Any system that persists must minimise surprisal, thereby gathering evidence for its own generative model, a process known as self-evidencing. However, one dimension of self-evidencing is provably impossible: evidencing the boundary that would constitute the agent as an entity separate from their environment. Recent results in quantum information theory demonstrate that no finite system can measure the entanglement entropy across its own boundary, rendering the separability of agent from environment permanently unevidenceable. Subjectively therefore, there can be no evidence for a self separate from the world. We propose that the Buddhist notion of awakening, in the sense of stable realisation of emptiness, can be understood as the embodied recognition of this impossibility. We formalise the belief in separation as a structural prior over an agent's quantum reference frame (QRF) deployments, constraining all measurement frames to respect a self/environment partition. We describe how contemplative practice progressively opacifies this constraint by developing a model of the agent's own QRF dynamics, revealing the partition as a contingent modelling choice rather than a given feature of reality. Once visible, the prior is eliminated via Bayesian model reduction resulting in a post-dual agent with unconstrained QRF deployments. We argue that such priors suppress the inherent contextuality of the boundary and that their removal constitutes a formal counterpart to the Buddhist notion of emptiness realisation. Self-evidencing may continue unimpeded after this transition, grounded in structural realism about causal regularities, while the ontological commitment to a bounded self is relinquished. We discuss empirical predictions, including altered dynamical regimes in neural systems, and the formal relationship between emptiness realisation and compassion.
Any system that persists must minimise surprisal, thereby gathering evidence for its own generative model, a process known as self-evidencing. However, one dimension of self-evidencing is provably impossible: evidencing the boundary that would constitute the agent as an entity separate from their environment. Recent results in quantum information theory demonstrate that no finite system can measure the entanglement entropy across its own boundary, rendering the separability of agent from environment permanently unevidenceable. Subjectively therefore, there can be no evidence for a self separate from the world. We propose that the Buddhist notion of awakening, in the sense of stable realisation of emptiness, can be understood as the embodied recognition of this impossibility. We formalise the belief in separation as a structural prior over an agent's quantum reference frame (QRF) deployments, constraining all measurement frames to respect a self/environment partition. We describe how contemplative practice progressively opacifies this constraint by developing a model of the agent's own QRF dynamics, revealing the partition as a contingent modelling choice rather than a given feature of reality. Once visible, the prior is eliminated via Bayesian model reduction resulting in a post-dual agent with unconstrained QRF deployments. We argue that such priors suppress the inherent contextuality of the boundary and that their removal constitutes a formal counterpart to the Buddhist notion of emptiness realisation. Self-evidencing may continue unimpeded after this transition, grounded in structural realism about causal regularities, while the ontological commitment to a bounded self is relinquished. We discuss empirical predictions, including altered dynamical regimes in neural systems, and the formal relationship between emptiness realisation and compassion.
This project operationalizes the 2026 preprint "There is no self-evidence: A physics of emptiness realisation" as a source-anchored software artifact. Its central claim is that a finite agent can use a boundary for prediction while never obtaining evidence that the boundary is ontologically real, and the software separates three local artifact roles: formal sanity checks for source equations, positive-control-style finite mechanism checks, and discriminating tests that reject stronger readings when a control is perturbed. The formal layer maps the paper's quantum free-energy principle (qFEP) and quantum reference frame (QRF) equations into finite operational surrogates, bridging each paper equation to a specific software artifact. The computed artifacts are a suite of finite quantum-information and contextuality audits — spanning two-qubit separability and entanglement entropy, Bell and contextuality witnesses, thermodynamic and open-system dynamics, seeded quantum-trajectory sampling checked against exact solutions, and frame-covariance checks for the quantum reference frame relabelings — with explicit positive controls, negative controls, or boundary checks recorded where the corresponding artifact contract requires them. The software represents QRF deployments as policies over boundary-channel sectorisations, using the same finite bitstream under self/environment/contextual relabelings so that QRF labels can organize prediction, action selection, and transformation covariance while failing to become evidence for an ontological self/world boundary. Bayesian model reduction is implemented as a sweep over prior precision and metacognitive access, extended with a sensitivity grid over observation noise. The separation prior is pruned only when removing it lowers the model's free energy, and kept when its remaining contribution to accuracy still offsets its complexity cost. The active-inference layer uses the inferactively-pymdp library (Heins et al. 2022) with profile-specific likelihood, transition, preference, and prior arrays for the separation-constrained, opacified, and post-dual quantum reference frame deployments, then records posterior beliefs, policy posteriors, selected actions, expected-free-energy summaries, seeded stochastic ensembles with null controls and replay seeds, and confidence intervals, without treating those simulations as empirical subject data. Practice protocols, compassion-policy scope, criticality-style indicators, quantum-boundary dynamics, empirical adapters, and artifact-release readiness are therefore written as bounded model interfaces, simulated indicators, local private release-readiness records, or blocked evidence classes. A physical realization of the quantum free-energy principle, public independent reproduction, and any human practice efficacy, neural measurement, or clinical outcome remain blocked future evidence classes. All manuscript and code source materials are available at https://github.com/docxology/realizing_emptiness
Sandved-Smith, Fields, Doctor, Laukkonen and Hohwy argue that any system which persists must minimise surprisal and so gather evidence for its own generative model, but that one dimension of this self-evidencing is provably impossible: evidencing the boundary that would constitute the agent as separate from its environment. Because no finite system can measure the entanglement entropy across its own boundary, the separability of agent from environment is permanently unevidenceable, and they propose that the realisation of emptiness is the embodied recognition of this impossibility. We take their result to be correct and do not contest it. We ask what survives it when the self/environment partition is read not as a static holographic screen but as a rate—the moving locus, in the Coherence– Rupture–Regeneration (CRR) framework, at which accumulated Fisher information saturates the Cramer–Rao bound, ´ C·Ω = 1. CRR has been shown to govern the temporal coordination of precision channels in active inference; here we apply it to the boundary the impossibility theorem concerns. Embedding CRR in the quantum reference frame (QRF) formalism the original argument employs, we find: that the rupture instant is itself screen-inducing, so CRR inherits the impossibility rather than escaping it; that the single point at which the framework fails the formalism’s unitarity requirement is, on a measurement-theoretic reading, a signature rather than a defect; that the forbidden spatial correlation is robustly bounded by, though not identical to, an accumulated temporal quantity; and that the convergence of many finite systems produces a genuine, macroscopic, collective now through a synchronisation transition we establish by finite-size scaling against validated benchmarks. The contribution is not a refutation but a relocation: emptiness moves from an epistemic limit on measurement to an ontological claim about a present with no content of its own, met by the selectively weighted past of every other finite system. Keywords: self-evidencing; emptiness; quantum reference frames; holographic screens; free energy principle; Fisher information; Cramer–Rao saturation; synchronisation.
Abstract The Light & Flux framework (L&F) derives complex Hilbert space as the unique inferential geometry available to finite agents, identifying macroscopic classicality as a lossy compression forced by rate-distortion necessity. This paper argues that Zen Buddhist contemplative phenomenology constitutes independent, first-person convergent evidence for this structural diagnosis. Treating contemplative reports as data generated by agents who have partially destabilized their own Classical Markov Blankets, we construct a strict tier-by-tier mapping between L&F’s architecture and central Buddhist doctrines. Anicca (impermanence) maps onto the structured absence of the Latent Markov Substrate (Tier 1). The Kantian Codec—spacetime, local causality, and narrative selfhood—maps onto the Zen diagnosis of the fabricated world and constructed self (Anattā, Tier 3). Śūnyatā (emptiness) maps onto the Non-Derivability Principle, establishing that classical outcomes are formally “empty” of Tier 2 grounding because the Simplex Projection is non-invertible. Nāgārjuna’s tetralemma is shown to diagnose the exact interpretive errors rejected by L&F’s tier discipline, and his Middle Way is identified as the philosophical correlate of that discipline—grounded not in preference but in rate-distortion necessity. We do not claim either tradition proves the other. Rather, they establish a mutual constraint: L&F supplies a formal vocabulary that renders Zen reports structurally precise, while Zen provides experiential evidence that L&F’s Copernican inversion corresponds to accessible features of consciousness. Ultimately, both converge on a shared epistemic limit: the Kantian Codec cannot fully represent its own origin.
This paper develops an extension of Existential Realism, a philosophical framework that distinguishes existence (what concretely is in the present moment) from reality (the broader causal–structural domain that includes past events, causal relations, informational traces, and structured future possibilities that are real but not presently existent). We synthesize core ideas from the original Existential Realism framework—ontological emergence, entanglement, temporal asymmetry, dimensional collapse, and the notion of a “dimensionless source”—and push them into new conceptual terrain. Time is placed at the heart of ontology: the present moment is the locus of existence, continually generating new actuality from prior reality. Past and future are real (with causal efficacy and structure) yet lack present existence. We explore how this two-tiered temporal ontology can accommodate key features of modern physics and metaphysics. In particular, we argue that ontological emergence at each moment provides a genuine arrow of time and a solution to the puzzle of how determinate events arise from an indeterminate backdrop. Quantum entanglement and nonlocal correlations, far from undermining a temporally oriented realism, instead hint at a deeper layer of unity “beneath” spacetime—a layer we articulate as a dimensionless source of reality. The dimensionless source is defined as a non-spatiotemporal relational structure encoding the informational constraints under which spatiotemporal events emerge through sequential actualization. It contains the informational constraints and lawful relations governing the generation of successive present states of the universe. We propose that spacetime and its separations emerge from this atemporal, aspatial ground, such that phenomena like entanglement and wavefunction collapse reveal the traces of a more fundamental order where spatial distance and temporal succession are secondary. Throughout, we connect these ideas to contemporary debates in quantum foundations (e.g. the measurement problem and objective collapse theories), philosophy of time (presentism, eternalism, and the reality of becoming), and speculative metaphysics (structural realism and process ontology). The result is a comprehensive, present-centered realist ontology that aims to reconcile the lived reality of time’s flow with the insights of modern physics, suggesting new avenues for understanding causality, identity, and agency in a dynamic universe.
The measurement dilemma derived from the quantum mechanical observer paradox, together with the Buddhist doctrine of Dependent Origination and Emptiness, collectively points to the constructive nature of the dual cognitive framework in shaping the phenomenal world. From the perspective of modern philosophy of science, this paper conducts a preliminary sorting and discussion at the epistemological level, and briefly elucidates the ultimate original meaning of Dependent Origination and Emptiness. This doctrine is by no means the superficial emptiness interpreted as the deconstruction of material objects in mundane understanding, but refers to the arising, ceasing, opening and closing of cognitive discrimination generated by the objectifying grasping of cognition. All dharmas inherently possess immutable pure nature; apart from observation and discrimination, there exist no fixed attributes or boundaries of all phenomena. The concrete manifestation of all worldly phenomena arises and occurs relying on the activation of cognitive discrimination. Centered on the core perspective of "Observation-Dependent Dependent Origination", this paper argues that quantum superposition state corresponds to the inherent empty potential transcending subject-object discrimination, and wave function collapse corresponds to phenomenal manifestation arising from the initiation of cognitive discrimination. The observer presupposed in physics is essentially the institutionalized and standardized academic embodiment of the subject-object dual cognitive structure. This paper introduces the bifocal lens model as a concise visualized thought tool to interpret the underlying operational mechanism of cognitive shaping and manifestation. Meanwhile, it constructs subject-object discrimination as a general meta-epistemological analytical framework, aiming to break the research misunderstanding of simple analogy between Chinese and Western thoughts, and establish a rational and equal interdisciplinary dialogue path between quantum physics and Eastern mind philosophy.
Abstract Recent advances in mathematical physics reveal that statistical mechanics, quantum decoherence and quantum measurement share an identical mathematical structure: a filtering mapping acting on the system’s degrees of freedom. The filtered information becomes irrecoverable, giving rise to the arrow of time and irreversibility within the reduced description. This paper argues that such filtering operation constitutes a precise physical counterpart to the “discriminating mind (vikalpa)” discussed in Eastern philosophy. The “dim indistinctness” in Laozi, the “Primal Chaos” in Zhuangzi, and the Buddhist notion of “unborn and unextinguished” all characterize the unfiltered state ; while “that which can be named”, “borrowing apertures” and “conceptual imputation” correspond to the implementation of filtering mapping . The essence of spiritual cultivation — attaining ultimate emptiness, mind fasting, samatha-vipassana — lies in gradually reducing the filtering ratio parameter, until both the reference frame and the agent performing filtering vanish entirely, allowing awareness to recognize its primordial nature. This article establishes a unified framework with rigorous scientific foundation and philosophical profundity for the mind-body problem in quantum mechanics, the modern interpretation of Eastern philosophy, and the validity of spiritual practice.