Monogamy Of Framing

The popular YouTube science explainer Sabine Hossenfelder recently published a video that starts with this question:

"Why does the world look like this? Why do we not constantly see things being in two places at once, cats that are dead and alive? Physicists can’t explain it. Somehow, it seems that we don’t observe quantum effects on macroscopic scales. But quantum physics itself has no off-switch, it doesn’t explain how it goes away."

I have a fresh explanation, which will be familiar to regular Slog readers. But I set myself to the task of building an argument that would be fully intelligible—and perhaps even persuasive—to scientific types. ChatGPT helped me translate into that language (under my very attentive supervision, including a few dozen revisions).

Here's an old plain-language explanation of the phenomenon. You may find it helpful to read that one first.


MONOGAMY OF FRAMING

Perception is structured around global interpretive frames.

We inevitably interpret sensory input through a constructed world-model. Experience is never raw data; it is organized into a single coherent stance — a unitary cognitive/perceptual frame. That’s the basic architecture of observation.

This is easy to see in images supporting two distinct interpretations, like the classic vase that also reads as opposing faces. The image remains fixed, but experience flips between interpretations that cannot coexist. You can imagine or recall the unused interpretation, but you cannot inhabit both at once. The exclusivity is strict. Cognitive and perceptual framing is monogamous.

This is not a quirk of vision. Any coherent observer — human, animal, machine — must maintain one consistent world-model at a time in order to predict, relate, and act. Alternative interpretations can be entertained conceptually, but they cannot be jointly instantiated as a moment of experience without losing coherence. Monogamy of framing isn’t psychological; it’s structural.

This might shed light on a longstanding quantum puzzle. Decoherence explains why macroscopically distinct alternatives cease to interfere, but it does not explain why experience never presents them simultaneously. The relevant constraint isn’t in the physics—it’s in the observer. No coherent observer can instantiate two incompatible world-models at once. So even if the quantum state contains multiple macroscopic branches, experience cannot render them simultaneously. It can only inhabit one. Monogamy of framing applies at this level as well.

In this sense, we do not—and cannot—perceive macroscopic superpositions for the same structural reason we cannot see both the vase and the faces at once. Not because quantum theory forbids the coexistence, but because occupying two incompatible interpretive frames in a single moment of awareness is impossible for any observer.