1. The Setup: A Classical Enigma
In its canonical form, the double-slit experiment proceeds as follows:
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Photons (or electrons, or neutrons) are emitted toward a barrier with two open slits.
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A detection screen records where each particle lands.
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If no measurement is made at the slits, an interference pattern emerges—suggesting wave-like behaviour.
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If detectors are placed at the slits to determine which slit each particle passed through, the interference pattern disappears—suggesting particle-like behaviour.
This result defies classical causality:
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How can a particle “know” whether the slits are being observed?
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What causes the change in outcome?
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Is the act of measurement retroactively altering the past?
Standard answers appeal to wave–particle duality, observer effects, or collapse of the wavefunction. But these metaphors lean heavily on entity-based assumptions: particles with paths, observers with influence, measurements as interventions.
2. A Relational Reframing
From a relational ontology, we shift focus from particles and detectors to the field of constraint constituted by the whole experimental setup.
Key reframing moves:
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The particle is not an object traversing space; it is a coherence in a structured field of relational potential.
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The double-slit apparatus is not a passive context, but an active topology of affordance.
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What is observed is not a particle’s behaviour, but the relational field’s resolution under a particular configuration of constraint.
The interference pattern does not result from a particle interfering with itself.It results from the system’s affordances allowing multiple pathways to cohere.
When a which-path detector is introduced:
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The relational topology is altered.
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The field now supports a different mode of actualisation—one in which coherence between alternatives is no longer permitted.
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What “causes” the disappearance of interference is not an observer, but a change in the structure of relation.
3. From Causal Agents to Constraint Geometry
In this view, causality is not transmitted from detector to particle. Rather:
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The presence of the detector modifies the compatibility space of the system,
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Which changes the set of coherent outcomes available for actualisation,
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Which in turn produces a different observed distribution on the screen.
There is no need to posit:
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A photon deciding,
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A wavefunction collapsing,
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A retroactive influence from measurement.
Instead, the experimental configuration constitutes a coherent relational field, and the pattern observed is the resolution of that field under constraint.
4. Measurement as Punctuated Constraint
This interpretation has broader implications for quantum measurement:
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Measurement is not the revelation of a pre-existing property, nor the imposition of a new one.
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It is a punctuation in a field of potential—where a particular configuration becomes relationally obligatory.
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The detector doesn’t cause the outcome—it modulates the field in which the outcome becomes definable.
This avoids both:
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The metaphysical quandaries of collapse,
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And the hidden variable detours of Bohmian mechanics.
What is observed is not a local event caused by prior states, but a reconfiguration of systemic coherence across the whole apparatus.
Closing
The double-slit experiment does not expose a paradox in nature—it exposes the inadequacy of substance metaphysics. Once we shift from thinking in terms of entities and influences to fields and constraints, the mystery transforms. What seemed like causality becomes relational resolution. What seemed like quantum weirdness becomes a signpost toward a deeper, processual ontology.
In the next post, we turn to this concept of measurement more directly: What is a measurement in a relational cosmos? What does it mean to extract a value when values are not intrinsic properties, but modes of coherence?
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