Mar 17, 2026 04:25 PM
https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-is..._auid=2020
INTRO: Physics, and science as a whole, attempts to paint an objective picture of reality. Consciousness, experience, and subjectivity are forcibly pushed out of this picture. Even where science is empirical, this empiricism rarely involves a consideration of human consciousness, but rather the readings of some mechanical measuring device, or some hypothetical abstracted sum of all perspectives – a God's eye view or view from nowhere. But phenomenologist of science Harald A. Wiltsche paints a different picture. Physics, even in the form of quantum mechanics, has its origins in the phenomenology of human consciousness. No matter how hard scientists try, it can never escape those origins, and to truly move forward, it must understand and embrace them.
EXCERPT: This is precisely the terrain on which phenomenology has always operated. From Husserl onward, the claim was neither that reality is “simply out there” nor that it is a projection of consciousness. Rather, objectivity is constituted through structured relations between appearance and possible variation. Objectivity, once again, emerges not from the elimination of perspective, but from invariance within structured contexts. Quantum mechanics forces physics to confront this same structural feature at a deeper level: properties are not self-standing attributes waiting to be uncovered, but arise within determinate experimental contexts governed by reproducible rules.
Several strands in contemporary quantum foundations connect explicitly to these issues. Early reflections by Fritz London and Edmond Bauer treated measurement not as a physical interaction but as involving a transition from potentiality to actuality that cannot be described without reference to the reflecting subject—without thereby lapsing into “consciousness causes collapse” mysticism. More recent approaches, such as QBism, interpret the quantum state as encoding an agent’s expectations about future experience, thereby resonating with the phenomenological insight that experience always unfolds within a horizon of anticipated possibilities. Reconstruction programs—often inspired by operational or information-theoretic principles—seek to derive the formalism from constraints on experimental interventions and outcomes.
These approaches differ in ambition and metaphysical commitment. Yet they share a recognition: quantum mechanics does not sit comfortably with the classical image of a world composed of context-independent properties. The theory’s own structure forces us to rethink what objectivity can mean... (MORE - details)
INTRO: Physics, and science as a whole, attempts to paint an objective picture of reality. Consciousness, experience, and subjectivity are forcibly pushed out of this picture. Even where science is empirical, this empiricism rarely involves a consideration of human consciousness, but rather the readings of some mechanical measuring device, or some hypothetical abstracted sum of all perspectives – a God's eye view or view from nowhere. But phenomenologist of science Harald A. Wiltsche paints a different picture. Physics, even in the form of quantum mechanics, has its origins in the phenomenology of human consciousness. No matter how hard scientists try, it can never escape those origins, and to truly move forward, it must understand and embrace them.
EXCERPT: This is precisely the terrain on which phenomenology has always operated. From Husserl onward, the claim was neither that reality is “simply out there” nor that it is a projection of consciousness. Rather, objectivity is constituted through structured relations between appearance and possible variation. Objectivity, once again, emerges not from the elimination of perspective, but from invariance within structured contexts. Quantum mechanics forces physics to confront this same structural feature at a deeper level: properties are not self-standing attributes waiting to be uncovered, but arise within determinate experimental contexts governed by reproducible rules.
Several strands in contemporary quantum foundations connect explicitly to these issues. Early reflections by Fritz London and Edmond Bauer treated measurement not as a physical interaction but as involving a transition from potentiality to actuality that cannot be described without reference to the reflecting subject—without thereby lapsing into “consciousness causes collapse” mysticism. More recent approaches, such as QBism, interpret the quantum state as encoding an agent’s expectations about future experience, thereby resonating with the phenomenological insight that experience always unfolds within a horizon of anticipated possibilities. Reconstruction programs—often inspired by operational or information-theoretic principles—seek to derive the formalism from constraints on experimental interventions and outcomes.
These approaches differ in ambition and metaphysical commitment. Yet they share a recognition: quantum mechanics does not sit comfortably with the classical image of a world composed of context-independent properties. The theory’s own structure forces us to rethink what objectivity can mean... (MORE - details)
