In mainstream quantum theory, decoherence is often invoked as the mechanism by which the classical world “emerges” from quantum superpositions. According to this view, when a quantum system interacts with its environment, its coherent superpositions become entangled with countless uncontrolled degrees of freedom — leading to the appearance of a single classical outcome, without requiring wavefunction collapse.
This explanation has undeniable predictive value. But it remains interpretively ambiguous: What, exactly, is “lost” during decoherence? Why does entanglement with the environment give rise to definiteness? And does this really solve the measurement problem — or merely displace it?
From a relational-ontological perspective, decoherence is not the washing-out of real quantum states into apparent classicality. It is a reorganisation of relational potential under constraint — a shift in the field’s coherence structure as it resolves across scales.
1. Decoherence as Constraint-Induced Resolution
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In traditional accounts, decoherence marks the transition from quantum to classical behaviour through environmental entanglement,
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In relational terms, what is occurring is a perspectival cut: coherence at one level of the field is redistributed across a broader system, leading to a new topology of constraint,
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Apparent “classicality” is not a fundamental ontological shift, but a regime of reduced affordance — a local resolution shaped by interactional saturation.
2. Not a Loss, but a Redistribution of Coherence
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Decoherence is often described as a loss of information or the destruction of interference patterns,
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But coherence is not a substance to be lost — it is a pattern of relational possibility. What changes is not its quantity, but its distribution,
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The “classical” appearance emerges when potential is so tightly constrained that only one construal remains viable — a punctualisation of the field into a dominant configuration.
3. No Sharp Boundary Between Quantum and Classical
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The idea that decoherence “produces” classicality presupposes that quantum and classical are two distinct ontologies bridged by a physical process,
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A relational view denies such a dichotomy: quantum and classical are not domains, but modes of construal depending on scale, constraint, and interactional saturation,
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Decoherence is not a crossing of a boundary, but a shift in perspectival resolution — the field reconfigures under relational pressure, giving rise to appearances we construe as classical.
4. Environment as Participating Constraint
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In standard decoherence theory, the environment is treated as an uncontrollable “bath” that traces out the system’s coherence,
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Relationally, the environment is not a backdrop but a constitutive component of the system’s relational topology,
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The system/environment distinction is itself a construal — decoherence marks not an objective event, but a shift in which parts of the field are included in the cut.
5. Decoherence and Ontological Modesty
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Decoherence is often claimed to “explain” why we don’t see superpositions in everyday life. But the better question is: why we ever expected to,
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If actuality is always a resolution of potential under constraint, then the absence of visible superpositions is not a problem but a feature of the coherence regime we inhabit,
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Decoherence doesn’t collapse anything — it distributes coherence beyond the scope of the current cut, such that only one construal remains locally viable.
Closing
Rather than treating decoherence as a mystery-resolving bridge between incompatible worlds, the relational view reframes it as a shift in the topology of constraint. What we call “classicality” is not an emergent realm, but a region of the relational field where coherence has become saturated and perspectivally resolved.
The world is not divided into quantum and classical. It is one relational field, structured by varying degrees of constraint and affordance. Decoherence is the name we give to the process by which relational potential narrows into local actuality — not a collapse, not a transition, but a reconfiguration of construal.
In the next post, we will turn to entanglement — the so-called “spooky action at a distance” — and reconsider it not as mysterious nonlocal causation, but as the mutual constraint of potential across cuts in a shared field.
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