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One World, Many Perspectives

A philosophical salon on symmetry, consciousness, and a unity that preserves difference. What would it mean for the world to be nothing over and above the network of perspectives and the relations between them? Could such a world still be independent of us? Could its unity include experiences that remain irreducibly someone’s own? And would understanding the whole require a perspective from which every difference finally disappears? These questions stand behind my mathematical work on shared structure, symmetry, and the comparison of perspectives. A recent paper, Symmetry Between Perspectives: Invariant Calibration and Symmetry Lifts , investigates a precise family of comparison problems. The philosophical possibilities surrounding those problems are much less settled. I wanted to explore them in a setting where an unusual thought could be pursued before anyone asked how to turn it into a publishable claim. I therefore asked ten AI agents to discuss the paper. Some were given p...
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Maktens lokala kartor: politikens anarkistiska gräns

Detta är en sonderande politisk-filosofisk analogi som tillämpar observer-ekvivarians utanför fysiken. Den lånar en av ramverkets grundidéer – att perspektiv inte kan avskaffas men att påståenden kan prövas genom hur de transformeras mellan perspektiv – och förenar den med normativa premisser som inte följer ur formalismen. Jag skriver sällan offentligt om politik. Inte därför att jag saknar politiska uppfattningar – jag betraktar mig själv som anarkist – utan därför att politiska samtal lätt förändrar karaktär när flera ideologiska språk möts i samma rum. En och en kan jag tala med en socialist om kapitalets makt, med en liberal om statens och med en nationalist om främmande herravälde och nationellt självbestämmande. När alla hör samma resonemang samtidigt uppstår lätt ett märkligt missförstånd. Kritik av den ena maktstrukturen uppfattas som ett försvar för den andra. Den som kritiserar kapitalet antas försvara staten. Den som kritiserar staten antas försvara kapitalet. Den som...
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Objectivity After Babel

A Mythopoetic Reading of Observer-Equivariance Most of my recent work on observer-equivariance has moved in the direction of greater precision. I have tried to separate formal results from physical calibration, and physical calibration from philosophical interpretation. That discipline matters. A suggestive idea can otherwise acquire the appearance of a theorem merely by being placed next to mathematics. Here I want to pause that work and let the imagination move more freely. The thought that prompted this essay was that the forgiveness of sins might be recognizable as an archetypal pattern within my interpretation of observer-equivariance. If no part is finally isolated from the whole, perhaps guilt cannot simply be expelled onto an alien part. The whole must somehow bear what has happened within it. I still think this intuition contains something important. It also carries a serious moral risk: it can erase differences in responsibility that must remain visible. This essay is a...
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One World, Many Perspectives: Relational Quantum Mechanics, QBism, Leibniz, and Taoism

Relational quantum mechanics and QBism both reject the idea that quantum theory offers a view from nowhere. Yet they understand the observer, reality, and the relation between perspectives in importantly different ways. Leibniz and Taoism can illuminate this difference, provided that philosophical comparison is not mistaken for physical evidence. Leibniz’s harmony also raises a narrower theological question about responsibility. The question behind the interpretations A discussion about personal identity and moral responsibility recently led me back to a more general question: If reality is always encountered from a perspective, what makes different perspectives perspectives on the same world? This question appears in several forms. In special relativity, different observers assign different coordinates to the same events. In quantum mechanics, different observers may assign different states—or even different sets of definite facts—to the same physical system. In phil...
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When Science Meets Spirituality: Dialogue, Synthesis, and the Direction of Inference

Attempts to bring science and spirituality together are treated very differently. A theory claiming that quantum physics points towards a universal consciousness may quickly be accused of pseudoscience. At the same time, a university can offer a course combining physics, philosophy and religion without causing much controversy. Is this merely a cultural preference for established Christianity over newer forms of spirituality? There is probably an element of institutional asymmetry. But I believe that a more fundamental distinction is involved. The crucial difference is not simply between Christianity and New Age spirituality. It is between bringing different disciplines into dialogue and claiming that physics directly establishes a spiritual worldview. Four projects hidden in one phrase The expression “uniting science and spirituality” can refer to at least four different projects. First, science, philosophy and religion can be compared. One may ask how they approach q...
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Can Quantum Physics Select a Here and Now?

Can Quantum Physics Select a Here and Now? Relativity does not abolish the local present. It abolishes the assumption that a local present automatically determines a global present throughout space. An ordinary quantum measurement is often described as selecting one outcome, or one branch, from a superposition. But could relativistic quantum physics contain a more ambitious operation—one that selects not only what happens, but also a spacetime “here and now” in which it happens? The short answer is that relativistic quantum theory contains several structures that come close, but no universally accepted sharp projection operator that performs both tasks. The closest operational object is a spacetime-indexed quantum instrument : a family of quantum operations whose outcomes may include both a detector result and a spacetime event. Objective-collapse theories can go further and treat such events as elements of physical reality, but they add structure beyond standard quantu...
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