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Foundations of Physics

A Participatory Universe in the Realist Mode: On the Separation of Observational and Agentive Perspectives in Classical and Quantum Mechanics

Jenann Ismael

Published May 2, 2025• 1 citation
Publisher
DOI
10.1007/s10701-025-00843-4

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Quantum mechanics reconfigures classical assumptions about objectivity by showing that physical description cannot be separated from the processes through which phenomena become intelligible. While Niels Bohr is often read as an instrumentalist or cautious anti-realist, this paper argues instead that his account of measurement advances a transcendental analysis of the conditions under which physical properties can count as objective at all. On this reading, complementarity is not a limit on access to an underlying reality, but a constraint on the forms of description through which physical properties become determinate and communicable. Drawing on a neo-Kantian perspective, I argue that objectivity in quantum theory is neither representational nor observer-independent but is realised through participatory conditions that anchor physical meaning within shared spatio-temporal and causal frameworks. The slogan ‘to be is to measure’ is defended as shorthand for the claim that objective physical properties are not revealed as pre-existing features of nature but arise only within experimental contexts that disclose them as intelligible objects within a shared mode of possible experience.
This article presents a basic concept for a comprehensive, unified theoretical framework for the mechanism of consciousness by synthesizing four cornerstone advances in quantum foundations and information physics: John Archibald Wheeler’s participatory universe and “It from Bit” paradigm [1], Quantum Bayesianism (QBism) with its participatory realism [2], Melvin Vopson’s Infodynamics (encompassing the mass-energy-information equivalence principle and the second law of infodynamics) [3,4], and Wojciech Zurek’s decoherence theory together with Quantum Darwinism, which accounts for the “loss of quantumness” and the emergence of classical objectivity [5,6]. In contrast to objective-collapse models such as Penrose and Hameroff’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) [7], we propose that consciousness is not a secondary emergent phenomenon arising from physical processes within an already-objective spacetime but the „primary participatory agent” that actively extracts and renders the classical, observable, and subjectively experienced reality - including particles, mass, energy, frequency, and spacetime geometry itself - from a deeper, pre-spacetime, purely informational substrate we denote as Φ. A mathematically consistent model is constructed in which consciousness functions as an information-optimizing, self-referential agent within Φ. Quantum states are interpreted as an agent’s subjective Bayesian probabilities (QBism); information entropy is dynamically minimized according to the second law of infodynamics; environmental interactions select robust pointer states through redundant copying (Quantum Darwinism); and participatory measurements actualize definite “its” (Wheeler) from underlying “bits.” The Einstein–Planck–de Broglie equivalence E = mc² = hf, which implies that every massive particle possesses an internal “metronome” ticking at the Compton frequency f ≈ mc²/h, appears only as a stabilized, experienced feature „after” this participatory extraction process. The framework preserves all empirical successes of quantum mechanics while naturally accommodating a simulation-like virtuality of macroscopic reality. We derive explicit mathematical relations, testable predictions, a detailed comparison with Orch-OR, followed by an extensive discussion of potential criticisms, and - crucially - a new extension exploring how the same mechanism may enable the emergence of consciousness in advanced artificial intelligence systems, particularly agentic large language models (LLMs). The result is a physically operational, information-theoretic vision of consciousness as the co-creator of the observable cosmos.
Previously we have shown that a gauge theory utilizing statistical manifolds as fibers offers a playground for a reconceptualization of physics as a participatory "it from bit" universe. Here we demonstrate that within this framework an inertial mass-like quantity naturally emerges as the statistical precision (the inverse covariance) of an agent's predictive model. By considering multi-variate Gaussians and a SO(N) gauge group we show that the second-order Taylor expansion of Kullback-Leibler divergence under belief updating yields a kinetic energy term T=12μ˙TΣp−1μ˙T = \frac{1}{2}\dot{\mu}^T \Sigma_p^{-1} \dot{\mu}T=21​μ˙​TΣp−1​μ˙​, in the variational free energy princple, where the Fisher information metric of the agent's predictive model serves as the mass matrix. This extends the variational free energy principle from a purely dissipative gradient dynamics to a fully Hamiltonian mechanics, with the Lagrangian structure L=T−V\mathcal{L} = T - VL=T−V. Crucially, mass and spacetime-like geometry are defined relative to each agent's prior with objective physics emerging only through inter-agent consensus driven by variational free energy minimization. The framework constitutes a concrete realization of Wheeler's participatory "it from bit" universe, wherein physical law emerges from the epistemic alignment of observing agents rather than existing a priori.