OFID – Ontological Framework of Imbricated Degrees
Conceptual foundation of the OFID framework
This page presents OFID as a minimal ontological framework designed to clarify the relation between global physical reality and regime-dependent local accessibility, without modifying the formalism of quantum mechanics or general relativity.
In simple terms, OFID states that physical reality may extend beyond what can be locally observed, due to the existence of structurally inaccessible degrees of freedom.
The problem addressed by OFID is whether the apparent limits of quantum coherence, information accessibility, and causal structure reflect incomplete knowledge, or instead reveal a deeper structural property of physical reality. OFID approaches this question by proposing that such limits may arise from intrinsic constraints on accessibility rather than from incomplete dynamics.
Overview
OFID proposes that physically real but structurally inaccessible degrees of freedom may impose fundamental limits on the reconstructibility of quantum coherence and on the completeness of local physical descriptions, without modifying the underlying dynamical laws.
Its objective is not to introduce a new physical theory, a collapse mechanism, or an interpretative alteration of the quantum formalism. Instead, it makes explicit a structural distinction between global ontological reality and the descriptions accessible from a given local regime.
In this framework, decoherence, indeterminacy, entanglement, causal horizons, and related forms of irreversibility are interpreted as manifestations of structural limitations of accessibility rather than as indicators of incomplete physical reality.
Core conceptual claim
The central ontological claim of OFID is that accessibility is not a criterion of existence. What is observable from a given regime does not exhaust what is physically real.
This dissociation between reality and accessibility is not introduced as a speculative addition, but extracted from structures already present in contemporary physics: partial trace in quantum mechanics, effective irreversibility in decoherence, entanglement-induced non-reconstructibility, and causal boundaries such as black hole or cosmological horizons.
OFID therefore proposes a minimal ontology in which reality may remain globally coherent while local descriptions are necessarily partial and regime-dependent.
Interpretive scope
Within OFID, quantum superposition is not understood as the coexistence of contradictory values, but as an effective local description of a richer global state. Likewise, measurement does not introduce a new fundamental dynamical process, but corresponds to a change in the structure of accessibility.
The framework also provides a unified perspective on phenomena often treated separately, including decoherence, entanglement, black holes, and informational boundaries, by analyzing them in terms of the same underlying distinction between global reality and local descriptive access.
In this sense, OFID does not replace standard physical mechanisms such as environmental decoherence, but clarifies the ontological conditions under which such mechanisms appear operationally complete from a local point of view.
From ontology to testability
Although OFID is primarily ontological, it is not intended to remain purely interpretative. Its empirical relevance is addressed through the identification of a falsifiable criterion based on the reconstructibility of quantum coherence.
This experimentally testable extension is developed in OFID-G, which formulates a regime-relative operational notion of local reconstructibility. The corresponding experimental implementation is developed in the Experimental page, and its quantitative phenomenological extension in Constraints.
OFID should therefore be understood not as a closed conceptual endpoint, but as the ontological foundation of a program that progresses from structural clarification toward operational testing.
Main preprint
📄 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18868538
Zenodo: View on Zenodo