Beyond the Interface: Decoherence, the Interaction Problem, and the Ground of Personal Consciousness

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Authors

Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-09-19
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21075989
Primary Topic
Philosophy and Theoretical Science
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Beyond the Interface: Decoherence, the Interaction Problem, and the Ground of Personal Consciousness

C W ANDERSON
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Philosophy and Theoretical Science
article

Beyond the Interface: Decoherence, the Interaction Problem, and the Ground of Personal Consciousness

C W ANDERSON
article en

Abstract

The preceding paper, Before the Beginning: Configuration Space, the Pre-Structural Ground, and the Ontology of Genesis 1:2, established configuration space as the pre-structural ground from which spacetime continuously emerges, and identified that ground with the territory named by tohu va-bohu in Genesis 1:2. It left two questions unaddressed. First, what is the precise relationship between a spacetime-resident observer and the ground at the moment of measurement — does decoherence describe a spacetime-side mechanism, or does it mark a boundary that spacetime-side description cannot in principle cross? Second, and more consequentially, what accounts for the existence of first-person experience at all — the hard problem of consciousness, which no purely structural or mathematical account of the ground, including configuration space itself, has the resources to resolve? This paper argues that decoherence is correctly understood not as a mechanism internal to spacetime but as a one-directional, instrument-converting interface event in which the measuring apparatus does not return a report from the pre-measurement state but is de-differentiated upon contact, subsumed into the entangled whole. Ordinary quantum experimentation — every interference experiment, every entanglement measurement — is an instance of this boundary's one-directionality, not an exception to it. The paper further argues that configuration space superposition and the decoherent "definite state" are not two conditions between which a quantum object passes but one reality described from two sides of the interface, and that the measurement problem is therefore not merely unsolvable from the spacetime side but malformed: it asks what causes a transition when there is no transition, only two descriptions of one condition. The apparent nonlocality of entanglement is addressed on the same terms: what the emergent frame calls spooky action between two particles is the signature of a configuration-space unity that the emergent description divided into two and then expressed surprise that the two behave as one. The paper then argues that the hard problem of consciousness cannot be resolved by any account, however rigorous, that grounds reality in an impersonal structure — including an account that posits a super-observer of unlimited information-processing capacity, which remains a spacetime-native category extrapolated to an impossible limit rather than a description of something outside the ontological register the paper establishes. A personal, necessary, atemporal ground is not an arbitrary addition to the framework but its required completion: personhood is the only category that explains first-person experience by like rather than by unlike. The paper extends the category-mistake argument of the preceding paper's Section 7 to the interaction problem in philosophy of mind, arguing that the demand for a causal-closure-compliant mechanism for the ground's animating relation to conscious beings is constitutively malformed for the same reason the measurement problem is — the conceptual instruments of such a demand were forged in the very differentiation event they are being asked to explain. The biblical witness of Hebrews 11:3 — that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible — states this boundary in propositional form from within the same scriptural tradition the preceding paper's linguistic analysis drew from.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Reduced inequalities
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Philosophy and Theoretical Science
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