Systems Theory

Abstract

Superdeterminism has re-emerged as a radical alternative to conventional quantum interpretations, purporting to resolve nonlocality and the measurement problem by denying statistical independence between measurement settings and system variables. While mathematically coherent, this position rests on a metaphysical asymmetry: it privileges the past as a fixed structure while ignoring the constitutive role of the present and the epistemic openness of the future. In this article, I argue that such models fail to account for the dynamical nature of measurement as a temporally embedded, cognitively mediated act. Drawing on insights from time-symmetric quantum formulations, neuroscience, and complexity theory, I propose that any viable physical theory must preserve the ontological distinctiveness of the present as a locus where constraint and possibility meet. Superdeterminism, in contrast, renders the present epiphenomenal and collapses possibility into determinacy. This framework risks explanatory sterility and conceptual circularity, and I offer reasons to consider it incomplete without a more nuanced theory of time and cognition.

1. Introduction

The quantum measurement problem and the appearance of nonlocality have motivated various interpretations of quantum mechanics. Among them, superdeterminism has gained renewed attention, largely through proponents such as Sabine Hossenfelder (2020), who argue that Bell’s theorem can be circumvented by denying the independence of measurement settings from hidden variables. This implies that the apparent randomness in quantum events is illusory: every event, including experimental choices, was determined from the universe’s initial conditions.

While this position is internally consistent, I argue that it is ontologically impoverished and epistemically fragile. Superdeterminism treats the past as fully real, the future as non-contributory, and the present as merely derivative. This temporal asymmetry undermines the very framework it seeks to strengthen. Further, it neglects the cognitive complexity and adaptive unpredictability of systems like the brain, which reshape the topology of the future in ways irreducible to past causes.

2. Superdeterminism: Formal Consistency, Conceptual Cost

Superdeterminism derives its strength from a technical loophole in Bell's theorem: the assumption of measurement setting independence. By denying that measurement settings are statistically independent of the system's hidden variables, it offers a local, deterministic interpretation of quantum correlations (Bell, 1976; Hossenfelder & Palmer, 2020).

Yet this move carries a conceptual cost. It requires that:

• All future actions are fixed by past microstates,
• Apparent freedom of experimental design is illusory,
• No genuinely novel outcome can occur at the point of measurement.

This ontological determinism, while perhaps mathematically plausible, undermines the methodological independence upon which empirical science depends (cf. Conway & Kochen, 2006; Bell, 1985; Shimony et al., 1976). While recent work by Hossenfelder and Palmer (2020) attempts to render superdeterminism empirically tractable, such efforts remain preliminary and lack a dynamical account of how measurement correlations are generated. Specifically, there is no known model specifying the physical mechanisms by which early-universe conditions lead to the observed correlations between detector settings and system variables, only that such correlations must be presupposed. This leaves the proposal ontologically heavy but mechanistically hollow.

It fails not only in specifying physical mechanisms but also in acknowledging that consciousness, with its embodied, psychodynamic forms, is integral to the act of measurement (cf. Heisenberg, 1958; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). Superdeterminism, as presented by Hossenfelder and others, imagines a universe devoid of the kind of subjective interiority that renders measurement meaningful in the first place. It posits a universe without the observer, without free will, and without the layered cognitive processes that actively shape what is being measured and observed. In doing so, it omits the very structure that gives rise to scientific inquiry itself.

3. Time Symmetry and the Role of the Present

A growing body of theoretical work emphasises the time-symmetric structure of physical law. The two-state vector formalism (Aharonov & Vaidman, 1991), retrocausal models (Price, 2012), and delayed-choice experiments (Wheeler, 1984) suggest that both past and future boundary conditions constrain present events.

Superdeterminism, by contrast, invokes only the past. It erases the possibility that future potentialities influence the present, a critical oversight given the role of measurement as a selection among possibilities.

The present, in this alternative framing, is not passive. It is the arena of actualisation, where entropy is reduced and information becomes accessible. As Rovelli (2012) argues in the relational interpretation, measurement outcomes are not facts in themselves, but facts for an observer, emerging at the moment of interaction. This view resonates with the participatory universe concept advanced by Wheeler (1984), who observed that no phenomenon is real until it is observed, and that the past is, in a sense, actualised by choices made in the present.

4. Cognitive Complexity and the Illusion of Fixed Possibility

The human brain is not a passive receiver of inputs but a predictive, self-modelling system (Friston, 2010). Cognitive biases, attentional framing, and perceptual schemas all contribute to restructuring the local possibility space in real time. This means that:

• What is measured is not just a function of external causality but of internal modelling and selection.
• The space of possibilities cannot be meaningfully reduced to a pre-determined finite set from initial conditions.
• Complexity, in the sense of computational irreducibility (Wolfram, 2002), creates barriers to determinism in practice: even simple deterministic rules can produce behaviours that are not compressible or predictable without simulation.
• Similarly, effective complexity (Gell-Mann & Lloyd, 1996) captures the structural richness of systems where regularities coexist with randomness, defying reduction to compact laws.

Taken together, these points suggest that ignorance is not merely epistemic noise, but a structural feature of interacting systems with incomplete information. Superdeterminism assumes total knowledge, but no system, including the universe, can coherently represent its own full state (cf. Breuer, 1995).

5. The Conflation of Explanation with Constraint

Finally, there is a danger in mistaking constraint for causal explanation. Superdeterminism explains quantum correlations by invoking past states so finely tuned as to predict present configurations, but without offering a mechanism by which those correlations are generated or maintained. This is close to explanatory circularity.

As Timpson (2013) and Maudlin (2011) have noted, a theory that merely precludes free choice by fiat offers no explanatory gain unless it can model how those correlations arise from known dynamical principles. Bell (1985) likewise warned that abandoning the assumption of measurement-setting independence risks making a theory that cannot be tested, undermining the very logic of science.

6. Conclusion: Restoring the Present

A complete theory of quantum mechanics and measurement must not ignore the asymmetry of the present, a temporal domain in which real decisions are made, possibilities collapse, and meaning emerges. Superdeterminism, by denying this structure, retreats into a metaphysics that is technically sound but ontologically hollow.

If the brain, as a physical system, reconfigures its internal states in interaction with a world not yet fully determined, then the idea that every such interaction was preordained from the Big Bang becomes less a scientific claim and more a theological one.

This critique does not hinge on empirical refutation in the narrow sense, but rather on superdeterminism's failure to accommodate the empirical structure of measurement as it is actually enacted in systems with dual subject–object embodiment. Observation is not passive data retrieval but an entangled interaction between model-building agents and the world they engage. A viable physical theory must account for this interdependence.

What is needed is a theory that takes seriously the reciprocity of time, the embeddedness of observers, and the structural role of ignorance and complexity. The future may not be written, but it shapes us nonetheless.

References

Abstract

Wavefunction collapse in quantum mechanics has long been a site of conceptual confusion, with competing interpretations either removing the observer entirely or attributing mystical powers to consciousness. Here, we propose a dual-aspect framework that reconciles collapse as a physical process with collapse as a psychological reality. We argue that collapse occurs both outside and inside of consciousness: externally, as entanglement and decoherence; internally, as the point at which information becomes integrated into a modelling system. These two forms of collapse are not mutually exclusive but structurally necessary to account for the emergence of experienced reality. The present is reframed as the convergence point between a deterministic past and a probabilistic future. We further contend that both physical and conscious systems are endpoint manifestations, structured through brain connectivity, of a larger informational reality. This account offers a reconciliatory path forward in physics and consciousness studies, grounded in contemporary neuroscience, quantum theory, and temporal dynamics.

1. Introduction: The Split in Collapse

Quantum mechanics forces us to reconsider what we mean by event, observation, and reality. The formalism describes the evolution of probabilities, but measurements yield determinate outcomes. Where and when this collapse of the wavefunction occurs, if at all, remains debated.

Some interpretations locate collapse entirely within the external physical world, through environmental entanglement and decoherence (Zurek, 2003; Joos et al., 2003). Others, particularly older or mystical readings, treat consciousness as the trigger of collapse (von Neumann, Wigner).

Despite numerous attempts to explain collapse, through decoherence, many-worlds, or consciousness-based mechanisms, no existing account provides a unified framework that treats physical and experiential collapse as ontologically distinct yet co-necessary. This paper presents such a framework.

Collapse is both a physical process and a modelling transition within consciousness. These two aspects are not in conflict but reflect complementary levels of description. Collapse as entanglement determines what is; collapse as modelling determines what is known.

2. Physical Collapse: Decoherence and Causality

Wavefunction collapse, when treated physically, is described as a transition from a coherent quantum state to a classical mixture via interaction with an environment. Decoherence does not require observation but rather loss of phase coherence due to entanglement with untracked degrees of freedom (Zurek, 2003).

This perspective provides a consistent, local, and time-symmetric account of how superpositions become effectively classical. Systems decohere rapidly in the macroscopic world, producing determinacy without invoking human minds.

However, this determinacy is observer-independent: it happens whether or not it is registered.

3. Experiential Collapse: Consciousness as a Modelling Endpoint

From the perspective of conscious systems, collapse occurs not when entanglement happens, but when the outcome becomes integrated into an internal model. The mind does not cause the collapse; it instantiates the conditions under which the event becomes meaningful.

This aligns with predictive coding and free-energy minimisation theories, in which the brain continually updates a generative model to reduce uncertainty (Friston, 2010). Collapse, in this sense, coincides with the arrival of sufficient information to resolve an inferential gap.

The Schrödinger's cat thought experiment illustrates this duality. The cat is physically dead or alive long before the box is opened. What remains in superposition is not the cat, but the observer's uncertainty. The collapse occurs in the brain when the uncertainty is resolved by observation.

We propose a guiding principle: collapse is completed where reality is resolved into a model that guides action. In physical systems, this is decoherence; in conscious systems, it is inference.

4. The Present as Convergence Point

We argue that the present is not merely a transient slice of time but the point of convergence between a determined physical past, shaped by causal entanglement, and an open probabilistic future, not yet measured or modelled.

This view, developed in our prior preprint (Stoliker, 2025), positions the present as a manifestation point: where constraints from the past meet the modelling structure of the observer to resolve possible futures into a single trajectory.

The present is not a moment in time but a structural boundary: the point at which constrained causal pasts and open probabilistic futures are finalised into coherent experience by a modelling system.

Time appears asymmetric not only because fundamental laws break symmetry, but because the observer's model is constrained by memory (past) and openness (future). Entropy increases and predictions degrade, giving time its apparent direction.

5. Directional Asymmetry and Mental Structure

Although quantum formalism is time-symmetric, physical and mental systems introduce directional asymmetry:

• Physical systems are structured to evolve under deterministic rules (classical emergence).
• Mental systems evolve via model update and goal-directed inference (adaptive emergence).

This distinction is not arbitrary. Consciousness, as a structured modelling system, produces the experience of time as moving forward because it must model from prior states toward uncertain outcomes. The experience of now is the boundary where new information is integrated.

Thus, the brain becomes an endpoint system, the place where both physical constraint and semantic meaning converge. This is not to say the brain creates reality, but that reality becomes realised only when modelled.

6. Collapse in Two Ontologies: The Principle of Dual Collapse

We now state the central claim: collapse happens twice.

1. In the world — as physical decoherence, when systems become entangled and phase information is lost.
2. In the mind — as inferential resolution, when that information becomes part of a coherent model.

These are not two versions of one thing; they are two interlocking layers of what reality is. One determines physical state, the other determines conscious reality.

We call this the Principle of Dual Collapse: collapse is completed where reality is resolved into a model that guides action — decoherence for physical systems, and inference for conscious ones.

7. Comparison with Existing Frameworks

Unlike Many-Worlds interpretations, this model retains single-outcome collapse. Unlike IIT or panpsychist approaches, it does not attribute consciousness to all matter but locates it where model resolution occurs. And unlike relational quantum mechanics, which relativises facts between systems, this account frames modelling consciousness as the integrator of facts into a coherent present.

The novelty of this theory lies in treating collapse and consciousness as complementary processes of resolution, structurally interdependent, but ontologically distinct.

8. Conclusion: Toward a Unified Framework

Collapse is neither solely physical nor purely mental. It is both the causal interaction of entangled systems and the semantic resolution of uncertainty within a modelling consciousness. The present is not arbitrary; it is the manifestation point where causal history meets cognitive inference.

Physical systems constrain reality. Conscious systems render it intelligible. Only together do we get a world that unfolds.

This dual-aspect framework clarifies the confusion around measurement and consciousness, grounding both in their proper domains without erasing either. It opens a space for meaningful dialogue between physics and the science of mind, free from mysticism and reductionism alike.

References