Few claims in contemporary discussions of quantum mechanics are made with more confidence—or less reflection—than the assertion that “there is no observer.” It is typically offered as a corrective: a rejection of anthropocentrism, subjectivism, or anything that smells of idealism.
But like many such corrections, it overshoots its target.
The claim does not eliminate the observer. It redefines the problem while pretending to dissolve it.
What the Claim Is Reacting Against
The discomfort that motivates “there is no observer” is easy to understand. Early formulations of quantum mechanics spoke incautiously about observation, measurement, and the role of the experimenter. These formulations invited caricature:
consciousness collapsing wavefunctions,
reality depending on human attention,
physics reduced to psychology.
To reject this picture is entirely reasonable.
But rejecting a bad ontology does not relieve one of ontology altogether.
The Observer as a Structural Role
In quantum mechanics, the observer is not a person. Nor is it a mind. It is a structural role within the theory: the locus at which outcomes are registered, distinctions are drawn, and probabilities are actualised.
To say “there is no observer” is therefore ambiguous. It can mean one of two things:
There is no human subject privileged by the theory.
There is no structural asymmetry between system and observation.
The first claim is modest and uncontroversial. The second is radical—and almost never defended.
Yet the slogan slides effortlessly from one to the other.
Eliminating the Name, Keeping the Function
In practice, most attempts to eliminate the observer do so only terminologically. The language changes, but the role remains:
“measurement” becomes “interaction,”
“observer” becomes “environment,”
“collapse” becomes “decoherence.”
These substitutions may be useful. But they do not remove the asymmetry between what is described and what does the describing. They merely relocate it.
The observer is not abolished. It is distributed.
The Fantasy of a View from Nowhere
The insistence that there is no observer often masks a deeper aspiration: the hope for a description of reality that is complete, self-sufficient, and perspective-free.
This is not a scientific demand. It is a metaphysical one.
Quantum mechanics resists such a description not because it is incomplete, but because it refuses to grant the world a single, privileged articulation independent of the conditions under which distinctions are drawn.
To deny the observer is therefore to deny the theory’s most unsettling lesson.
Responsibility Without Subjects
Acknowledging an observer does not require smuggling consciousness back into physics. It requires only acknowledging that descriptions are always made from somewhere, under specific constraints, for specific purposes.
That acknowledgment is not a weakness. It is a condition of intelligibility.
To insist that “there is no observer” while continuing to rely on observer-like functions is not clarity. It is denial.
What Would Careful Speech Look Like?
Ontological responsibility here would consist in resisting slogans and speaking precisely:
denying anthropocentrism without denying perspective,
rejecting subjectivism without pretending to a view from nowhere,
and recognising that formal success does not erase the conditions of its articulation.
Quantum mechanics does not require an observer in the human sense. But it does require us to own the asymmetries we rely on—and to stop pretending that renaming them makes them disappear.
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