The Frame Structure of Quantum Measurement: How Collapse and Unitarity Coexist

This paper is a conceptual and interpretive companion to "The Dynamics of Discrete Fact: A Phase-Transition Theory of Wavefunction Collapse" (doi: 10. 5281/zenodo. 18748601), which develops a phase-transition theory of wavefunction collapse in full mathematical detail. The interpretive claims made here rest on the physical model established there. The paper identifies a structural conflation at the root of the quantum measurement problem. The standard formulation treats measurement simultaneously as a physical process and as an experiential event without distinguishing between the two. We formalize this distinction as two complementary descriptive frames — a Reality Frame (FR) for the continuous dynamics of the system–apparatus field, and an Observer Frame (FO) for the discrete outcomes recorded by an embedded observer — connected by a calculable critical threshold γc derived from the companion paper's phase-transition model. The frame distinction is applied to the three sub-problems of measurement, to five foundational paradoxes (Wigner's friend, Frauchiger–Renner, Schrödinger's cat, delayed choice, and EPR), and to seven major interpretations of quantum mechanics, each shown to privilege one frame while neglecting the other. A Frame Complementarity Principle is conjectured as a testable constraint on the simultaneous accessibility of process information and outcome definiteness.