Abstract
Chapter 7 suggests that the principles of quantum information theory, implicitly at work, as I have argued, already in Heisenberg’s discovery of quantum mechanics, may play a major role in the future of fundamental physics and principle thinking there. Heisenberg’s work and quantum information theory also share their “technological” nature in the broad sense of technology, as considered in Chap. 2 (Sect. 2.5). Indeed, which is the main theme of this conclusion, the question of quantum information and “the question concerning technology,” in Heidegger’s famous phrase, are deeply interconnected and may even be seen as one and the same question. For, the physics of quantum information is also the physics of the relationships between experimental and mathematical technology. All technology is essentially linked to information. Indeed, technology may be best defined as the means of obtaining information about systems, in the case of quantum systems, in the RWR-principle-based interpretations, as the means of generating information (classical in nature) through the interaction between quantum systems and the technology of measuring instruments. In this way, this conclusion brings together all of the main themes and fundamental principles discussed in this book.
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Notes
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I am indebted to G. M. D’Ariano on this point.
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Cf. an intriguing recent approach to representing sensation-perception dynamics in terms of quantum-like mental instruments or, one might say with the discussion given in Chap. 7 in mind, “circuits” in Khrennikov (2015). A qualification might be in order. There have been recent arguments concerning the technological nature of thought itself in the sense of the material embodiment (“embodied cognition”) or material extension (“extended cognition”) of thought, for example, those following Clark and Chalmers (1998). Arguments in support of such claims do not appear to me to have been rigorously developed thus far. I am not denying that there are relationships between thought and technologies conventionally assumed as exterior to thought, beginning with the technology of writing, without which it would be difficult to do mathematics, for example. On the other hand, it is difficult to argue rigorously that one thinks with the technology of the LHC, although we might think with mental images of photographs enabled by this technology or possibly of other material components of the LHC. These remarks are, admittedly, hardly sufficient to make the case they suggest, but doing so will require an argument that cannot and need not be pursued here. In any event, my primary concern is the technology, specifically mathematical technology, of thought itself, which may, I admit, never be entirely separable or independent from one or another exterior technology, but it is, I would also argue, not reducible to such exterior technologies either. Nor of course is thought reducible to its technological aspects, insofar as thought may create objects, such as phenomenal or mathematical spaces that are not in themselves technological (fibrations or cohomology and homotopy groups that one uses to study spaces are), even though they can be made part of technologies of thought. To assume this reduction would merely (or naively) reverse the classical dualist and hierarchical view of thought and technology, which assumes technology to be merely auxiliary to thought. This type of reversal, which unconditionally subordinates thought to technology, as against the previous phase of the unconditional independence of thought from technology, is not sufficient to critically reexamine and ultimately change the fundamentals of our thinking concerning the relationships between thought and technology. The same claim, it follows, would apply to the opposition between mental and materially embodied technologies of thought. Neither is unconditionally separable from or unconditionally subordinate to the other.
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Plotnitsky, A. (2016). Conclusion: The Question Concerning Technology in Quantum Physics and Beyond. In: The Principles of Quantum Theory, From Planck's Quanta to the Higgs Boson. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32068-7_8
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