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

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