Abstract
Quantum fundamentalism is the view that quantum mechanics (QM) should inform us about fundamental ontology. It is adopted by many who seek to defend scientific realism with respect to QM, and it prompts them to opt for one of the versions (or interpretations) of QM that were developed in response to the measurement problem. I argue that this is a mistake. Not only is realism about QM compatible with neutrality concerning these different versions, but the commitment to any particular one of them is actually in tension with basic tenets of scientific realism. This is demonstrated by a critical assessment of Michael Esfeld’s and Valia Allori’s recently developed versions of quantum fundamentalism.
‘As for myself,’ said Éomer, ‘I have little knowledge of these deep matters; but I need it not. This I know, and it is enough, that as my friend Aragorn succoured me and my people, so I will aid him when he calls.’ The Return of the King J.R.R. Tolkien
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Notes
- 1.
I admit that there are many formulations of scientific realism (see Chakravartty (2017) for an overview) and not all of them include the ontological component I am concerned with here. However, the authors discussed in the rest of this paper clearly share an ontological understanding of scientific realism in the sense that the realist should take some parts of our best scientific theories to accurately describe elements of reality.
- 2.
- 3.
Another important ingredient of the PO approach is the requirement that the PO is constituted by “entities living in three-dimensional space or in space-time” (Allori, 2013, 60). This will become important in Sects. 2.4 and 2.5, because it excludes the quantum mechanical wave function (which is in general not defined on three-dimensional space, but on some higher dimensional configuration space) from the PO.
- 4.
One might think that this problem can be circumvented by formulating scientific realism in terms of truth rather than existence, but this only works insofar as one disregards the question of what it is in the world that makes some statement true (see Asay (2018) for different realist options in that respect). Now Esfeld is clearly not among those who disregard this question, and his response to it brings us back to the original claim that the only real truth-makers are the elements of the PO. About propositions containing predicates such as ‘mass’ or ‘charge’, he writes:
These predicates—as well as all the other ones appearing in the propositions that are true about the world—really apply, and the propositions really are true; there is nothing fictitious about them. But what there is—and hence what makes them true—is nothing over and above the distribution of primitive stuff throughout space and time. (Esfeld, 2014a, 465)
- 5.
As far as I see, justification for this assumption comes from non-relativistic Bohmian mechanics, where a history of particle configurations can be compatible with many different wave functions describing the system’s quantum state at a certain time during that history. It is not clear to me whether this still holds in Esfeld and Deckert’s (2018, chap. 4) Dirac sea model for quantum field theory, where the number of particles is massively increased and the requirement of being able to change the quantum state without changing any particle movements seems much harder to satisfy.
- 6.
It might seem that the PO of standard QM also encompasses microscopic entities, since QM textbooks often talk about elementary particles and their properties, for example. However, standard QM describes such entities by a wave function, whose role, according to the proposal under consideration, is “to determine the probability relations between the successive states of [macroscopic] objects” (Allori et al., 2008, 363).
- 7.
There are other aspects of the wave function which do not play such a role, an important example being superpositions of macroscopically discernible states of affairs (Everettian “worlds”). That these are not acknowledged in all the proposed solutions of the measurement problem is the reason why (as mentioned in Sect. 2.2) my proposal differs from the Everett interpretation, and is, from the realist point of view, preferable to it.
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Egg, M. (2022). Quantum Fundamentalism vs. Scientific Realism. In: Allori, V. (eds) Quantum Mechanics and Fundamentality . Synthese Library, vol 460. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99642-0_2
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