The previous posts have cleared the ground. We have seen why talk of particles “knowing” things is a symptom of explanatory strain, how appeals to past and future electrons illicitly temporalise what is not a temporal relation, and why interference patterns are not built, coordinated, or produced by events acting together across time.
What remains is the positive account. If patterns are not effects, and if events do not coordinate to produce them, then what is the relation between a single electron detection and the interference pattern it exemplifies?
The missing concept is instantiation.
In the relational ontology developed in our recent work, a system is not first a collection of things that later happens to display regularities. A system is a structured potential: a theory of possible instances defined relative to a particular construal. The experimental arrangement—the slits, their geometry, the detection screen—does not merely provide a backdrop against which electrons behave. It defines the space of possible outcomes that any detection can actualise.
On this view, what is often called the “wavefunction” is not a physical object evolving in time, nor a mysterious entity that somehow accompanies each particle. It is a formal description of the structured potential associated with a given experimental construal. It specifies, in abstract terms, how possible detection events are distributed across the available space.
An individual electron detection is an instance of that potential. It is not caused by the wavefunction, nor does it emerge from it as a later stage of a process. Rather, it is a perspectival cut: the point at which the system-as-theory is actualised as a system-as-instance.
This cut is not something that happens in time in addition to the detection event. It just is the detection event, viewed as an instance of a theory-relative structure. Nothing flows, collapses, or propagates. There is no need to imagine information being consulted or decisions being made. The relation between potential and instance is constitutive, not causal.
Once instantiation is understood in this way, the so-called “central mystery” of the two-slit experiment dissolves. Each electron does not need to know how many slits are open, because the number of slits is already built into the structured potential that defines what counts as a possible detection. Each electron does not need to know what other electrons have done, because no detection ever responds to any other. And there is no influence from the future, because nothing about the explanation depends on temporal order at all.
What appears mysterious only does so because we persist in asking the wrong kind of question. We ask how events manage to coordinate themselves so as to produce a pattern, when we should be asking how events come to count as instances of a structured situation in the first place.
Seen through this lens, the two-slit experiment is not a demonstration of particles behaving strangely, nor of reality defying common sense. It is a demonstration of the limits of an ontology that recognises only events and processes, and has no place for structured potential as a first-class explanatory category.
The interference pattern does not need to be explained as something that happens. It needs to be recognised as something that is presupposed by every detection event as a condition of its intelligibility. Once that shift is made, the anthropomorphic metaphors fall away, the temporal paradoxes evaporate, and the experiment loses its air of mystery—without losing any of its significance.
What remains is not an enigma, but a demand: that we take seriously the relations between theories and instances, between construal and phenomenon, and between potential and actualisation. The two-slit experiment does not force us into mysticism. It forces us to get our ontology right.
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