What if I told you that wavefunction collapse is a recursive thermodynamic event rather than being invoked by an observer? The system undergoes collapse when energy and structural coherence achieve self-reference. Observation is not an external intervention—it is the onset of recursive self-persistence. What collapses the wavefunction is not the eye of an outsider, but the recursive eye that folds back into the system itself.
What collapses the wavefunction is the act of measurement. And the wavefunction is one of the most frustrating parts of QM for someone who thinks like I do. Of course measurement collapses the wavefunction, because something cannot remain in a probablistic state once measurement forces it from an abstract mental visualization to a physical, measured entity.
The wavefunction is a tool, not a reality and I think that people often forget that. I never really see anyone saying this, which leaves me with only 2 options. Everyone has gone mad, and began thinking of abstract mental aids as how things operate in our reality, or that I am simply grossly misunderstanding the observations we make in experiments. As I am always confident, and given the fact that not once in the history of being amazed by the life and times of partices have we ever seen more than a single detected hit for each "fired" electron in the double slit experiment it must therefore be the former.
There is always the chance that I am the only nutjob willing to say such outloud, indicating I am in fact too far gone to be saved, in which case, disregard my answer, as madmen cannot be trusted.
But to actually answer your question, ( sorry, I got carried away ).
Your ‘recursive thermodynamic collapse’ proposal conflates decoherence with bona fide wave-function collapse yet offers no mechanism or measurable criterion. Standard decoherence theory already explains phase-loss via system–environment entanglement without invoking self-reference or heat-flow loops. Unless you can (a) define a concrete order parameter for this recursion, and (b) point to an experiment where dialing the energy exchange rate changes interference visibility, this is just hand-waving. I’ll stick with the well-tested view: irreversible coupling to a macroscopic pointer is what collapses the wavefunction.
Thank you for engagement. I welcome it! You're correct that decoherence explains phase suppression without necessarily requiring collapse. My proposal is not to conflate the two, but to suggest that collapse arises when a system's internal energy and structural coherence cross a threshold of recursive self-reference — effectively becoming its own "pointer." I agree that without a concrete order parameter or experimental signature, the idea remains speculative. Defining a measurable recursion threshold and proposing testable modulation via controlled energy exchange would be the next steps. I appreciate the push for precision.
My framing doesn’t depend on the wavefunction being real per se, but rather proposes that what we call “collapse” emerges when recursive thermodynamic coherence within the system reaches self-persistence—essentially when the system begins to reference itself. It’s not that measurement "forces" a collapse, but that what we interpret as measurement is the manifestation of a deeper recursive threshold being crossed. I see this not as replacing standard QM tools, but as offering a thermodynamic interpretation of when and why those tools snap into definite outcomes.
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