigner’s friend, nonlocal correlations — are not signs of reality misbehaving. They are artefacts of misaligned symbolic cuts, where system potentials are read as pre-existing objects instead of being reflexively constructed through experiment, observation, and interpretation.

Recognising this reflexivity dissolves the “weirdness.” Quantum mechanics is internally coherent; the challenge is aligning system, instance, and collective construal explicitly.

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Towards a Meta-Cut

A relational-ontology approach invites a meta-cut: a perspective that sees all interpretations as partial instantiations of the same systemic potential. No single interpretation is “true” in an absolute sense; each construes the potential differently. Paradoxes emerge only when one cut is treated as reality itself.

By making cuts explicit, acknowledging their reflexive nature, and situating phenomena within collective uptake, physicists can finally understand why quantum mechanics behaves as it does — not because the world is “crazy,” but because the act of observation, measurement, and interpretation creates the phenomena it describes.

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Conclusion

Quantum confusion is a structural feature of the theory, not a defect. From a relational ontology perspective:

1. Quantum theory is systemic potential.

2. Every interpretation performs a symbolic cut.

3. Instances arise only through cuts and collective alignment.

4. Paradoxes reflect misalignment, not ontological failure.

Understanding quantum mechanics thus requires reflexive awareness: an acknowledgment that the observer, the experiment, and the symbolic framework are co-creating the very phenomena physics seeks to describe.