Record-Based Ontology (RBO): Individuation,Continuity, and Definiteness - A BCT-derived philosophical framework for facts, selves,outcomes, and observer-worlds

This paper reframes Record-Based Ontology (RBO) as a BCT-derived framework for individuation. Its central aim is not to offer a complete physical theory of reality, nor to replace Bit-Collapse Theory (BCT), nor to derive the formal structure of quantum mechanics. Its more limited claim is that finite systems require criteria of individuation: not every physical difference automatically individuates a fact, self, outcome, or observer-world for a finite record-bearing system. RBO begins from the BCT insight that experienced definiteness is not a primitive global fact but an agent-relative structure. In BCT, what becomes definite for an agent is not the universal wavefunction as such, but the agent-relative equivalence class of global configurations compatible with the agent’s accessible informational and record structure. RBO generalizes this insight cautiously: records do not create reality, and they are not identical with facts; rather, records are stabilized physical or informational structures through which differences become definite, inherited, and update-constraining for finite systems. The core RBO constraint is anti-overcounting: do not count facts, selves, outcomes, or observer-worlds more finely than the record-constituted differences that make them difference-making for finite systems. This is not intended as a new dynamics, nor as a theory of subjective world-creation. It is an individuation constraint on when physical multiplicity becomes fact-, subject-, outcome-, or world-making relative to finite systems. The framework distinguishes physical difference, trace/correlation, record, fact-for-a-system, and truth/accuracy. It also distinguishes recordhood from representational success: false records are real as records while failing as representations. RBO therefore aims to function as a fallibilist record-realism and as a philosophical extension of BCT’s equivalence-class approach to definiteness.