Collapsing onto the Same Record: First-Person Actualisation, Shared Records, and the Collapse Chain
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: We develop an account on which the future, before it is observed, is real potential without definite values, and on which observation actualises it relative to the observer. For an observer who has not yet observed an event, the event is not merely unknown but indefinite; time, for each observer, is a chain of such collapses, causal but indeterminate. The account faces the question that observer-relative views share: how do separate observers come to live in one world? We distinguish two layers of every collapse, a record layer of public traces and an interpretation layer of private readings. Agreement on asking, already established as conviviality in convivial solipsism and as consensus in quantum Darwinism, follows for any shared classical record. We go further and propose that co-readers of a record collapse onto one record-fact, and defend this as the best explanation of agreement, compatible with Zwirn’s prohibition on comparing perceptions because what is shared is a record, not a perception. Financial markets supply such records by institutional design: each second, a changing set of readers co-collapses onto one price while interpreting it divergently. A minimal first-person formalism identifies where non-classical structure could appear and reduces to a classical Markov model when all updates commute. We separate the interpretive claims, which no experiment decides, from testable consequences framed as no-signalling-in-time conditions. Version 2 (November 2026). Changes from version 1: Section 3.3: added support for the scope limitation from Zwirn (2026), “Are events absolute?” (EPJ Web of Conferences 366, 01002). Three of his reservations about the Wigner’s-friend theorems are cited: undoing a measurement makes it hard to regard the outcome as a fact; experiments with macroscopic observers would require apparatus larger than the universe; and photons are not clearly valid stand-ins for observers. Added Adlam (2026, arXiv:2604.12094), who argues from within relational quantum mechanics that explaining collapse requires giving up the completeness of the quantum formalism. Section 3.4: distinguished the potentialities of convivial solipsism, which belong to the observer and are selected without a physical process, from the real potentials and real actualisation of this paper. Section 4.4: stated Zwirn’s position more precisely: agreement on asking holds because asking is itself a measurement, while two observers may still see different results. Added that Zwirn (2026) treats consensus among observers as an open question, and positioned Postulate 1 as one proposal for it. References: added Zwirn (2026), Zwirn (2024, Foundations of Physics 54, 39), Adlam (2026) and Proietti et al. (2019). No claim, lemma, postulate or formal result has been changed. Version 3 (November 2026). Changes from version 2: Section 2.2: added a comparison with Del Santo and Gisin (2021), “The relativity of indeterminacy”. Their determinacy is relative to spacetime regions and independent of knowledge; ours is relative to observation. Added the argument that, before observation, not knowing coincides with indeterminacy because observation creates the value. Section 2.4: related the collapse chain to the creative time of Del Santo and Gisin (2024), with the difference that it passes for each observer separately. Section 3.1: replied to Del Santo and Gisin (2023), “The open past in an indeterministic physics”. Irreversibility belongs to the collapse itself, not to the persistence of records; forgetting removes access to a fact, not the fact. Stated the resulting asymmetry before and after observation. Added Table 1, which sets this account beside Einstein’s realism and Del Santo and Gisin on two questions: whether the unobserved is determinate, and whether the observed past stays determinate when every record is gone. Identified the commitment as that of the growing block universe (Broad 1923), and the opposing view as Dummett’s (1969). New Appendix A: the core claims stated as four axioms, a model showing that they are jointly consistent (in which values come into existence only at observation), and three theorems (the asymmetry, agreement on asking, and the direction of time). A remark shows that dropping each axiom yields a rival position. References: added Del Santo and Gisin (2021, 2023, 2024), Broad (1923), Dummett (1969), Pais (1979), Mermin (1985), Bourne (2002) and Braddon-Mitchell (2004). The core claims of the paper are unchanged; this version makes their foundations and their relation to rival positions explicit. Table numbers after Section 3.1 have shifted by one.
Author: Rao, Huiying
Language: English
Subfield: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225417963