ONTOLOGY CONTRACT · v1

Classical cannot mean “whatever survives.”

If the reconstruction program can redefine the word after every failure, it proves nothing. So the rules are fixed in advance.

The model must say what exists, how it moves, what the detector does, and which causal assumptions it changes.

Core admission rule

A candidate counts as a classical reconstruction here when its fundamental state is given by objective physical variables—fields, charge/current densities, particle positions, extended matter configurations, stochastic processes or comparable beables—whose dynamics are stated directly in spacetime or phase space. Continuous fields may carry waves, memory, noise and nonlinear structure. Randomness may be fundamental or effective. The model may use experimentally fixed constants, including ℏ, without turning ℏ itself into an ontological verdict.

What does not count by default

Fundamental wavefunctionIf the universal ψ in Hilbert space is simply declared physically fundamental, the reconstruction has imported the quantum ontology it was supposed to replace.

Born rule as an axiomA candidate must derive event probabilities from physical dynamics or explicitly label the Born rule as an imported postulate.

Projection/collapse as primitiveDetector transitions may be discontinuous. A primitive measurement-collapse rule is not a classical reconstruction unless itself reduced to objective dynamics.

Operators as the physical furnitureOperators can be calculation tools. They do not count as the underlying material ontology unless the project explicitly leaves the classical program.

Allowed departures—only when declared

“Classical” is not being used here as a synonym for nineteenth-century locality. Bell makes that untenable for some model classes. A candidate may therefore be nonlocal, measurement-dependent, retrocausal, globally constrained or contextual—but the departure must be named, mathematically exposed and charged to the model’s complexity ledger.

LOCALITYLocal / nonlocal / global constraint

CAUSAL ARROWForward-only / retrocausal / all-at-once boundary value

MEASUREMENT INDEPENDENCERetained / relaxed with quantified dependence

STOCHASTICITYDeterministic / intrinsic noise / environmental noise

DETECTORExplicit nonlinear dynamics required for event-statistics claims

STATE SPACESpacetime fields / particles / extended matter / other declared beables

No semantic laundering in either direction

A successful continuous-field mechanism is not to be dismissed as “quantum in disguise” merely because it produces discreteness, uses ℏ, or contains a stochastic background. Conversely, a model does not become classical merely by renaming a wavefunction “field” while preserving Hilbert-space postulates unchanged.

Classical reconstruction is a physical constraint set, not a nostalgia label.

The falsification clause

If every model satisfying this contract fails the same experimentally sharp target, that failure becomes evidence against this model class. The contract exists so the program can actually lose.