Mathias Spohr

The editor of the renowned Encyclopédie, a compendium of knowledge and expertise in the Age of Enlightenment, voiced his reservations about his own project in the dialogue Le Neveu de Rameau. The rise in prominence of a technically understood concept of causality—interestingly linked to the growing appreciation of music in the 18th century—fostered criminal thought and behaviour in the Nephews context. Through his conceptual framework, Diderot developed the ideas of self-reference, causal chains and control loops – concepts that were not considered important prior to the advent of 20th-century information technology.

This paper proposes a fundamentally different reading of quantum-mechanical paradoxes by relocating their source from physical reality to the institutional and operational conditions that make physics possible in the first place. Standard interpretations implicitly treat the observer’s standpoint, reproducibility, and symmetry as innocent, cost-free features of the formalism. We argue instead that observer equivalence is not a physical given but a socially enforced requirement that has been naturalized into methodological necessity. Quantum paradoxes arise precisely where the energetic cost of maintaining this equivalence can no longer be neglected. In our framework, measurement is understood as the energetic production of countability, performed under conditions of observer equivalence. Superposition is reinterpreted as a prepared symmetry frame—a stabilized system of observational equivalence—rather than as a physical coexistence of states. Measurement authorizes a specific standpoint within this frame. We define authorization strictly non-metaphysically as any energetic input originating in the observer’s space that remains informationally invisible within the observational record. We consider the strength—and at the same time the difficulty—of the quantum measurement method to lie in the fact that the measure is not presupposed, but operationally established through what is measured. Boundary operations replace the distinct objects of classical physics. Our framework generalizes and systematizes insights from QBism, relational quantum mechanics, and structural realism, while integrating second-order observational analysis (Luhmann 1995) and van Fraassen’s empiricist stance (1980). Quantum theory is thereby demystified: its paradoxes do not reveal a strange ontology but expose the authorizations that maintain observer equivalence.

In the following study, I outline the history of the modern era as a social construction of causality that follows this principle: rules replace rulers. I try to explain why equality, competition or technology have changed in the course of modernity from something frightening to something attractive, and why the exhaustion of this aspiration is becoming increasingly apparent. My semiotic concern is as follows: I suggest substituting the ahistorical models of 20th- century semiotics with a historical model in which the concept of sign is replaced by the concepts of model and afterimage, depending on perception. The contrast described is, in my view, a principle of perception that is learned in the civilized world like a language. Models are not tangible as such but only exist as embodiments; afterimages are tangible, but refer to something intangible.