This series has not argued for a preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics. It has not attempted to adjudicate among competing ontologies, nor to repair the theory’s discomforts with a better story.
Instead, it has traced a pattern.
Each interpretation we have encountered is an attempt to manage the same pressure: quantum theory refuses to say that reality is fully specified prior to its instantiation.
What follows from that refusal has proven difficult to tolerate.
The Pattern of Refusals
The interpretations differ in form, but not in structure.
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Bohm refuses indeterminacy by hiding it beneath an inaccessible order.
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Many Worlds refuses exclusion by ensuring that nothing ever fails to occur.
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QBism refuses objectivity by withdrawing ontology into belief.
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Rovelli refuses absolutes by distributing facts across relations while retaining independent systems.
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Objective collapse theories refuse ambiguity by forcing the cut into dynamics.
Each saves something precious.
Each does so by refusing to let something else remain unconstrained.
What Was at Stake All Along
Beneath the technical disagreements lies a single unresolved question:
Is reality complete in advance of its actualisation?
If it is, then indeterminacy must be explained away, relocated, or compensated for. Possibility becomes a deficit — something waiting to be redeemed by deeper structure, proliferation, belief, relation, or force.
If it is not, then actuality cannot be understood as the unfolding of what already is. It must be understood as a cut — not a temporal process, but a shift in what counts as real.
This is the question none of the interpretations can fully face.
The Field, Not the Thing
Relational ontology proposes neither a new entity nor a deeper layer. It proposes a different stance.
Reality is not a collection of things with properties, nor a catalogue of worlds, nor a set of beliefs, nor a network of interacting systems, nor a wavefunction awaiting interruption.
It is a field of constrained possibility.
This field is not abstract. It is structured. It affords certain actualisations and not others. But it is not already actual.
Why the Cut Cannot Be Eliminated
Every interpretation we have examined attempts, in its own way, to soften the cut.
But the cut persists, because it is not a flaw in the theory. It is the theory’s most honest consequence.
Possibility as First-Order
Quantum theory forces a reversal that many interpretations resist.
Probability, on this view, does not measure ignorance, belief, or branching weight. It expresses readiness — the structured openness of a field to be cut in particular ways.
When probability is reified, privatised, or dynamised, this readiness is lost.
Why There Is No Final Interpretation
The desire for a final interpretation is itself a refusal — a refusal to accept that construal is constitutive.
To interpret quantum mechanics once and for all would be to deny that its meaning emerges relationally, through repeated cuts across theory, experiment, and world.
Relational ontology does not offer closure.
It offers discipline.
The Becoming of Possibility
This blog is titled The Becoming of Possibility for a reason.
Possibility becomes — and in becoming, it gives rise to actuality without being exhausted by it.
The interpretations we have examined are not mistakes. They are symptoms — of our varied tolerances for indeterminacy, relation, and construal.
This series has allowed those tolerances to speak.
It ends not with a resolution, but with a stance:
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