When chance becomes real, but relation does not
With Max Born, quantum theory crosses a decisive threshold. Where Planck introduced a discontinuity while refusing ontological consequences, Born makes chance itself fundamental. The wavefunction, he proposes, does not describe what is, but what is likely.
This move is often celebrated as an act of intellectual honesty: physics abandons determinism and accepts indeterminacy. Yet something crucial happens at the same moment — something that is rarely named.
Probability becomes real, but perspective disappears.
The Statistical Interpretation
Born’s proposal is deceptively modest. The wavefunction, he argues, should be interpreted statistically: its squared magnitude gives the probability of finding a particular outcome upon measurement.
This resolves a pressing problem. The mathematics no longer pretends to describe an evolving physical wave that somehow collapses. Instead, it describes a distribution of possible outcomes. Physics regains its footing.
But the ontological cost of this stabilisation is high.
In Born’s interpretation:
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Probability is a property of the system.
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The distribution exists independently of how or from where it is construed.
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Measurement merely reveals which outcome occurred.
The wavefunction does not describe reality directly — but the probabilities it encodes are treated as objective features of the world.
This is probabilistic realism.
The First Major Fault Line
Relational ontology identifies Born’s move as the first major fault line in the foundations of quantum theory.
Not because probability is introduced — but because it is introduced without perspective.
Probability, in Born’s account, floats free of any construal. It belongs to the system as such. The observer disappears again, quietly, precisely at the moment they should have become unavoidable.
Chance replaces certainty, but representation remains intact.
Probability vs Readiness
This exchange names the core disagreement.
From a relational standpoint, probability is not a feature of the world. It is a second-order abstraction over possible instantiations. Treating it as ontological substance mistakes a measure for a mode of being.
Relational ontology proposes a different cut — without introducing a competing interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Instead of probability, it speaks of readiness.
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Probability is a numerical distribution over outcomes.
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Readiness is the structured potential for instantiation within a given construal.
Born’s probabilities describe frequencies across repeated trials. Readiness concerns what can be actualised as an event from a particular perspective.
The difference is subtle — and decisive.
Distributions vs Potential for Instantiation
Born’s interpretation treats the wavefunction as a distribution of outcomes. But a distribution already presupposes:
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a space of outcomes
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a metric of likelihood
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a stable frame within which repetition makes sense
These are not innocent assumptions. They smuggle in a background ontology of sameness, repeatability, and observer-independence.
Relational ontology does not deny that distributions can be constructed. It insists that they are derivative.
What is primary is the potential for instantiation — the way a system, understood as a theory of possible instances, can be cut into an event under specific conditions of construal.
Probability is what you get after you forget the cut.
The Quiet Reinstatement of Realism
Born is often read as a break from classical realism. In one sense, this is true: determinism is abandoned.
But something else takes its place.
By treating probability as an objective property of systems, Born reinstates realism at a higher level of abstraction. What is real is no longer position or momentum, but likelihood.
This move feels modest. It is anything but.
The world becomes a catalogue of chances, existing independently of how those chances are construed, accessed, or actualised.
Relational ontology refuses this move — not by denying probability, but by relocating it.
What Born Makes Possible — and What He Closes Off
Born’s contribution is indispensable. Without the statistical interpretation, quantum theory would likely have fractured beyond repair. He provided a way to work, calculate, and predict without metaphysical extravagance.
But the price of that stability is the foreclosure of a deeper question:
Probability of what, relative to which construal?
By answering that question too quickly — by assigning probability to systems rather than to relations — Born closes off the possibility of understanding indeterminacy as perspectival rather than ontological.
Chance becomes a feature of reality, rather than a feature of how reality is cut into events.
Born stands, in this series, as the figure who makes uncertainty safe — and in doing so, makes it inert.
The next encounter will be with someone who refuses that safety, and pushes indeterminacy to the brink of description itself.
Next: Werner Heisenberg — Indeterminacy and the Collapse of Description
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