Computational · Paper · 2026

Observers Who Read Their Universe into Existence: Finite Consensus, an Executable Observer, and Standard Physics

Bernhard Mueller, Mario Poneder, Alexander Osika, Kai Xue, Ben Cassie, Peter Nguyen, Jinwook Kim, David Matscheko, Daniel Ari Friedman, Jonathan Hill, William T. Glynn, Maarten Antonie Visser, Kale Arnav Anirudha, Brieuc de La Fournière

PhilPapers (preprint)

Download PDF Publication source Paper folder on GitHub Read extracted text

Overview

Observer Patch Holography (OPH) proposes that physics is what bounded observers can establish together: finite patches compare records on shared boundaries, repair disagreements, and treat as objective whatever survives every comparison. The universe, on this view, is a timeless self-referential structure whose observers recover its specification from their records and realize it, so that it reads itself into existence. Nothing lies outside to impose premises, so the recovered specification owes no a-priori justification; it has to run and reproduce what observers measure. That specification is a candidate, an executable observer: a twelve-port carrier, a native repair law, retained records and record-controlled feedback, joined in one interacting quantum process of electric flux, charged matter and a scalar field whose feedback response is certified nonzero in the infinite-occupation limit. Observers whose regions overlap on one carrier share a single complete law of fields, local event clocks and feedback, and on a refining spherical screen one repair history defines a common continuum operator for Gaussian fields, their decay and finite-speed waves. On a declared radial product over that screen, every finite menu of observer readouts admits, to any tolerance, one smooth static (1 + 3)-dimensional Lorentzian effective field theory. Finite theorems turn the specification’s readouts into familiar structure: schedule-independent public records, the Born rule and Tsirelson bound on completed records, a carrier whose slow response is exactly three-dimensional, the Standard Model gauge Lie algebra with an anomaly-free generation, a source-derived (1 + 3) causal precursor with proper-time ratios from record counts, and the Einstein equation from a realized null balance. We state the acceptance criteria of the construction, which premises it discharges, which it takes as declared inputs, and the frozen tests that can reject its branches.

foundations of physicsObserver Patch Holographyobserver consensusexecutable observerself-referencequantum recordsgauge structureEinstein field equation

Overview source: Curated paper metadata.

Methods and contributions

Read the source for the full argument, qualifications, and evidence.

Findings and contributions

  • The authors define objective facts operationally through records that survive authorized observer comparisons; this is a proposed foundation rather than an empirical confirmation (pp. 1-2).
  • The abstract reports conditional finite constructions for quantum records, gauge structure and effective spacetime, with declared inputs and rejection criteria (p. 1).
  • The manuscript explicitly states that its finite constructions do not establish physical realization or select a unique universe (p. 2).

Methods

  • Finite observer patches and protected-record repair — The manuscript constructs local patches that compare shared-boundary records and accept repairs preserving protected data (pp. 1-2).
  • Executable observer specification — The authors join a twelve-port carrier, native repair, retained records and record-controlled feedback in a candidate quantum process (p. 1).

Summary sources: Paper metadata and evidence · Extracted source text.

Document downloads

PDFs are hosted here; supporting sources may use pinned archives.

Citation

Citation metadata follows the unified bibliography.

Mueller, Bernhard; Poneder, Mario; Osika, Alexander; Xue, Kai; Cassie, Ben; Nguyen, Peter; Kim, Jinwook; Matscheko, David; Friedman, Daniel Ari; Hill, Jonathan; Glynn, William T.; Visser, Maarten Antonie; Anirudha, Kale Arnav; de La Fournière, Brieuc. 2026. Observers Who Read Their Universe into Existence: Finite Consensus, an Executable Observer, and Standard Physics. PhilPapers (preprint). URL: https://philpapers.org/rec/MUEFOC.
Download bibliography

Catalog details and resources

Catalog row230
Citation keyFriedman2026ObserversWhoReadTheir230
DOINot listed

Related in Computational

Other catalogued works in the same domain.

View all Computational works, software & media →