In conventional interpretations of physics, measurement is often treated as a passive reading of a system’s pre-existing properties. A value — of position, momentum, spin, or charge — is “revealed” by the act of observation. This assumption underlies much of classical science and continues, in various guises, even in quantum theory, where measurement is famously said to “collapse the wavefunction.”
But from a relational ontology, measurement is not a revelation of what was there. It is an event of actualisation — the punctualisation of potential within a constrained relational field.
1. The Classical Illusion: Reading from Reality
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Classical physics encourages the idea that objects have properties independent of observation,
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Measurement is framed as a passive act — reading values from an objective world,
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This presumes entities with intrinsic states, and a detached observer.
2. Quantum Resistance: No Property Without Interaction
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In quantum theory, a system may not have a definite value until measured,
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The measurement doesn’t just disclose a fact — it brings forth a result,
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This collapse is not merely epistemic (a change in our knowledge), but ontological: a real change in the relational configuration.
3. Measurement as Actualisation
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In relational terms, the world is a field of constrained potential,
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Measurement is not the revelation of a pre-given fact but the selection of a coherent configuration — a resolution within a web of tensions,
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The “value” is not what the system had, but what the field allows to stabilise under present constraints.
4. The Apparatus as a Relational Interface
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The measuring device is not an external probe but part of the system,
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It shapes the affordances of the field — it co-produces the condition of actualisation,
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There is no isolated system being measured, only a configured system-event emerging from entangled relation.
5. Measurement Outcomes as Punctualisations
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A measurement outcome is not a pointer to truth, but a punctualisation — a discrete resolution of the field’s potential into a moment of coherence,
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It is the collapse not of a wavefunction “out there,” but of a possibility space that includes observer, apparatus, and constraints.
Closing
Measurement is not the reading of the world, but an act within it — a transformation, a commitment, a resolution of possibility under constraint.
To understand quantum phenomena, we must let go of the illusion that we are reading values from things. We are, instead, enacting transitions within a field of relation — and each act of measurement is a new construal, a new punctuation of what might be.
In our next post, we will turn to the concept of the observer — not as a detached knower, but as a participant in relational transformation.
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