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Irreversibility Without Cause_ The Hidden Non-Determinism of the Many-Worlds Postulate

Bostick, Devin

Published Nov 10, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

Supersession Note — May 2026 This CODES-era work is an exploratory predecessor and is no longer the canonical statement of the author’s program. It has been superseded by the identity-persistence stack: https://zenodo.org/records/20127331. Claims in this record concerning replacement of probability, unrestricted universality, ontology, physics, intelligence, biology, governance, or reality should be read as developmental framing, not as the current formal claim. The current claim is restricted to identity persistence under transformation within explicit admissibility constraints. Abstract: This work demonstrates that the Everett (Many-Worlds) interpretation of quantum mechanics, while claiming full unitarity, introduces irreversibility without cause. Decoherence is governed by the same unitary operator U(t) and its inverse U†(t); treating branch separation as permanent therefore imposes an unmotivated non-unitary constraint. Logical audit shows that the transition from approximate to exact orthogonality re-inserts collapse by assumption. The paper concludes that a genuinely deterministic formulation must permit lawful recoherence, consistent with Structured Resonance Dynamics.

DOI
10.5281/zenodo.17568563

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Supersession Note — May 2026 This CODES-era work is an exploratory predecessor and is no longer the canonical statement of the author’s program. It has been superseded by the identity-persistence stack: https://zenodo.org/records/20127331. Claims in this record concerning replacement of probability, unrestricted universality, ontology, physics, intelligence, biology, governance, or reality should be read as developmental framing, not as the current formal claim. The current claim is restricted to identity persistence under transformation within explicit admissibility constraints. Abstract: This work demonstrates that the Everett (Many-Worlds) interpretation of quantum mechanics, while claiming full unitarity, introduces irreversibility without cause. Decoherence is governed by the same unitary operator U(t) and its inverse U†(t); treating branch separation as permanent therefore imposes an unmotivated non-unitary constraint. Logical audit shows that the transition from approximate to exact orthogonality re-inserts collapse by assumption. The paper concludes that a genuinely deterministic formulation must permit lawful recoherence, consistent with Structured Resonance Dynamics.
Supersession Note — May 2026 This CODES-era work is an exploratory predecessor and is no longer the canonical statement of the author’s program. It has been superseded by the identity-persistence stack: Universal Identity and Persistence: https://zenodo.org/records/19904166 A Mathematical Theory of Identity Persistence: https://zenodo.org/records/19967345 A Coding Theorem for Identity Persistence: https://zenodo.org/records/19996467 Identity Persistence Calculus: https://zenodo.org/records/19905404 The Bounded Corridor: https://zenodo.org/records/19645631 The Unclosable Bridge: https://zenodo.org/records/19601328 Claims in this record concerning replacement of probability, unrestricted universality, ontology, physics, intelligence, biology, governance, or reality should be read as developmental framing, not as the current formal claim. The current claim is restricted to identity persistence under transformation within explicit admissibility constraints: recurrence comparability, admissible redescription, bounded drift, scalar or scalar-equivalent governance, finite identity capacity, and deterministic finite-regime coding/enforcement where applicable.
Abstract This paper conducts a consistency audit of ontological claims made by the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Without proposing any alternative interpretation or modification to the formalism, the analysis examines whether claims of strict unitarity, determinism, and literal permanent branching are jointly admissible under unitary dynamics alone. The central result identifies a required but illicit substitution from approximate to exact orthogonality in decoherence-based branching accounts. Because unitary evolution preserves inner products, permanent branch separation cannot be derived dynamically without additional postulates. Modern “emergent” formulations avoid contradiction only by relinquishing literal ontological status, thereby reclassifying branching from physical ontology to descriptive metaphor. The paper draws no experimental conclusions and advances no new physics; it functions solely as an internal consistency audit of existing interpretive claims.
⚠️ CORRECTION NOTICE (added 2026): The author has since identified serious errors in this work through a systematic adversarial audit. The central claims of this record should not be relied upon. Specific issues found across this research program include implementation errors (e.g., conflation of signed cosine with cos²), circular definitions, proof gaps, results that reduce to known theorems, and effects that vanish under proper null models and direct-influence correction. This record is left online for transparency and as a documented case, not as a valid result. For the author's current, audited methodology, see the later work on classical-baseline auditing of quantum-like contextuality claims: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20680607 — A. Ogasawara This manuscript explores structural aspects of irreversible projection and sequential operations under minimal assumptions.Rather than introducing new physical postulates, it examines how order dependence and relational representations arise in systems subject to information deletion. The analysis focuses on the structural consequences of projection processes and discusses connections to phase-like representations, interference-type effects, and approximate reversibility in weak-projection regimes. The work is intended as a formal and conceptual contribution to the study of order-dependent dynamics across physical and computational systems.No modification of standard quantum theory is proposed.Note: Parts of the manuscript were linguistically and structurally refinedwith the assistance of AI-based tools.All scientific content, analysis, and conclusions are the author's own.
What are the physical conditions required for agency?Recent work has rigorously shown that purely unitary, coherence-preserving quantum dynamics are insufficient to support deliberation, comparison of counterfactual actions, and reliable action selection. These results establish a genuine no-go theorem for agency in a strictly quantum-coherent regime.This paper provides a structural completion of that no-go result. Rather than challenging its correctness, the analysis identifies the underlying assumption on which it rests: that unitarity alone is sufficient as an admissibility criterion for decision endpoints. We show that this assumption is incomplete.Working within the Tier-0 closure framework, physical lawfulness is characterized by closure-stable fixed points selected by structural constraints rather than by unconstrained dynamical evolution. Within this framework, coherent quantum states may function as intermediate computational or representational states but are excluded as lawful endpoints for records, decisions, and control.Applying closure stability to quantum systems yields a classical decision subspace without introducing new dynamics, observer-dependent postulates, or interpretation-specific assumptions. The paper further shows that agency requires a closure-stable internal selection process capable of consistent expected-utility comparison. Imposing closure compatibility rigidly fixes the standard quadratic Born probability rule as the only weighting compatible with stability, representation-independence, and admissibility-preserving re-expression.Together, these results integrate agency into the same structural framework that accounts for quantum measurement and probability. The absence of agency in purely quantum-coherent models is shown to reflect an under-constrained admissibility regime rather than a fundamental limitation of quantum theory. Lawful agency emerges as a closure-stable property of coupled agent–world dynamics, fully consistent with standard quantum mechanics.This work clarifies the physical limits of purely quantum models of decision, sharpens existing no-go arguments, and provides a mathematically explicit foundation for agency grounded in structural admissibility rather than interpretation. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18028427
The Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics preserves unitary evolution by rejecting wavefunction collapse and treating all outcome branches as equally real. While mathematically consistent, this move elevates admissible descriptions of a system to ontological status without an accompanying principle of physical selection. In this paper, we argue that quantum branching need not imply ontological multiplicity once structural admissibility, temporal constraint, and recoverability are made explicit. Unitary evolution defines the space of allowable continuations, but only a subset of these persist forward in time due to structural resolution. Within this framework, the appearance of branching reflects under-resolved admissible paths rather than the realization of multiple worlds. Many-Worlds is thus reinterpreted as a transitional bookkeeping scaffold rather than a necessary ontological commitment.
[Author’s Note (April 2026)]Supersession Notice: This 2025 paper explores the early KB-Flux framework. It has been structurally overhauled and formally superseded by “The Light & Flux (L&F) Framework (2026)”. While the 2025 version relies on cognitive metaphors—treating the wave function as a “generative model” —the 2026 L&F framework provides a rigorous mathematical proof deriving complex Hilbert space from finite-inference constraints. It replaces “phenomenal grammar” with the Simplex Projection (𐍀), grounded in metabolic and thermodynamic mandates. Researchers seeking the formal Non-Derivability Principle and a stratified three-tier ontology should refer to the 2026 version. Original AbstractReaders are advised to treat the present paper strictly as a historical record of the framework’s initial development. For the current, accurate formulation, please refer to the new publication.The measurement problem—why quantum superpositions yield definite outcomes upon observation—has persisted as the central interpretative challenge of quantum mechanics for nearly a century. This paper proposes that the problem dissolves when viewed through the joint lens of Kantian epistemology and predictive processing (Bayesian brain) theory. Drawing on Kant’s distinction between phenomena (experience) and noumena (reality-in-itself), we argue that the quantum wave function (Ψ) does not represent a physical field in the noumenal world, but rather the generative model of a prediction-generating cognitive agent. In this framework, "superposition" represents a state of uninitialized probabilistic expectation (Latent Space), while "collapse" is reinterpreted as a Bayesian belief update—the discrete transition from a probability distribution to a definite value, necessitated by the information-processing constraints of the observer. By treating the observer not as a passive witness but as an active inference engine, this framework: Naturalizes the collapse postulate: Measurement is the update of an internal model, not a physical discontinuity in nature. Resolves nested-observer paradoxes: Wigner's Friend is resolved by treating reality as a distributed system with eventual consistency, where distinct agents hold distinct local cache states. Grounds the Born Rule: We argue that the squared-amplitude probability rule (P=∣Ψ∣2P=|\Psi|^2P=∣Ψ∣2) serves as a transcendental constraint (akin to Gleason’s Theorem) required for the internal consistency of any probabilistic agent. This interpretation suggests that the "weirdness" of quantum mechanics reflects the necessary architectural constraints of any finite mind attempting to model an inaccessible reality, effectively treating physics as the "User Interface" of reality.