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observer-dependent

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Observer-relativity ( metaphysics)

A property that exists only relative to some observer; without any observer-like reference system, the property doesn’t exist at all.

Examples: money, being a screwdriver, being a national border – these require agents who treat/use the thing as such.

Under relational metaphysics, the intrinsic vs observer-relative distinction dissolves

Every property is observer-relative in some sense (which mapping fixes a computation, which metaphors we use, …).
→ Replace the binary with a spectrum, parameterised by the (size of the) invariance group:

At one end, we have what we believe to be observer-invariant … according to current physics (speed of light, rest mass, electric charge, CPT symmetry).
But today’s wide invariance group might be tomorrow’s narrow one, as science asymptotically approximates objective reality (intrinsic scalar mass→rest-mass+frame-dependent energy/momentum; euclidian spacetime geometry→GR; QM…).

In the middle, “observer-variable” things that exist for any observer but vary with the observer (velocity, simultaneity, energy, basis of measurement for spin).

At the other end, observer-specific things – only exists relative to a particular observer.
Money (not intrinsically money absent the institution; ontologically observer-relative, but epistemically objective – we can still make objective claims about money), a screwdriver, positive vs negative current, …

→ There is no thing-in-itself.

To rephrase:

Everything is observer relative: there’s a spectrum of invariance to observers; at the very top sit mathematical facts, progressing down we have physics (some theories only hold from certain perspective), and so on descending narrower invariance groups, minds somewhere at the bottom.

And my hypothesis is that science progressively uncovers that these “set in stone” laws are… not so set in stone after all.
Like the speed of light, facts of mathematics etc… some might sooner or later turn out to not hold or change, depending on the perspective.

Maybe there's some natural link to the discovery of causal structure… discovering more mechanisms leads to more perspectives…?

So like there’s a single causal graph and observer relativity is a consequence of non-omniscience.
Not sure about the analogies yet tho, like what invariance translates to, etc.
There’s no god’s eye view on the graph. Everything is relative, everything is partial, from any bounded observer on the graph.
Yet, the graph exists objectively.

I should prlly refeactor the relational metaphyiscs claim into an evergreen note, and revisit the backlinks, e.g. how i link in What is Intelligence - What is Life

“objective reality is the invariance across observers” alias “there is no thing-in-itself” (tho actually… better a separate note for that too, because arguments from engels/lenin dont fit into the invariance across observers claim); and maybe backlink some things to relational metaphysics, tying together the things that make these poitns (from the computation note, real note, …).
and perhaps (yh most definitely, I wanna split the above callout / argument into the clear objective reality/invariance definitional claim, and the speculative one)
”[…?]” (perhaps first solidify the other things, above and below)

Also, distill and incorporate the below – maybe once I've gotten around to reading a bit more source material – and link it to the ideas that a) there's no god's eye view (~=there's no separate realm?; nothing outside the causal structure) b) there is no static total causal structure in totality / no static totality. It's a process. "Engels then secularizes "absolute truth" itself: it survives only as the asymptote of an open-ended scientific practice that keeps converting in-itself into for-us, never closing into a final self-knowing system." Geist. This grounds his claims that the real is rational, that freedom is the truth of history, and that the modern state and Protestant Europe are the political-spiritual shape in which Spirit has come to know itself. Reconciliation (Versöhnung) with what is, comprehended as rational, is the payoff.

Hegel uses absolute truth as the endpoint and retroactive justification of his whole system. Once you reach absolute knowing, the prior dialectical movement (logic, nature, spirit, history, art, religion, philosophy) is shown to have been the Absolute coming to comprehend itself; history has a rational telos, and the philosopher standing at the end can reconstruct it as a necessary self-development of

Marx and Engels keep the dialectic and the totality-as-process, but invert the agent. It’s not Geist self-developing and producing material conditions as its expression; it’s humans producing their material life under definite relations, and consciousness/ideology/philosophy as expressions of that. So Hegel’s absolute truth gets read as a mystified picture of a real process (historical self-production of humanity), and the Versöhnung at the end is rejected as an apologetic move — comprehending the Prussian state as Reason’s self-realization is exactly the kind of trick the dialectic, once put back on its feet, should expose. Engels then secularizes “absolute truth” itself: it survives only as the asymptote of an open-ended scientific practice that keeps converting in-itself into for-us, never closing into a final self-knowing system.

What Engels does say (in Anti-Dühring and the Feuerbach essay) is roughly: human knowledge proceeds through an endless succession of relative truths; “absolute truth” exists only as the limit-direction of this process, approached but never possessed in finished form by any individual or generation. He mocks Dühring’s “final and ultimate truths” (endgültige Wahrheiten letzter Instanz) as a pretension. The in-itself / for-us conversion language is from the Feuerbach essay, where the argument runs through industry and experiment as the practical refutation of the Ding-an-sich.

Live analogues you can poke at: Rovelli’s relational QM (facts are observer-relative but the relation-facts are real), decoherence and the absence of a clean observer/system cut, gauge theory (a lot of apparent “structure” turns out to be convention modded out by gauge orbits), participatory-universe stuff. None of this requires abandoning dialectical materialism. It requires abandoning the version of materialism where matter is a billiard-ball substrate viewable from nowhere. Engels was already comfortable letting nature be deeply relational and processual.
https://claude.ai/chat/74630b72-c097-4157-ba4c-61855056c152

There is probably no dead matter anywhere, only minimally active matter and lazy observers.

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