'We Create Reality Together'

Philosophy of Science
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In a current New Scientist feature (Forget the multiverse. In the pluriverse, we create reality together, 16 March 2026) author Jo Marchant explores a radical rethinking of reality emerging from quantum physics, neuroscience, and phenomenology. Moving beyond the familiar “multiverse” idea, the article presents the concept of a “pluriverse”—a reality not composed of fixed, observer-independent facts, but of inter-related first-person perspectives shaped through interaction.

Referring to the work of John Wheeler, Christopher Fuchs, Anil Seth, and Michel Bitbol, Marchant argues that quantum theory doesn’t describe an objective world wholly external to the observer, but rather describes the structure of our relationship with it.

“The world is such that you cannot separate yourself from it” ~ Michel Bitbol

In QBism, quantum states are not properties of physical systems but expressions of an observer’s expectations, which are modified through experience. This reframing dissolves many quantum paradoxes, such as the infamous “wavefunction collapse” and Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiments, by treating outcomes as events relative to particular agents rather than objective occurences.

“Probabilities are not things out in the world, but rather measures of what somebody knows” ~ Christian Fuchs, inventor of QBism

The article also connects this with predictive processing in neuroscience, where perception is understood as a kind of “controlled hallucination”—the brain’s best guess about the world based on prior experience.

The things we perceive – mugs, cats, sofas – are the brain’s “best guesses”, says Anil Seth, dependent on our personal history and beliefs. “We will never see things as they really, really are,” he says. “It’s hard to know what that would even mean.”

Taking this further, Marchant considers the possibility that what we call “physical reality” may itself be inseparable from these processes of interpretation.

To avoid sliding into solipsism, the framework retains a key constraint: the Born rule, which ensures coherence between different expectations and experiences. The result is a picture of reality as a dynamic, evolving “meshwork” of agents and interactions, rather than a pre-existing objective universe which individuals apprehend with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy.

The artical also links this to enactivism, where organisms and environments co-emerge through action. The upshot is a vision of the cosmos as continually coming into being—a “living community of nows”—in which observers are not passive spectators, but active participants in the ongoing formation of reality. (Think the Great Barrier Reef.)

Details of Jo Marchant’s forthcoming book In Search of Now can be found here.

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Typical aporetic, bi-categorical thinking leading straight to idealistic insanity. Here, we are presented with two categories:

  • The real, certain, scientifically proven foundation of reality: the quantum realm, which has multiplicity and randomness as its essence.

  • The “observer”, the thinker, etc.: no one knows what it actually is, but it is supposedly there and “real”. So the desperate question becomes: how do we force this thing into the quantum multiplicity?

Since absolutely nothing of the “observer” can be found in the quantum realm (there is nobody there), the proposed solution is always the same lazy trick: invert Reality and put Thinking (the “observer”) first. Just claim that we create reality. This is the typical, nonsensical idealist solution—positing Thought as the first cause—which, by the way, is the exact same mechanism used by religions.

This is a canonical example of Quantum Mysticism and has the exact value of any religious explanation.

All these aporias dissolve instantly in the MCogito multi-categorical framework (quanta-matter-life-thought-data).

In this causal structure, each category n knows only itself and possesses its own causality, which acts as a meta-causality over category n-1—a direct code-control of the n-1 causality, as you can easily discover here:

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Interesting article, this bit caught my eye;

My emphasis is always on the biosphere acting this way, as though it is one being, while each part of the world of that being is experienced by a particular participant (biological being in the world)and together all participants partake of the whole of the collective being and visa versa.

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Yes! Hence my Great Barrier Reef allusion.

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The first sentence makes it look like quantum Bayesianism is understood. The last sentence is a drastic misunderstanding.

Quantum-Bayesian and Pragmatist Views of Quantum Theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Quantum-Bayesian and Pragmatist Views of Quantum Theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The QBist does not take quantum theory truly to describe the world: but (s)he does take that to be the aim of science—an aim to which quantum theory contributes only indirectly .

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I’ve just come from another thread in which I posted that the meaning of any individual life is in the connections made.

Then I came upon this thread, which seemed at least a coincidence. This is a new word to me – enactivism – but it may align with the way I view existence, too. Our lives seem to be defined/shaped by the many intimate connections we make, from all the interactions, from the entire environment to other human beings, not just physically, but mentally, too. My consciousness only exists because of the information that comes into it from my environment.

Philosophies of interconnectedness – that the universe is one unified living whole – are ancient. These new theories seem a logical extension of them. A holistic approach ought to increase harmony, too.

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Good OP! The ‘pluriverse’ is certainly a fascinating concept and IMO yes quite similar to QBism.

However, I believe that, just like QBism, it cannot be interpreted ontologically but more like as an epistemic limit. Indeed, if it is interpreted ontologically, one would make an assertion about something that is outside one’s perspective.

I don’t buy that we have access only to ‘the world that appears’ but we can know, albeit in a distorted way, the world as it is. But yeah, the 'in itself’cannot be fully known.

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But what does it mean to say reality is constructed? Gravity is still gravity. You and I will both still fall if we jump off a cliff.

So what’s the upshot? It applies only to the quantum realm and resolves to an absolute unalterable reality at any other scale.

Fascinating stuff for quantum physicists, but I’m not seeing the philosophical ramifications for anyone else.

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Arguably given the intriduction of relativity and quantum mechanics we have to admit that classical physics cannot be descriptive but predictive. The relativistic understanding of gravity is totally different from the Newtonian understanding at least at the level of the letter (i.e. if we interpret both theories as giving us a picture of ‘how the world in itself is’).

So concepts like the classical forces etc should IMO be more adequately understood as useful fictions that allow us to make predictions and applications rather than giving us a reliable ‘picture’ of the world as it is.

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OK. But what’s the upshot? I mean, they’re about as ‘useful’ a prediction as it gets, being right so far … [checks notes] … all the time, ever.

I’m just not seeing the philosophical interest, I guess.

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To me the philosophical interest rests on the idea that if our knowledge is more limited than we usually take for granted, the world becomes much more mysterious than we usually take it to be. It is also of interest because it makes us more aware of our own limitations and perhaps less inclined to be excessively ‘dogmatic’ about our assumptions about reality.

But, yes, at the same time, we have to take seriously the ‘common sense’ picture of reality (but notice that even classical mechanics isn’t always ‘common sensical’). It is hard to function ‘in real life’ if you don’t.

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You think classical physics is right all the time, ever?

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Does it though? In a nice woo-woo sense of meaningless mysticism, maybe. But not in any real sense. Are you (and @FlannelJesus) seriously doubting physics?

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No, I’m not. And I didn’t want to convey that idea. Rather, I think that that kind of ‘sense of mystery’ actually motivates research. One seeks to know only one is aware that one doesn’t know (at least as much as one thought)…

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That is not under question. Scientific laws still hold. What is under question is the taken-for-granted nature of reality, the sense reality what is ‘just there’ independently of anything we think or do.

The ‘quantum domain’ can’t be firewalled off from that. Recall that for centuries, physics was engaged in the quest for the fundamental constituents of reality, the kind of bedrock layer of what exists. The discoveries of quantum physics in the 1920’s really upended that quest, the discovery of the uncertainty principle in particular. Science is still coming to terms with that.

Enactivism is the philosophical and biological argument that cognition is not a passive mental representation of an external world, but an active process of sense-making through the “structural coupling” of an organism and its environment. Enactivism suggests that living systems do not just process information; they “bring forth” a meaningful world through their specific bodily actions and biological needs. Rather than the mind being a computer-like processor hidden inside the skull, enactivism views the mind as an inherently embodied and relational process, where knowing is inseparable from doing and the “lived world” is co-created by the continuous interaction between the knower and the known. It incorporates elements of Buddhist philosophy as well as cognitive science and psychology.

It was initiated by a book called The Embodied Mind, published around 1990, revised 2015, by biological philosopher Francisco Varela, with Evan Thompson and Elenor Rosch. It is nowadays influential in both philosophy and cognitive science.

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But it is independent of what we think and do. We can’t think gravity into a different constant. Nothing we do will change the speed of light, or the forces holding a bridge up. These things are real and nothing we do changes that.

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Yeah, I agree with this. I hold a sort of middle ground between the naive realist view that we can know physical reality as it is and the notion that it is completely unknowable to us.

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Sorry for this reply to myself, but to put this in other words, I quote Plato’s Symposium:

[Diotima of Mantinea:] The truth of the matter is this: No god is a philosopher. or seeker after wisdom, for he is wise already; nor does any man who is wise seek after wisdom. Neither do the ignorant seek after Wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want. (source: The Internet Classics Archive | Symposium by Plato )

The very quest for knowledge is motivated by the awareness of our lack of it.

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Likewise.

It seems to me little more than the basic principle that we assume reality is as we find it, but we might be wrong.

I’m really not sure there ever was a time when physicists thought they were unquestionably right about everything, so the mere fact we might be mistaken isn’t all that special.

Even if reality only collapses out of ‘possible states’ in the presence of an observer, that’s a property solely of reality (not the observer) all the while it collapses to the exact same thing no matter who is observing it.

Clearly we’re inputting nothing whatsoever into this process other than entirely mechanistic act of ‘observing’.

If someone were to argue a person’s reality were different depending on the person, then we’d be talking about co-evolving.

But here my guess is that physics, far from being the one realm where this happens is probably the one realm where it doesn’t.

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I disagree. I believe that until the early 20th century many physicists thought that theories could give us a faithful picture of physical reality.

I do believe that unfortunately physicists themselves are apt sometimes to shift from an epistemic to an ontic language. For instance, QBism seems to be a purely epistemic interpretation: QM is a tool that allows us to make predictions about the degrees of beliefs of a given agent. Clearly this doesn’t tell us ‘how the world is’. At the same time, however, you get the language of ‘participatory realism’. However, I think that that kind of language causes confusion more than anything. To make an analogy, it’s like saying that the appearance of an object is an ‘emergent reality’ from the interaction of an object and an observer that sees the object from a certain perspective. In a similar way, each ‘agent’ in QBism has their/its (I use the personal/impersonal pronouns to cover all varieties of QBism and related interpretations) ‘perspective’ on reality. But this doesn’t mean that the agent actually ‘transforms’ reality as the phrase ‘participatory realism’ might suggest.