Gauge Symmetry of the Third Kind and Quantum Mechanics as an Infrared Phenomenon

We introduce functional degrees of freedom by a new gauge principle related to the phase of the wave functional. Thereby, quantum mechanical systems are seen as dissipatively embedded part of a nonlinear classical structure producing universal correlations. There are a fundamental length and an entropy/area parameter, besides standard couplings. For states that are sufficiently spread over configuration space, quantum field theory is recovered.