Abstract
Aristotelian ideas have in the past been applied with mixed fortunes to quantum mechanics. One of the most persistent criticisms is that Aristotle’s notions of potentiality and actuality are burdened with a teleological character long ago abandoned in the natural sciences. Recently this criticism has been met with a model of the actualization of quantum potentialities in light of Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘spontaneous events’. This presumably restores the nowadays acceptable idea of efficient causation in place of Aristotle’s original doctrine of the ‘four causes’. In this article I challenge the model by arguing that when properly scrutinized Aristotle’s final cause poses no problems for an Aristotelian reading of quantum mechanics. Final causes in fact provide a better ontology for quantum mechanics than spontaneous causation. The idea of ‘spontaneity’ is unanalyzable and therefore of little use in quantum mechanics. In addition, it is ontologically sterile in the context of quantum measurement, as shown by a historical and conceptual review of the role of efficient causation in experimental physics.
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Notes
See Sect. 4 for a comprehensive account of the genesis and meaning of Aristotle’s concept of ‘potential beings’.
In his Farbenlehre Goethe saw Newton also as an ‘Inquisitor' torturing nature in order to extract desired confessions from her (see Schöne 1987, 64–66). For Plato’s views on experimentation as the ‘torture of nature’ see Goehr (2015), and for his general attitude toward empirical method see a classical reference Lloyd (1968).
Bohm's usage of the concept of ‘quantum potentialities' is not incidental; he mentions the concept and explains it repeatedly throughout the book (Bohm 1951, pages: 132–133, 139, 143, 157, 158–161, 168, 175–176, 238, 331–332, 415, 469, 548, 609–611, 620–622, 625–627).
As put by Bohm, “it is characteristic of the classical domain that within it exist objects, phenomena, and events that are distinct and well-defined and that exhibit reliable and reproducible properties with the aid of which they can be identified and compared” (Bohm 1951, 125), which includes also our (classical) measuring devices. This characterization of the classical domain is in essential accordance with Aristotle’s characterization of ‘actual beings’ (see Sect. 4).
Despite occasional announcements to the contrary. For example, in 2012 a team of German physicists announced that they have demonstrated both wave and particle properties of light in one single experiment (Menzel et al. 2012), but later it has been demonstrated that the supposed violation had been caused by a biased sampling (Bolduc et al. 2014).
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I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism, comments, and suggestions that have essentially improved the quality of the paper.
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Kožnjak, B. Aristotle and Quantum Mechanics: Potentiality and Actuality, Spontaneous Events and Final Causes. J Gen Philos Sci 51, 459–480 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-020-09500-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-020-09500-y