Abstract
Since the 17th century, our conceptual framework has divided the world between what's objectively real in itself and what's only subjective, in someone's mind. This dichotomy excludes something important – the structure of the physical environment that can actually be experienced, from the viewpoint of any local system. What's significant about this internal structure is that it provides the contexts of interaction in which information is physically defined and communicated between local systems. When we describe things objectively, from no particular viewpoint, we necessarily abstract from these particular physical contexts. So theoretical descriptions of objective reality necessarily overlook the environmental structure that makes information observable. Though objective theory works well in classical physics, I doubt that this contextual structure can be ignored at a fundamental level. I suggest that physics needs to describe not only the body of context-independent fact that constitutes objective reality, but also the interaction-structure that communicates these facts as its shared information-content. Further, I suggest this two-sided view of the world is just what both relativity and quantum mechanics actually give us.
Conrad Dale Johnson