Abstract
The end of the last decade saw a media frenzy over possibility of an H1N1 flu pandemic. The frenzy turned out to be misplaced, but it did serve to remind us of a basic truth: that a healthy body can be stricken with a fatal disease which to outward appearances is nearly identical to a common yearly annoyance. There are lessons here for quantum mechanics. In the history of physics, there has never been a healthier body than quantum theory; no theory has ever been more all-encompassing or more powerful. Its calculations are relevant at every scale of physical experience, from subnuclear particles, to table-top lasers, to the cores of neutron stars and even the first 3 min of the universe. Yet since its founding days, many physicists have feared that quantum theory’s common annoyance – the continuing feeling that something at the bottom of it does not make sense – may one day turn out to be the symptom of something fatal.
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Notes
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Most of the time one sees Bayesian probabilities characterized as measures of ignorance or imperfect knowledge. But that description carries with it a metaphysical commitment that is not at all necessary for the personalist Bayesian, where probability theory is an extension of logic. Imperfect knowledge? It sounds like something that, at least in imagination, could be perfected, making all probabilities zero or one – one uses probabilities only because one does not know the true, pre-existing state of affairs. Language like this, the reader will notice, is never used in this paper. All that matters for a personalist Bayesian is that there is uncertainty for whatever reason. There might be uncertainty because there is ignorance of a true state of affairs, but there might be uncertainty because the world itself does not yet know what it will give – i.e., there is an objective indeterminism. As will be argued in later sections, QBism finds its happiest spot in an unflinching combination of “subjective probability” with “objective indeterminism.”
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Strictly speaking, meliorism is the doctrine “that humans can, through their interference with processes that would otherwise be natural, produce an outcome which is an improvement over the aforementioned natural one.” But we would be reluctant to take a stand on what “improvement” really means. So said, all we mean in the present essay by meliorism is that the world before the agent is malleable to some extent – that his actions really can change it.
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The term “pluriverse” is again a Jamesian one. He used it interchangeably with the word “multiverse”, which he also invented. The latter however has been coopted by the Everettians, so we will strictly use only the term pluriverse.
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Fuchs, C.A. (2014). Introducing QBism. In: Galavotti, M., Dieks, D., Gonzalez, W., Hartmann, S., Uebel, T., Weber, M. (eds) New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04382-1_26
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