Following our discussion of temporal smuggling, we now turn to the broader pattern of entangled outcomes. A familiar intuition arises: it seems as though electrons are somehow coordinating their spins across space to ensure perfect anti-correlation. This is often dramatised in terms like “spooky action at a distance” or imagined as one particle communicating with the other. But this intuition is misleading.
The correlation is a property of the system-as-pair, not a property of sequential events. Each electron measurement is an independent instantiation of the joint structured potential defined by the entangled state. No electron modifies or influences the other; no signals are sent; nothing accumulates in the world beyond individual detection events.
Describing correlations as being “built” or “produced” by electrons introduces the same explanatory error we saw with interference patterns in the two-slit experiment. Patterns in the outcomes do not require communication or coordination; they emerge from the constraints encoded in the structure of the system itself. Each detection event simply actualises one of the allowed outcomes, and the regularity we observe across many measurements is a reflection of the structured potential, not a cumulative process of influence.
Thinking otherwise leads to conceptual confusion: it makes the phenomenon appear paradoxical, requiring faster-than-light signals or retrocausal effects. Recognising that correlations are constraints on possible joint outcomes, rather than messages exchanged between particles, dissolves the mystery.
In the next post, we will introduce the relational ontology perspective fully: measurement events as perspectival cuts, superpositions as structured potential, and how this framing explains entanglement without invoking hidden coordination or mysterious action at a distance.
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