Rick Rosner on Unified Existence, Quantum Reality, and Ironclad Physical Rules

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/06/04

How does Rick Rosner explain existence as unified, relational, process-based, and grounded in ironclad physical rules?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Rick Rosner on foundations of existence, probing whether reality is unified, relational, and process-based rather than unitary. Rosner argues that particles require context, non-contradiction, spacetime, records of change, and near-certainty for macro objects. The exchange links quantum uncertainty, minimal necessary units, mathematical self-consistency, time as change, and consciousness as emergent but governed by ironclad rules, rejecting vague metaphysics for a grounded informational realism within a philosophically ambitious and scientifically skeptical conversation.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The first one we have here is your perspective. The big premise is the idea that there are fundamental architectures, foundational frameworks of being. What is the substance, the stuff that makes up the universe or all of reality? Is that a good place to start, or is it an integrated set of things that cannot help but emerge entangled together?

Rick Rosner: It is all one thing. The stuff cannot exist without a context for existence. You cannot have a particle without the existential framework for the particle. To that extent, it is all one thing. Quantum mechanics, which I do not adequately understand, provides that mathematical framework. It characterizes things that exist and the framework in which they exist. You cannot have floating stuff existing.

Jacobsen: All right. We are going to have this more free-floating conversation, but I have my frameworks of research in the background around this, and we will see how far this goes. You are talking about unified existence.

Rosner: Unified, not unitary. “Unitary” sounds like everything is one thing. I am saying that it is the combination of the thing that exists and the framework in which it exists.

Jacobsen: So, unitary, no; unified, yes. Another term less commonly used, which I have used in prior writing, is “unicity,” meaning that it is unified, yes, but each potential universe in and of itself is unique in its own quality, whatever you want to call it.

Rosner: Yes. As we have discussed many times, the principles of existence are generally freedom from contradiction. Stuff cannot both exist and not exist in the same respect. You could also say there are mathematical limits to the extent to which things can both exist and not exist, or appear contradictory, when there is incomplete information about them. Under quantum mechanics, you can have probabilities, superpositions, and uncertainty about states. Within those limits, as long as you do not have complete information, the state can be open to question.

To use the overused cliché, Schrödinger’s cat: before measurement, the cat is represented in a quantum superposition tied to the underlying quantum event. Once you have a definite measurement, the observed outcome has to be one thing or another: alive or dead. In order for macro things to exist in the way we understand them, they have to have existential near-certainty.

When you catch a baseball, another cliched object to discuss in relation to existence, there is enough evidence of its existence. The roughly 10³⁰ particles it contains, the history of the ball, and your existence in the world along with the ball all serve to confirm the ball’s existence to near certainty. Along with that near certainty, you get a lack of contradiction. It certainly exists. It certainly had a history. There is no magical appearance of macro objects out of nowhere. The history and the massive number of particles it contains serve to confirm and substantiate its existence without contradiction.

Jacobsen: Is there anything absolute in those terms?

Rosner: No. It is all constructed.

Jacobsen: Would you argue that it is more an orientation on existence as stuff, or existence as substrate?

Rosner: I do not know.

Jacobsen: This is an interesting one. Would you argue that particles or simples? Is the universe composed of indivisible or minimal units?

Rosner: Yes, minimal necessary units.

Jacobsen: Why the word “necessary”?

Rosner: Because, in order to have existence, we need a framework. We do not fully know the mechanics of existence, but we have the particle zoo, which includes many particles, some elementary and some composite. There are five particle types that do much of the macro business of the universe. When you look at macro objects, what you are seeing involves protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, and, in the wider physical picture, neutrinos. Protons and neutrons are composite particles made of quarks; electrons, photons, and neutrinos are elementary in the Standard Model.

Then you have support particles and fields that facilitate the existence and interaction of those particles. It is all a necessary framework. Is the physics of our universe the simplest possible physics? Probabilistically, yes. Could you simulate a universe that was still consistent but had different physics? Many of the particles we have are built from group-theoretic principles that make everything consistent. Could you build a more complex basis of existence from different groups? You might still have the main particles, but they might require more support structure. Could you build a universe with a bunch of extra information, so it has four or five spatial dimensions, and prop it up as a simulated universe? You could probably do that, but it would take propping up. The default universe is probably what we exist in: the simplest possible configuration and particle structure.

Basically, you asked whether our cars are the simplest unitary thing. You could say, yes, we have the simplest possible cars, but a car has all these parts necessary for it to be a car. Particles have all these supporting structures that are necessary for the particle to do what it needs to do. What it needs to do is exist in certain ways.

Jacobsen: Do the basic units bear properties, or are properties derived from them, or both?

Rosner: I do not know. If you poke at that, I am not sure there is a meaningful difference. The particles are what they are, or have what they need, in order to do what they need to do: be part of a consistent, existent universe. What happens with the major particles and all the support particles is that they can exist in changing configurations, and configurations that encode some kind of memory, some kind of evidence of a past. If there is no way to retain a record of the past, then there is no past, and there is no existence. You could list the things necessary for existence: spacetime, a record of the past, and particles or fields configured in ways that allow for that.

Jacobsen: What about pattern, form, and structure? Is that more fundamental than this object orientation itself, or is there some type of…

Rosner: It is all part of self-consistency. Take the number line. Take counting numbers. It is a very consistent system. Every time you add a set of numbers in whatever order, or multiply them, you end up with the same result. You have to work hard to find any part of mathematics that is potentially contradictory. Whatever parts you may find after the sixth year of a postdoc, those potential contradictions do not jeopardize the entire structure.

Is that structure inherent to existence? I do not know. I am not sure that I care. It is a system that arises again and again in relation to the real world because it is simple and self-consistent. It earns its reflection in the world through its simplicity and self-consistency. Does that mean it has inherency? I do not care. You can argue that it is emergent, but the only thing that matters is whether it is self-consistent, because that is what you need, among other things, for existence.

You can go further and ask: Why is self-consistency the foundation of all this? Some people would say it is obvious. Really, it probably is not. You probably have to poke at that whole thing. Is that something I am interested in doing? No. I am barely interested in doing anything.

Jacobsen: What about the fundamental idea of change and activity in the universe, so nothing is truly static, as in your IC model, the general picture?

Rosner: One of the essential elements of existence is time. If things do not change, then time does not elapse. You need change. If things cycle between a million different moments and that sequence repeats, then you have only the span of time until it cycles again. To have ongoing time, you need a record of change. When stuff does not change, or when it repeats exactly, you do not really have time that moves forward.

I would argue that change is time. Time is not merely the playground in which change can happen. They are the same thing. Change and time are so logically interlinked that they are the same thing.

Jacobsen: Is the general framework a relational physical-realist perspective on the universe – networks, systems, structures, and relations?

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: I am working after that unified framework from before, but it is a process of continuous networked and structurally integrated change.

Rosner: You have to be able to argue for the existence of things rather than for an evanescent possibility of existence. What we perceive as the world in the moment, each moment of existence, could have arisen from random stuff to give the illusion of a real, old, and durable universe. But you need to be able to make a mathematical argument, built in reasonable physics, for the high probability that it is real.

Jacobsen: The last one in this section is that reality is grounded. It is unified, relational, and process-based, but it is grounded in something, not vague ideas of consciousness or experience.

Rosner: It has ironclad requirements for existence. It is not woo-woo, hand-wavy stuff. It is quantum mechanics, not probably our current form of quantum mechanics, which is really good but still incomplete. There is an ironclad framework for existence based on principles of non-contradiction and the requirements of existence: spacetime, matter or fields, change, distinct moments, and all those things.

While arising, or emerging, from increasingly information-rich moments in a developing universe, they become ironclad in their emergence. There is no magic, including consciousness. Consciousness itself, when pinned down, will be ironclad. Consciousness as manifested in various entities can be mushy. If you have a damaged or limited brain, consciousness is going to be damaged or limited. But the rules for what consciousness is, while emergent, are ironclad when manifested.

Jacobsen: Relational, dynamic, informational, process-based, with ironclad rules, and durable as a principles-based perspective on an IC view of foundations of being.

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: Let us call it a day.

Rosner: All right. Thank you.

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