Quantum mechanics is often regarded as paradoxical or incomplete due to the imposition of a classical ontology that is not suited to its domain. This paper proposes a reinterpretation based on the notion of contextual coherence, in which the quantum state is not an intrinsic property but a relational configuration dependent on interaction conditions. Measurement is thus understood as a regime transition characterized by phase fixation and the dispersion of coherence into the environment. Within this framework, the Résonon is introduced as a minimal conceptual unit articulating energy, information, and temporal phase. It does not constitute a new physical entity but serves as a theoretical tool to express the internal logic of coherence transitions. This approach allows for a reformulation of superposition, contextuality, and decoherence without invoking additional assumptions such as many worlds or hidden variables. Finally, the paper opens an epistemological dialogue with operative knowledge systems such as Ifá, highlighting a convergence around the notion of preparing reality. Quantum mechanics thus emerges as a theory of coherence regimes in transition, where reality stabilizes through contextual configurations rather than as a set of pre-existing objects.
Quantum mechanics is often regarded as paradoxical or incomplete due to the imposition of a classical ontology that is not suited to its domain. This paper proposes a reinterpretation based on the notion of contextual coherence, in which the quantum state is not an intrinsic property but a relational configuration dependent on interaction conditions. Measurement is thus understood as a regime transition characterized by phase fixation and the dispersion of coherence into the environment. Within this framework, the Résonon is introduced as a minimal conceptual unit articulating energy, information, and temporal phase. It does not constitute a new physical entity but serves as a theoretical tool to express the internal logic of coherence transitions. This approach allows for a reformulation of superposition, contextuality, and decoherence without invoking additional assumptions such as many worlds or hidden variables. Finally, the paper opens an epistemological dialogue with operative knowledge systems such as Ifá, highlighting a convergence around the notion of preparing reality. Quantum mechanics thus emerges as a theory of coherence regimes in transition, where reality stabilizes through contextual configurations rather than as a set of pre-existing objects.
This accepted manuscript is structurally governed by THE META-INDEX (Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18169167) Modern quantum mechanics represents an unprecedented computational success in the history of physics, predicting the outcomes of subatomic processes with extraordinary accuracy. Despite this mathematical precision, however, the ontological status of quantum phenomena remains unresolved. This work argues that quantum mechanics correctly describes how systems behave, but fails to explain what quantum phenomena actually are. Concepts such as uncertainty, probability, and superposition are shown to be epistemic constructs—tools that describe incomplete transitions rather than fundamental properties of reality. Through a series of thought experiments and an A–B transition framework, this paper proposes that quantum phenomena should be understood as a constrained and harmonious transition regime between potentiality (A) and realized outcome (B). In this view, quantum is not a domain of indeterminacy, but the physics of becoming: a regulated ontological interval in which outcomes have not yet formed, rather than existing in an indeterminate state. This reinterpretation offers a coherent ontological foundation for quantum mechanics without invoking intrinsic randomness or observer-dependent reality.
This essay argues that many interpretative paradoxes in quantum mechanics arise from a systematic confusion between regimes of description and regimes of existence. It therefore proposes an operative distinction between the real (material dynamics), the concrete (the mark as a stabilising inscription), and theory (the symbolic organisation of prediction). On this basis, degeneracy is reinterpreted as a limit of individuation defined by the experimental cut: where there is no difference at the level of the mark, formal multiplicity amounts to an excess of description rather than to ontological plurality. Likewise, the density matrix is treated as an epistemic operator appropriate to incomplete knowledge and variability of preparation, thereby avoiding the reification of “mixture” into an entity. Interference and superposition are traced back to the manner in which the calculus organises possibilities prior to their separation by a mark. Entanglement is analysed as epistemic correlation inherited in the absence of present interaction, and is distinguished from dynamical non-separability except in cases of effective coupling. In the context of EPR/Bell, it is argued that the update of the predictive regime following a local mark does not constitute a physical process in the distant system; Bell inequalities constrain certain classical grammars of factorisation without determining a positive ontology of superluminal influences. The paper concludes with a critical comparison of consistent histories, informational approaches, and collapse models in terms of their respective ontological costs.
Quantum physics can be understood as an epistemological rupture that transforms the foundations of modern scientific rationality. In contrast to the Newtonian mechanistic worldview that underpinned universalist notions of progress, objectivity, and control, quantum mechanics introduces uncertainty, contextuality, non-locality, and the constitutive role of observation into scientific knowledge. These features destabilize the image of reality as a unified, hierarchically structured, and fully transparent domain, thereby challenging the epistemic premises of Western universalism. At the cultural level, this rupture finds expression in forms of scientific magical realism, where the quantum world appears as strange, paradoxical, elusive and fundamentally ungraspable. Such representations allow the quantum revolution to be interpreted not only as a theoretical breakthrough in physics but as an internal epistemological transformation of modern rationality itself. The issue is not the abandonment of rationality, but the reconfiguration of its foundations: the acknowledgment of uncertainty, contextuality, and the participatory role of the observer as structural features of knowledge. This shift is comparable to the epistemological tensions identified by postcolonial theory in situations where hegemonic discourses encounter forms of knowledge that cannot be reduced to their universalist logic. In this sense, quantum physics emerges as a form of internal epistemological alterity within Western science: while remaining part of its canon, it simultaneously rearticulates its ontological assumptions and limits its claim to constitute the sole normative regime of rationality. Extending quantum logic into social theory enables a shift from mechanistic social ontology toward a quantum social ontology, in which relationality, co-constitution, and process take precedence over fixed entities and linear causality. This transformation unfolds as a form of passive revolution, in the Gramscian sense: a profound ontological reorientation achieved not through the destruction of disciplinary institutions, but through their gradual conceptual reconfiguration. The epistemological outcome of this shift is the pluralization of knowledge and the emergence of a pluriversal onto-epistemological horizon, where scientific rationality becomes compatible with multiple cosmologies and situated ways of knowing. In this sense, the quantum turn opens a pathway toward the decolonization of knowledge and the rethinking of global order beyond universalist epistemic hierarchies.
The origin and basis of the notion of quantum contextuality is identified in the Copenhagen approach to quantum mechanics, where context is automatically invoked by its requirement that the experimental arrangement involved in any measurements or set of measurements be taken into account while, in general, the outcome of a measurement may depend on other measurements immediately preceding or jointly performed on the same system. For Bohr, the specification of the experimental situation of any measurement is essential to its significance in light of complementarity and the omnipresence of the quantum of action in physics; for Heisenberg, the incompatibility of pairs of sharp measurements belonging to different situations coheres with both the completeness of the quantum state as an objective physical description and the principle of indeterminacy. Here, context in the Copenhagen approach is taken to be the equivalence class of experimental arrangements corresponding to a set of compatible measurements of quantum observables in standard quantum mechanics; the associated form of contextuality in quantum mechanics arises via the non-commutativity in general of sharp observables, proven by von Neumann, that can appear, providing different contexts. This notion is related to theoretical situations explored later by Bell, by Kochen and Specker, and by others in relation to the classification of hidden-variables theories and elsewhere in physics. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Contextuality and probability in quantum mechanics and beyond’.
Measurement as Phase Locking: A Physical Interpretation of Quantum Measurement (Phase Ontology — Part III) addresses one of the most stubborn puzzles in modern physics: what “measurement” physically is, and why a quantum superposition yields a single definite outcome. The paper argues that the measurement problem persists largely because phase is treated as merely descriptive, rather than as a physically real organizing layer. Within a phase-ontological framework, measurement is reinterpreted as a coupling-driven coherence transition. A quantum system begins as a distributed phase configuration. When it interacts with a macroscopic detector (and its environment), the interaction imposes many competing constraints on phase relations. Once coupling crosses a practical threshold, only those configurations that can remain coherently stable with the detector–environment system survive: the system phase-locks into a local, dynamically stable configuration. What standard interpretations call “collapse” is therefore not a mysterious, observer-triggered discontinuity, but an emergent stabilization process governed by coupling strength, environmental structure, and phase stability. The paper also situates this account relative to decoherence: decoherence explains the suppression of interference, while phase locking is proposed as the missing stabilizing mechanism that explains why one localized outcome is realized. Probabilities are interpreted not as hidden variables, but as the relative stability of available phase-locking channels, offering a physical reading of the Born rule. This work is Part III of a seven-part series (Parts I–VII). It builds on the foundations of Parts I and II, prepares the ground for Part IV (entanglement and nonlocal correlations), and points ahead to Part VII for experimental implications and falsifiability.
Quantum mechanics is often perceived as conceptually paradoxical because it appears to conflict with deeply rooted intuitions about fixed reality, determinism, and observation. This paper does not propose a new physical theory. Instead, it offers an epistemological reframing of quantum mechanics: not as a direct mathematical unveiling of a fully fixed pre-existing reality, but as a highly precise description of phenomenological structures emerging through observational conditions and interaction. The paper explores: the distinction between mathematical predictive success and ontological completeness, the role of human perception in constructing “fixed reality” intuitions, the phenomenological nature of qualities such as color and temperature, the possibility that some conceptual tensions in quantum mechanics arise from assumptions inherited from macroscopic cognition, and how quantum theory may be interpreted as describing observable structures rather than fixed hidden states. The work intentionally avoids mystical, anti-scientific, or consciousness-centric interpretations of quantum mechanics. It does not deny the existence of reality, nor reject modern physics. Rather, it attempts to clarify what exactly mathematical models are describing when applied to quantum phenomena. This text is positioned as a conceptual and phenomenological reorganization of perspective — a small doorway toward reconsidering how humans frame “reality” itself.