Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning: 27 The Observer as Cut: Reflexivity, Meaning, and the Limits of Objectivity

The term “observer” has long haunted the foundations of quantum theory. Does the observer collapse the wavefunction? Are they outside the system? Inside it? Is measurement a physical process, a mental one, or something else entirely?

From a relational ontological perspective, these questions dissolve. The observer is not an external agent, nor a metaphysical enigma. The observer is the cut that constitutes the event.

Construal, Not Consciousness

Crucially, this is not a claim about sentience or cognition. The observer is not “you” or “me” as biological organisms. It is the construal itself — the perspectival instantiation of potential into actual.

To observe is to instantiate a relation: to cut across a system of potential, thereby bringing forth a first-order phenomenon. That phenomenon has no independent reality outside the cut. It is not “revealed” by observation; it is constituted through it.

Reflexivity and the Collapse of Objectivity

What does this mean for objectivity? It does not deny the possibility of shared knowledge — but it redefines what is being shared. Objectivity is not access to an unconstrued world, but coordination across perspectives.

In this model:

• There is no underlying reality independent of construal.

• There is no phenomenon prior to observation.

• There is no “observer-independent fact of the matter.”

Instead, reality is reflexive: the observer is part of what is being observed. The cut that individuates a phenomenon also positions the observer within it. All knowing is self-implicated.

Decoherence as Reflexive Alignment

This perspective allows us to reinterpret so-called decoherence — not as a transition from quantum to classical, but as the reflexive coordination of cuts. A stable, coherent “world” emerges not because the observer steps away, but because multiple construals align across systems. The classical world is not what’s left behind when we stop observing — it’s what is jointly sustained by patterns of mutual construal.

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In short, the observer is not a problem to be solved. It is the constitutive gesture of meaning itself.