The new era of quantum foundations, fed by the quantum information theory experience and opened in the early 2000s by a series of memorable papers [...].
This volume collects a unified series of formal papers developing the Information Manifold Model (IMM)—a structural realist framework for consciousness, quantum measurement, and temporal experience. IMM treats conscious experience as a structural property of information systems satisfying a minimal set of axioms governing integration, self-reference, temporal continuity, and experiential projection. Within this framework, quantum states are interpreted as representational encodings of informational structure rather than direct ontological entities, and the apparent collapse of the wavefunction is reinterpreted as structural projection rather than physical discontinuity. The collected papers formally establish: • An axiomatic foundation for conscious experience • Structural determinacy and stability of experience • Substrate independence of consciousness • Emergence of temporal experience (chronoception) • Quantitative information-theoretic metrics on conscious manifolds The volume concludes by outlining implications for quantum foundations, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind, while clearly distinguishing established results from speculative extensions. The work is intended as a foundational research program rather than an empirical theory, preserving the formalism of quantum mechanics while clarifying its interpretive structure.
OUF (Information–Observer Unified Framework) series, Papers I–V, preprint v1.0. The series reconstructs physics from operational axioms: Paper I derives the measurement formalism as a theorem; Paper II recasts the equations of quantum mechanics in dual-real information form; Paper III develops detector–recorder systems as quantum channels; Paper IV derives the readout-channel thermal spectrum; Paper V rebuilds open quantum systems and quantum-engine laws from settlement. Remaining papers of the series will be added in a later version. License: CC BY 4.0.
The purpose of the conference (the fourth in the series of Vaxjo conferences) was to bring together scientists (physicists, mathematicians and philosophers) who are interested in foundations of quantum physics. An emphasis was made on both theory and experiment, the underlying objective being to offer to the physical, mathematical and philosophic communities a truly interdisciplinary conference as a privileged place for a scientific interaction. Due to the actual increased role of foundations in the development of quantum information theory as well as the necessity to reconsider foundations at the beginning of the new millennium, the organizers of the conference decided that it was just the right time for taking the scientific risk of trying this.