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On Participatory Realism

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Information and Interaction

Part of the book series: The Frontiers Collection ((FRONTCOLL))

Abstract

In the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “‘I’ is not the name of a person, nor ‘here’ of a place, .... But they are connected with names. ... [And] it is characteristic of physics not to use these words.” This statement expresses the dominant way of thinking in physics: Physics is about the impersonal laws of nature; the “I” never makes an appearance in it. Since the advent of quantum theory, however, there has always been a nagging pressure to insert a first-person perspective into the heart of physics. In incarnations of lesser or greater strength, one may consider the “Copenhagen” views of Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli, the observer-participator view of John Wheeler, the informational interpretation of Anton Zeilinger and Časlav Brukner, the relational interpretation of Carlo Rovelli, and, most radically, the QBism of N. David Mermin, Rüdiger Schack, and the present author, as acceding to the pressure. These views have lately been termed “participatory realism” to emphasize that rather than relinquishing the idea of reality (as they are often accused of), they are saying that reality is more than any third-person perspective can capture. Thus, far from instances of instrumentalism or antirealism, these views of quantum theory should be regarded as attempts to make a deep statement about the nature of reality. This paper explicates the idea for the case of QBism. As well, it highlights the influence of John Wheeler’s “law without law” on QBism’s formulation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A further important review of QBism by an outsider can be found in [53].

  2. 2.

    The exact corpus of my readings was this: [55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109,110, 112,113,114],

    [111] I want you and Einstein to jolt the world of physics into an understanding of the quantum because the quantum surely contains—when unraveled—the most wonderful insight we could ever hope to have on how this world operates, something equivalent in scope and power to the greatest discovery that science has ever yet yielded up: Darwin’s Evolution.

    You know how Einstein wrote to his friend in 1908, “This quantum business is so incredibly important and difficult that everyone should busy himself with it.” ... Expecting something great when two great minds meet who have different outlooks, all of us in this Princeton community expected something great to come out from Bohr and Einstein arguing the great question day after day—the central purpose of Bohr’s four-month, spring 1939 visit to Princeton—I, now, looking back on those days, have a terrible conscience because the day-after-day arguing of Bohr was not with Einstein about the quantum but with me about the fission of uranium. How recover, I ask myself over and over, the pent up promise of those long-past days? Today, the physics community is bigger and knows more than it did in 1939, but it lacks the same feeling of desperate puzzlement. I want to recapture that feeling for us all, even if it is my last act on Earth.

    .

  3. 3.

    But other similar accounts abound. Here is another choice one, from Ladyman and Ross’s book Everything Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized [36]: “According to [Fuchs and Peres] the quantum state of a system is just a probability distribution in disguise. This is an instrumentalist approach that is metaphysically unhelpful.”

  4. 4.

    Steven Weinberg, Lectures on Quantum Mechanics, 2nd Edition, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2015).

  5. 5.

    It is worth noting that in this aspect at least, QBism bears a certain resemblance to structural realism . See, for instance, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/. Imagine our universe at a time (if there ever was one) when there were no agents about to use the laws of probability theory as an aid in their gambles—i.e., no such agents had yet arrived out of the Darwinian goo. Were there any quantum states in the universe then? A QBist would say NO. It’s not a matter of the quantum state of the universe waiting until a qualified Ph.D. student came along before having its first collapse, as John Bell joked, but that there simply weren’t any quantum states. Indeed, on earth there weren’t any quantum states until 1926 when Erwin Schrödinger wrote the first one down. The reason is simple: The universe is made of something else than quantum states. But then, what of the Born Rule ? To this, in contrast, a QBist would say, “Aha, now there’s a sensible question.” For the Born Rule is among the set of relations an agent should strive to attain in his larger mesh of probability assignments. That normative rule is still lying about even when there are no agents to make use of it. As Craig Callender once paraphrased it back to me in a conversation, it’s the normative rule which is nature’s whisper, not the specific terms within it.

  6. 6.

    Rüdiger Schack has furthermore found a very fine way of putting this point in some recent talks delivered in Stellenbosch and Siegen. First he quotes Einstein, in a letter to F. Reiche and his wife, dated 15 August 1942. Einstein wrote, “I still do not believe that the Lord God plays dice. If he had wanted to do this, then he would have done it quite thoroughly and not stopped with a plan for his gambling: In for a penny, in for a pound. Then we wouldn’t have to search for laws at all.” Then, on the next slide Rüdiger writes, “The usual reading: Einstein advocates deterministic laws . QBist reading: There are indeed no laws. God has done it thoroughly. There are no laws of nature, not even stochastic ones. The world does not evolve according to a mechanism. What God has provided, on the other hand, is tools for agents to navigate the world, to survive in the world.”

  7. 7.

    It is a bit of a stretch, but I have found a wildly-speculative idea in some recently unearthed notes from a 1974 notebook of John Wheeler’s which is mildly evocative of the metaphor just given. See https://jawarchive.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/twa-1974.pdf and https://jawarchive.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/tarski.pdf, typed transcripts of which may be found in the Appendix. Despite the dubious connection to anything firmly a part of QBism , I report Wheeler’s idea because it seems to me that it conveys some imaginative sense of how the notion of “birth” described here carries a very different flavor from the “intrinsic randomness” that Adán and others seem to be talking about.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Ted Hänsch and Ignacio Cirac for affording me the leisure to think on these things in the quiet of little Garching some time before writing them down. I thank Blake Stacey for advice on this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Physics, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Boulevard, Boston, MA, 02125, USA

    Christopher A. Fuchs

  2. Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Hans-Kopfermann-Strasse 1, 85748, Garching, Germany

    Christopher A. Fuchs

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  1. Physics Department, Saint Anselm College, Manchester, New Hampshire, USA

    Ian T. Durham

  2. Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Carslaw, Australia

    Dean Rickles

Appendix: Transcription from John Wheeler’s Notebook

Appendix: Transcription from John Wheeler’s Notebook

[Text taken from photographs of notebook posted at https://jawarchive.wordpress.com/.]

4–6 February 1974 draft notes for discussion with Dana Scott; also with Simon Kochen, Charles Patton and Roger Penrose.

ADD “PARTICIPANT” TO “UNDECIDABLE PROPOSITIONS” TO ARRIVE AT PHYSICS

John A. Wheeler

Brief

We consider the quantum principle. Of all of the well-analyzed features of physics there is none more central, and none of an origin more mysterious. This note identifies its key idea as participation; and its point of origin, as the “undecidable propositions” of mathematical logic. On this view physics is not machinery. Logic is not oil occasionally applied to that machinery. Instead everything, physics included, derives from two parents, and is nothing but cathode-tube image of the interplay between them. One is the “participant.” The other is the complex of undecidable propositions of mathematical logic. The “participator” assigns true-false values to appropriate ones among these propositions at his own free will. As he does so, the corresponding world unrolls on his screen. No participator, no world!

Comments

1. The quantum principle and physics.

The quantum principle is taken here to be the pervasive unifying element of all of physics. It would be a favorable sign to find the quantum principle derivable from mathematical logic along the foregoing lines; and to find the opposite would be a decisive blow against these views.

2. Start with what formal system?

Take a formal system. Enlarge it to a new formal system, and that again to a new formal system, and so on, by resolving undecidable propositions (“act of participation”). Will the system become so complex that it can and must be treated by statistical means? Will such a treatment make it irrelevant, or largely irrelevant, with what particular formal system one started?

3. Lack of commutativity

After the system has grown to a certain level of complexity, one can imagine a difference in the subsequent development, according as decisions about appropriate “undecidable propositions” are taken in the order AB or the order BA. One might focus on this point in trying to locate something like the quantum principle as already contained in mathematical logic.

4. “Reality”

The propositions are not propositions about anything. They are the abstract building blocks, or “pregeometry,” out of which “reality” is conceived as being built.

Mon 25 Feb ’74 PATTON, FOLLOW-UP OF SCOTT DISCUSSION

Can we find “Tr” in our theory and A in our theory such that for all provable statements it comes out OK and yet also to unprov. statements assign truth values[?] Tarski says can’t do; have to have a bigger theory; have to have someone on outside imposing what’s true & what’s false. Truth is thus a “meta” concept. “Participator” here! Logic can’t live by itself. No wonder Boolean system won’t fly.

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Fuchs, C.A. (2017). On Participatory Realism. In: Durham, I., Rickles, D. (eds) Information and Interaction. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43760-6_7

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