Collapsing onto the Same Record: First-Person Actualisation, Shared Records, and the Collapse Chain

We develop an account on which the future, before it is observed, is real potential without definite values, and on which observation actualises it relative to the observer. For an observer who has not yet observed an event, the event is not merely unknown but indefinite; time, for each observer, is a chain of such collapses, causal but indeterminate. The account faces the question that observer-relative views share: how do separate observers come to live in one world? We distinguish two layers of every collapse, a record layer of public traces and an interpretation layer of private readings. Agreement on asking, already established as conviviality in convivial solipsism and as consensus in quantum Darwinism, follows for any shared classical record. We go further and propose that co-readers of a record collapse onto one record-fact, and defend this as the best explanation of agreement, compatible with Zwirn’s prohibition on comparing perceptions because what is shared is a record, not a perception. Financial markets supply such records by institutional design: each second, a changing set of readers co-collapses onto one price while interpreting it divergently. A minimal first-person formalism identifies where non-classical structure could appear and reduces to a classical Markov model when all updates commute. We separate the interpretive claims, which no experiment decides, from testable consequences framed as no-signalling-in-time conditions.