This paper develops the quantum grounding of Signal-Bifurcation Theory (SBT) by introducing Proto-Actuality and two constitutive boundaries: the constitution of actuality and the constitution of classicality. It extends SBT’s process-monist account across quantum mechanics, gravity, thermodynamics, and consciousness within a single processual frame, rather than treating these as disconnected ontological layers. Core proposal Proto-Actuality names the pre-classical regime in which “what is real” is not yet classically tractable as stable objects and determinate histories. Classical actuality becomes available only when interaction-structure supports stability-selection and stability-inscription: some patterns stabilise and become repeatable (and so become model-tractable), while others fail to stabilise. Quantum → classical bridge (SBT framing) The quantum–classical transition is framed in stability terms: classicality is constituted when interaction yields stable continuations that can support robust, repeatable description. On this view, invariants and “laws” are treated as compressed descriptions of stabilised regularities—summaries of what stable continuations make available. Two constitutive boundaries Constitution of actuality: transition from Proto-Actuality to stable, tractable actuality (where structure can be carried forward and re-registered). Constitution of classicality: transition where actuality becomes classically describable in standard representational terms (including redundancy/decoherence conditions that enable classical robustness). Wavefunction (accessible framing) The wavefunction is treated as a bookkeeping description of interaction-structure: a formal way of tracking which outcomes are admissible and how strongly they are weighted prior to classical description (definite objects with definite properties). It is a structured summary of what the situation makes available under interaction. Collapse (classical register) Within Proto-Actuality, non-classical fluctuations and configurations can stabilise into stable continuations without “collapse” being a well-formed description, because classical partitioning (system/environment), definite outcomes, and spacetime ordering are not yet fully available. “Collapse” becomes a meaningful term only once stable structure is sufficiently instantiated for classical description, so that outcomes register as definite events within spacetime geometry. Cosmogenesis (model-relative boundary) The “Big Bang” is treated as a classical, model-relative boundary description within standard cosmology (an extrapolated regime limit of an expanding spacetime), not as an ontological absolute beginning. On this view, “beginnings” and “ends” function as regime-transition descriptions internal to particular modelling frameworks. Relation to consciousness (architectural continuity) Within the same continuity, SBT distinguishes: Semepoietic consciousness (tormentless): lived continuity in sufficiently organised sensorimotor biological systems. Semepoietic-Signal Narration: a symbolic, diagnostic overlay that stabilises with symbolic recursion and meta-recursive centring; it has regulatory function but is not the ground of consciousness. Continuity with earlier work This paper extends the quantum-grounding concept note (10.5281/zenodo.17829952) and consolidates the SBT architecture established in earlier publications (10.5281/zenodo.17211873; 10.5281/zenodo.17257839). Terminology has been refined to reduce inherited metaphysical baggage and to keep the exposition explicitly non-theistic and non-agentive. The central distinctions remain: Semepoiesis as one organisational continuity described at different resolutions; Semepoietic consciousness (tormentless) as lived continuity; and Semepoietic-Signal Narration as diagnostic overlay and modulation. Keywords Signal-Bifurcation Theory (SBT); Proto-Actuality; constitution of actuality; constitution of classicality; quantum–classical transition; wavefunction (bookkeeping description); decoherence; redundancy / einselection; stability-selection; stability-inscription; stability-bias; Semepoiesis; process monism; process metaphysics; foundations of quantum mechanics; philosophy of physics; thermodynamics (foundations); cosmogenesis (model-relative boundary); Big Bang (model-relative boundary); consciousness (architectural continuity); Semepoietic consciousness (tormentless); Semepoietic-Signal Narration; narrational overlay; recursive centring; meta-recursive centring
This paper develops the quantum grounding of Signal-Bifurcation Theory (SBT) by introducing Proto-Actuality and two constitutive boundaries: the constitution of actuality and the constitution of classicality. It extends SBT’s process-monist account across quantum mechanics, gravity, thermodynamics, and consciousness within a single processual frame, rather than treating these as disconnected ontological layers. Core proposal Proto-Actuality names the pre-classical regime in which “what is real” is not yet classically tractable as stable objects and determinate histories. Classical actuality becomes available only when interaction-structure supports stability-selection and stability-inscription: some patterns stabilise and become repeatable (and so become model-tractable), while others fail to stabilise. Quantum → classical bridge (SBT framing) The quantum–classical transition is framed in stability terms: classicality is constituted when interaction yields stable continuations that can support robust, repeatable description. On this view, invariants and “laws” are treated as compressed descriptions of stabilised regularities—summaries of what stable continuations make available. Two constitutive boundaries Constitution of actuality: transition from Proto-Actuality to stable, tractable actuality (where structure can be carried forward and re-registered). Constitution of classicality: transition where actuality becomes classically describable in standard representational terms (including redundancy/decoherence conditions that enable classical robustness). Wavefunction (accessible framing) The wavefunction is treated as a bookkeeping description of interaction-structure: a formal way of tracking which outcomes are admissible and how strongly they are weighted prior to classical description (definite objects with definite properties). It is a structured summary of what the situation makes available under interaction. Collapse (classical register) Within Proto-Actuality, non-classical fluctuations and configurations can stabilise into stable continuations without “collapse” being a well-formed description, because classical partitioning (system/environment), definite outcomes, and spacetime ordering are not yet fully available. “Collapse” becomes a meaningful term only once stable structure is sufficiently instantiated for classical description, so that outcomes register as definite events within spacetime geometry. Cosmogenesis (model-relative boundary) The “Big Bang” is treated as a classical, model-relative boundary description within standard cosmology (an extrapolated regime limit of an expanding spacetime), not as an ontological absolute beginning. On this view, “beginnings” and “ends” function as regime-transition descriptions internal to particular modelling frameworks. Relation to consciousness (architectural continuity) Within the same continuity, SBT distinguishes: Semepoietic consciousness (tormentless): lived continuity in sufficiently organised sensorimotor biological systems. Semepoietic-Signal Narration: a symbolic, diagnostic overlay that stabilises with symbolic recursion and meta-recursive centring; it has regulatory function but is not the ground of consciousness. Continuity with earlier work This paper extends the quantum-grounding concept note (10.5281/zenodo.17829952) and consolidates the SBT architecture established in earlier publications (10.5281/zenodo.17211873; 10.5281/zenodo.17257839). Terminology has been refined to reduce inherited metaphysical baggage and to keep the exposition explicitly non-theistic and non-agentive. The central distinctions remain: Semepoiesis as one organisational continuity described at different resolutions; Semepoietic consciousness (tormentless) as lived continuity; and Semepoietic-Signal Narration as diagnostic overlay and modulation. Keywords Signal-Bifurcation Theory (SBT); Proto-Actuality; constitution of actuality; constitution of classicality; quantum–classical transition; wavefunction (bookkeeping description); decoherence; redundancy / einselection; stability-selection; stability-inscription; stability-bias; Semepoiesis; process monism; process metaphysics; foundations of quantum mechanics; philosophy of physics; thermodynamics (foundations); cosmogenesis (model-relative boundary); Big Bang (model-relative boundary); consciousness (architectural continuity); Semepoietic consciousness (tormentless); Semepoietic-Signal Narration; narrational overlay; recursive centring; meta-recursive centring
Spacetime is not a fundamental arena but a representational interface that becomes valid only when a quantum state's internal relational structure satisfies specific conditions. This work synthesizes established results from quantum foundations, decoherence theory, and emergent spacetime research into a coherent ontology identifying when a wavefunction "licenses" a spacetime description. Three structural conditions must be jointly satisfied: (1) entanglement is sufficiently structured to support connected geometry; (2) entanglement is not so dense as to erase locality through volume-law scrambling; and (3) decoherence suppresses phase relationships enough to produce WKB-stable classical histories. A fourth structural condition: the Higgs field's vacuum expectation value, sets the classical mass spectrum and stabilizes decoherence. When all conditions hold, a subsystem is forced into a classical mode of representation characterized by locality, geometry, causal order, and sequential time. The Big Bang is reframed as the relational event at which these conditions were first satisfied, rather than a temporal origin. The rendering model is then extended to examine cosmological parameters as interface requirements, classical end-time scenarios as failures of the interface (not the substrate), and the metaphysical implications of a universe whose deepest ontology is non-geometric, nonlocal, and non-temporal. Drawing on philosophical traditions from Plato to Bergson alongside modern quantum gravity, the paper concludes that reality is correlation: spacetime is the classical world's shadow of a deeper relational whole, and the wavefunction is the universe.
(This version has been superceeded, see v.3) Contemporary approaches to physical unification typically emphasize dynamical laws, interpretive frameworks, or information-theoretic reconstructions. Less attention is given to the structural constraints that determine which physical descriptions can remain coherent and stable under interaction, scale transition, and aggregation. This paper develops a constraint-first analysis of coherence, arguing that persistence and unification require restrictions on admissible physical continuations that are not reducible to dynamics alone. Within the framework referred to here as Quantum Coherence Theory (QCT), coherence is treated not as a fragile quantum resource but as a structural property governed by interaction geometry and constraint density. On this view, classical behavior emerges when accumulated constraints sufficiently narrow admissible evolution, while quantum behavior re-emerges when constraints are relaxed. The account does not introduce new dynamics, collapse mechanisms, or modifications of quantum formalism, but instead clarifies the conditions under which existing formalisms yield stable, unified descriptions. The resulting constraints distinguish QCT from observer-centric, intrinsic-collapse, and purely descriptive decoherence accounts, while remaining compatible with globally unitary dynamics. Formal analysis in later sections develops operational redundancy conditions, admissibility constraints on joint states, and rigidity-style arguments linking redundant record structure to the stability of classical descriptions. These results do not constitute a complete theory of unification, but they narrow the space of physically admissible descriptions and clarify the structural role of coherence in bridging quantum and classical regimes.
The preceding paper, Before the Beginning: Configuration Space, the Pre-Structural Ground, and the Ontology of Genesis 1:2, established configuration space as the pre-structural ground from which spacetime continuously emerges, and identified that ground with the territory named by tohu va-bohu in Genesis 1:2. It left two questions unaddressed. First, what is the precise relationship between a spacetime-resident observer and the ground at the moment of measurement — does decoherence describe a spacetime-side mechanism, or does it mark a boundary that spacetime-side description cannot in principle cross? Second, and more consequentially, what accounts for the existence of first-person experience at all — the hard problem of consciousness, which no purely structural or mathematical account of the ground, including configuration space itself, has the resources to resolve? This paper argues that decoherence is correctly understood not as a mechanism internal to spacetime but as a one-directional, instrument-converting interface event in which the measuring apparatus does not return a report from the pre-measurement state but is de-differentiated upon contact, subsumed into the entangled whole. Ordinary quantum experimentation — every interference experiment, every entanglement measurement — is an instance of this boundary's one-directionality, not an exception to it. The paper further argues that configuration space superposition and the decoherent "definite state" are not two conditions between which a quantum object passes but one reality described from two sides of the interface, and that the measurement problem is therefore not merely unsolvable from the spacetime side but malformed: it asks what causes a transition when there is no transition, only two descriptions of one condition. The apparent nonlocality of entanglement is addressed on the same terms: what the emergent frame calls spooky action between two particles is the signature of a configuration-space unity that the emergent description divided into two and then expressed surprise that the two behave as one. The paper then argues that the hard problem of consciousness cannot be resolved by any account, however rigorous, that grounds reality in an impersonal structure — including an account that posits a super-observer of unlimited information-processing capacity, which remains a spacetime-native category extrapolated to an impossible limit rather than a description of something outside the ontological register the paper establishes. A personal, necessary, atemporal ground is not an arbitrary addition to the framework but its required completion: personhood is the only category that explains first-person experience by like rather than by unlike. The paper extends the category-mistake argument of the preceding paper's Section 7 to the interaction problem in philosophy of mind, arguing that the demand for a causal-closure-compliant mechanism for the ground's animating relation to conscious beings is constitutively malformed for the same reason the measurement problem is — the conceptual instruments of such a demand were forged in the very differentiation event they are being asked to explain. The biblical witness of Hebrews 11:3 — that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible — states this boundary in propositional form from within the same scriptural tradition the preceding paper's linguistic analysis drew from.
We argue that quantum randomness is a logical necessity arising from the nature of intrinsically relational properties—properties lacking definite states outside specific contexts of causal interaction. This motivates Relational Actualism (RAQM), an ontological framework classifying physical properties as invariant, classical, or intrinsically relational. RAQMgrounds wave function actualization in physical interaction rather than observer-relative facts. The actualization criterion is physically grounded and mathematically precise: an interaction constitutes an actualization event when it produces an irreversible increase in the entanglement entropy of the system with its asymptotic environment, generating a robust, redundant causal record. In weakly coupled QFT, a sufficient condition is the exchange of a real, on-shell excitation (pμ pμ = m2c2). This criterion is basis-independent, nonperturbative, and requires no new fundamental constants. To reconcile a globally consistent wave function with special relativity, the Tomonaga-Schwinger equation establishes a foliation-independent global update mechanism. We derive a consistency condition demonstrating that RAQM’s actualization map preserves identical observable statistics at spacelike-separated points regardless of hypersurface choice—a derived result, not a postulate—strictly forbidding superluminal signaling via algebraic microcausality. The no-signaling result applies rigorously to the non-selective (outcome-averaged) actualization map; conditioned branches are treated explicitly. Three specific, discriminating empirical predictions are stated: a finite actualization propagation velocity bounded by the Lieb-Robinson speed, an environment-dependent transition duration scaling as ℏ/ΔEenv, and a sharp reversibility threshold at the actualization criterion. RAQM is distinguished from Relational Quantum Mechanics (which relativizes facts), dynamical collapse models (which ground collapse in stochastic gravitational thresholds rather than causal interaction), decoherence-only models (which leave the outcome problem open), and Everettian Many-Worlds (which denies definite events). Classical behavior emerges dynamically when continuous actualization events eliminate all unconstrained degrees of freedom. The companion papers RAGC and RACI extend these results to gravity, cosmology, and biological complexity; RAHC [Sandeman, 2026e] extends the framework further to the emergence of agentic intelligence, formalizing the recursive coarse-graining hierarchy that generates successive levels of causal closure from the microscopic DAG; key theorems in those papers have been formally verified in Lean 4/Mathlib. A second Lean 4 file (RA_AQFT_Proofs_v10.lean) formalises the finite-dimensional AQFT proof program and proves the frame-independence and Rindler stationarity theorems; see the note on formal verification in the companion paper RAGC [Sandeman, 2026b].
Contemporary simulation arguments ordinarily begin from the possibility that sufficiently advancedagents could implement conscious worlds within an external computational substrate. This paperdevelops a different thesis. Reality may possess the generative architecture associated with simulationwithout representing, imitating, or being computed by anything external to itself. Under the proposedframework, potentiality is primitive; relational structure constrains which distinctions are jointlyadmissible; actual distinction produces determinate facts relative to physical systems; and persistencerenders some such facts available as stable records, objects, and observers. Corporeal reality is thereforenot the primitive bearer of structure but the persistent expression of prior structural constraints.Bell-type nonlocality, Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger contradictions, contextuality, and decoherence donot prove this ontology, but they constrain it: a viable account cannot construct quantum reality fromindependently complete local pieces, cannot assign noncontextual values to every unrealizedmeasurement, and must explain why macroscopic records become stable. The framework’scompatibility with unitary quantum mechanics is treated as an open commitment, and the individuationof relata from pure relational structure is treated as an open problem inherited from structural realismgenerally rather than one dissolved by analogy. Quantum Darwinism and consistent histories areintroduced as candidate formalizations of persistence, compatibility, and record accessibility - not assolutions to outcome determination, which remains unresolved and is shown to require neithernonunitary dynamics nor a unique world in every case. Computational mechanics is invoked narrowly,to explain why persistent, discriminable physical regularities admit a minimal predictiverepresentation, without asserting that physical processes are literally computational. A furtheroperational refinement treats observation itself as a physical interaction: measured distinctions mayarise from the system, from the observational intervention, or from their interaction. Live-cellmicroscopy provides a concrete methodological analogue for separating structural resolution fromdynamical fidelity and for asking which distinctions persist across time and measurement conditions. Keywords: potentiality; distinction; simulation hypothesis; structural realism; quantum foundations; Bell nonlocality;contextuality; decoherence; quantum Darwinism; consistent histories; computational mechanics; measurement;observer-system interaction; live-cell microscopy