Can we put an end to the debate on interpretations of quantum mechanics?

Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli’s excellent book already mentioned here, deserves a second article. He makes a concise and masterful assessment of interpretations of quantum mechanics, returning back to back those who vainly try to reconcile with classical mechanics and explaining why, in his opinion, conciliation is not necessary. Let’s quickly summarize the assessment:

Everett’s multiple universes are an infinity of bifurcations for every tiny interaction. Immeasurable ‘Totiverse’ to which no one can adhere, devoid of desire, choice and even organization since everything exists in an equivalent way. It does not explain our experience of personal reality. What would be the common thread? Purely ontological hypothesis, therefore, incomplete in addition to being fanciful. Quantum strangeness has so weakened the safeguards of reason that sometimes it escapes. What still motivates the decisions of Everett’s followers? Fortunately, there is a discrepancy between what is said and believed sincerely.

The Bohm pilot wave is associated with a particle to explain the dual nature of the quanton, wave and particulate. Unfortunately, this hypothesis involves hidden variables, impossible to know, and is not compatible with relativity. Nice teleological effort but the ontological facet does not hold.

The physical collapse of the wave function, “official” interpretation, is no better. It departs from true quantum mechanics by making arbitrary macroscopic predictions. Why would a macroscopic entity stop showing the quantum properties of its elements? It does but the collapse does not say why, does not even deserve the title of interpretation.

Alternate directions

None of the hypotheses that want to concretize quantum indeterminacy in classical reality shows a way. Therefore, it must be accepted by default that reality is indeterminate in essence.

Q-bism is a hypothesis that takes this side. It considers the wave function only as information we have about the world, not the world itself. Therefore, the macroscopic change is not that of reality per se, only that of the information we have about it. As if to judge the weather we look at a barometer rather than the sky out the window.

Carlo makes an excellent critique of q-bism. He accuses it of being a pure instrumentalization of science. Deflation of the ontological pretension, replaced by a model of observation, pure teleological, as incomplete as multiple universes.

Then our famous physicist gives his version: a world made of pure relationships. Everything exists only through its interactions. Variable appearance, even contradictory, depending on what it interacts with, a quanton, a human observer, etc. The set of classical objects has disappeared, replaced by a fabric of relationships. No new mathematical theory to add. It is an epistemic readjustment of pure quantum theory. The ontology is intact. For teleology to work, the nature of the observer must evolve. The mind expects to find tiny entities melting the world? Let him abandon this idea. The self-image is not transposable to the lowercase. Ontology is first, the mind has only one effort to make: adapt to it.

Persistent indecision

For Carlo (and other pragmatic physicists) there is no need for any additional hypotheses. The interpretation is of interest only to those who have not really understood quantum primacy. Embroiled in the classical vision they seek in vain to save it. A little humility and quantum theory becomes a priority.

The explanation is remarkably clear and yet leaves me undecided. I don’t feel ‘quantum’. Why such a discrepancy between ontology and the way I perceive it? Can we reduce everything to cultural programming? It would be to reintroduce an impassable wall in the middle of reality. Unknown obscuring the nature-culture filiation. After having brilliantly fought against all dualisms, Carlo stumbles on the last, the most hidden. That is his only mistake. But it is sizeable. At this point in the book, it will distort the whole sequel.

Philosophical Review

Carlo shows how old the idea of a universe made entirely of relationships is. Masterful history, which he connects to the successes of scientific thought and finally quantum mechanics. For him the case is clear. Structural realism has beaten the punch to the substantial in physics, a success that validates the parent philosophical current. Is it that simple?

The great strength of structuralism is to connect real and virtual. Everything being relationships, the mind/body opposition disappears. But the winner, since quantum theory, is not classical materialism. It is no longer the mind that has melted into the materiality of the body, as neuroscientists argue; it is the body that has melted into the virtuality of the mind. Spectral. Neural biochemical exchanges have become equivalent to psychic evolutions and not the other way around…

An evanescent world

By dint of wanting to emancipate the world of teleological postulates, here it is completely transparent. The quantum mechanics told by Carlo no longer offers any hook to the downward look. Teleology and ontology intersect without interacting, which is a serious problem for an interaction-based approach 😉

Having lost all substance, matter has no way of slowing down the downward look before it falls into the void. This is the meaning of Carlo’s homage to Nagarjuna, an Indian philosopher who asserts that fundamental reality is emptiness. Worse, his philosophy of emptiness is an even deeper void, he says. We are witnessing the final self-dissolution of the mind. No longer finding any support for existence, pure being, it comes to denigrate its own substantial experience.

Extremism as damaging for reason as multiple universes. On the one hand an immeasurable number of concrete realities, on the other hand no more one. Quantum mechanics, definitely, pushes for radicalism. Help! Send a buoy to save my mind!

Not so fast!

Let’s go back shortly before Carlo’s bad fork. It judiciously reintegrates the reality of the mind into the general. No distinction between virtual and real. He insists on the primacy of ontological direction, with Ernst Mach: the world is made up of interactions that are organized. Complexity progresses from micro to macro-mechanisms. Finally it rids us of the deified human observer. Reality interacts and is observed in the absence of any contemporary Homo. But then let us ask ourselves the following question: Where do our assumptions about the world come from? How did we construct them ontologically?

The substance was founded in the world before the human

Did the culture of Homo sapiens land in a brain-spaceport, established there we do not know how? No doubt the anthropological dimension is a little lacking in Carlo. Biological and then neural information systems took millions of years to establish. If they seem autonomous to us over the last millennia, this does not make them an independence. They were formed in response to interactions with the environment. The ancestors of our cultural postulates are indeed the processes of a reality learning to observe itself.

If they gave birth to the very solid notion of substance, it is because reality per se has been deeply organized around it. We find it at all levels of life. The teleology of primitive organisms is as substance-based as it is here. Could we understand their behavior with a quantum paradigm? If this paradigm was so realistic, why was it not selected by evolution, why millions of years before finding a formulation? No need for mathematics to base one’s actions on the fact that everything is relationship.

The advantage of symbolic substance

On the contrary, the evolutionary advantage seems to be the attribution of a symbolic identity to individuals. Be careful, let’s not relapse into anthropocentrism. Our human ancestors did not invent the principle first. It was already inscribed in the first organisms, even molecular entities. Will you have a hard time following me further? I take the risk: atoms have found it more advantageous in terms of organization to merge entangled quantum states into particles with symbolic individuation. Without any outside help.

Carlo, however, has come most of the way. He recognized the realism of approximations, and that an observer is not necessarily human. Why refuse to allow the atom to make an approximation of its own constitution? What separates the human from the atom so that one approximates and not the other? We can see that Carlo has not completely abandoned the mind/matter dualism.

And consciousness?

Can we stop, like him, at the concretization of quantum mechanics as a universal principle of reality? Is this enough to explain everything we observe? Not. Critical breaches remain. Reality is seen as a vast continuous system of interactions. Why do some start generating consciousness and others do not? Carlo feels that something is missing. He is not seduced by quantum panpsychism, which sees in the tiniest interactions of units of consciousness. Why does their accumulation have such an astonishing result in humans when larger and more complex systems show no signs of awakening?

Rovelli solution to Schrödinger’s cat

Carlo’s solution to Schrödinger’s cat problem is incomplete. For him it is necessary to consider only the elements in relation. A phenomenon is not built by two but by three. Its reality appears in the 3rd who interprets the relationship of the first 2. Each introduction of a new element creates a reality specific to this new set, which can be contradictory with the previous ones. Quantum entanglement allows these superimposed states at the microscopic level. Having removed the need for an interpretation of quantum theory by something external to it, Carlo only has to extend the principle to the macroscopic universe. All reality is quantum. The cat, in its box, is well in a superimposed dead/alive state until I open to check. I’m not ‘third’ yet. I become one the moment I open the box. The cat becomes for me either dead or alive. Reality intricating itself with those where this interaction did not take place, not denigrating the contradictory results to its.

The solution is unsatisfactory. By lending the cat my own ability to know if I am dead or alive, I place it in a different world than mine. Didn’t Carlo reintroduce Everett’s multiple worlds, since he doesn’t make any quantum state disappear? That is indeed the case. But he uses an ingenious sleight of hand. What it makes disappear is the possibility of realizing that there are multiple realities. No exterior allows you to contemplate them. Everything is intrinsic to the global reality, even when one tries to free oneself from it. For Carlo it is the very possibility of reflecting on the whole that is impossible.

‘Complex degree’, we are almost there

The explanation given to macroscopic stability is based on the increasing complexity of interactions that makes their pointillism disappear. Carlo thus makes complexity the mixing principle of perception, uses at the turn of a sentence the notion of ‘complex degree’ without specifying how to relate it to quantum mechanics. He is on the threshold of understanding the whole of reality but does not want to threaten this new fragile monism drawn from quantum mechanics. He refuses to reintroduce a split in his ‘interior’ which has become homogeneous and explicitly denigrates the idea of ‘levels’ of reality. However, it is not far from it, with its ‘third’, which is not equivalent to the other two. A plan of existence separates them.

In this book Carlo remains behind the door, with his questions about mind and consciousness, which he admits unresolved. His position is ultimately close to eliminatory materialism, even if he seeks to take off from it. What he eliminates is the possibility of observing oneself consciously, of becoming external to one’s experience in the first person. This simply becomes a sophisticated quantum entanglement. This is the case but Carlo has not really solved Chalmers’ ‘hard problem’, merely stating that it does not make sense, as in epiphenomenism. It makes it an avatar of our tendency to add a ‘God of storm’ to the storm. This trend is no longer necessary when the storm has received a physical explanation but does not disappear. The same goes for the ‘hard problem’, which becomes purely metaphysical. But how is Carlo sure that we are not the God of storm in addition to the storm? The incredible possibilities of quantum mechanics have impressed him so much that he can lodge all his pretensions there.

A little extra leap

I couldn’t do it. The complementary leap to make is not so difficult. It is enough to grant reality a different quantization, more fundamental than that of quantum theory: that of complexity.

The self-realized approximation by the world on its own interactions is one of the fundamental principles of Surimposium. It establishes levels/attractors with a complex dimension. In these emerging levels, the notion of substance is rooted. Reality appears to be substantial in itself, with all the more thickness as it becomes more complex. Here is the hoped-for encounter between downward and upward looks, teleology and ontology, which finally agree that they describe the same thing.

Rid of quantum interpretations, we are, thanks to the remarkable analysis of Carlo Rovelli. Rid of our substantial experience, we are not, thanks to Surimposium. Our look has lost no thickness. The world is no more transparent than before. On the contrary, it has gained a multitude of geological strata, from quantum swarming to the gazebo of consciousness.

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