Introduction to the Series: The Readiness Cut in Quantum Theory

Quantum theory is often treated as a domain of unavoidable paradox—an intellectual landscape where superposition, collapse, and nonlocality coexist in uneasy tension with our most basic intuitions. Yet the persistence of these paradoxes has less to do with what quantum systems are, and far more to do with how we have been construing them.

This series develops a simple but powerful claim:

Every major quantum paradox arises from failing to distinguish between two different kinds of potential: inclination and ability.

In everyday reasoning, the difference is obvious: the inclination to act is not the ability to act. But quantum theory, as traditionally formulated, treats them as one undifferentiated “state”—a single abstract object that is somehow both a catalogue of possibilities and the engine that drives one possibility to actualise. This conflation forces the theory to carry contradictions it never needed to bear.

Relational ontology allows us to separate these two dimensions cleanly:

• Inclination is the structured potential of a system—the organisation of what can actualise.

• Ability is the relational alignment that makes a particular actualisation possible in a given circumstance.

The cut between potential and event is not a temporal transition. It is a perspectival shift: the move from the standpoint of inclination to the standpoint of ability. Once this distinction is maintained, the fog surrounding quantum mechanics begins to clear. Superposition loses its air of mystical multiplicity, measurement ceases to require a “collapse,” and entanglement no longer carries the burden of nonlocal metaphysics.

This series unfolds in two movements.

The first three posts introduce the readiness framework and develop the perspectival structure of measurement.

The following three posts show, in detail, how this framework dissolves the canonical quantum paradoxes—not by adding assumptions, but by removing a conceptual confusion that never belonged in the theory.

Taken together, the six posts demonstrate a simple proposition:

Quantum mechanics becomes coherent the moment potential is no longer misconstrued as a single thing.

What follows is not an interpretation layered atop the standard theory but a clarification of what the theory has always already been pointing toward.