Information-Theoretic Bounds on Quantum Decoherence: A Short Philosophical Note on the Emergence of Classicality

Abstract

The quantum-to-classical transition remains a foundational puzzle. While environmental decoherence explains the practical disappearance of interference, it does not fully account for the ontological status of definite macroscopic outcomes. This short paper proposes a preliminary theoretical fragment: the emergence of classical definiteness is constrained not only by environmental dynamics but also by the finite information-processing capacity of the observing system. We introduce a heuristic information-theoretic inequality linking the observation timescale to the observer's information bandwidth. Philosophically, this reframes classical reality not as an objective, observer-independent property of the macroscopic world, but as a cognitively compressed "interface" phenomenon. We discuss the implications of this view for the measurement problem and suggest that classicality may be species-specific, dependent on the information architecture of the observer.