Self-Awareness & the Collapse Question

One of the longest standing open questions in quantum mechanics is what actually causes superposition collapse. The Copenhagen interpretation just says "observation" & leaves it at that, which has driven physicists mad for a century. It implies a special role for the observer without ever explaining the mechanism. What is an observation? Who or what qualifies as an observer? At what scale does collapse occur & why?

PT proposes something more satisfying: collapse is intrinsic. It is the system's own self-discrimination, its primitive awareness of its own ternary states. The observer doesn't cause the collapse. The observer is just witnessing a process that has its own internal trigger.

That internal trigger is self-awareness. Not consciousness in any grand or mystical sense, but the most minimal possible version: a thing registering that it is this & not that. You cannot divide without some mechanism that discriminates. You cannot split into ⁻1, 1 & 1⁺ without something that registers the difference between them. In PT that discriminating mechanism is intrinsic to every mechanism all the way up, from the first pulse of the Phen to every quantum event in the Phenomena.

That's not a small claim. It directly addresses one of the most contested & unresolved problems in all of physics. It may also have implications for quantum computing, for the nature of measurement, & possibly for a structural account of consciousness itself. Those are bigger conversations for other pages. But they all start with a Phen & photon becoming aware of what they are.