Related papers: Whence deep realism for Everettian quantum mechani…
In the context of theories of the connection between mind and brain, physicalism is the demand that all is basically purely physical. But the concept of "physical" embodied in this demand is characterized essentially by the properties of…
Contrary to classical physics, which was strongly objective i.e. could be interpreted as a description of mind-independent reality, standard quantum mechanics (SQM) is only weakly objective, that is to say, its statements, though…
What ontology does realism about the quantum state suggest? The main extant view in contemporary philosophy of physics is wave-function realism. We elaborate the sense in which wave-function realism does provide an ontological picture; and…
This chapter, from the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Physics (Eleanor Knox and Alastair Wilson, eds., 2021), is an overview of the constraints that relativity places on interpretations of quantum theory. It focuses on four main…
Is presentism compatible with relativity ? This question has been much debated since the argument first proposed by Rietdijk and Putnam. The goal of this text is to study the implications of relativity and quantum mechanics on presentism,…
The mathematical model of orthodox quantum mechanics has been critically examined and some deficiencies have been summarized. The model based on the extended Hilbert space and free of these shortages has been proposed; parameters being…
We suggest a contextual realist interpretation of relational quantum mechanics. The principal point is a correct understanding of the concept of reality and taking into account the categorical distinction between the ideal and the real.…
Fundamental principle of classical physics -- local realism, means that freely chosen observations can be explained by a local (slower than light) real process. It is apparently violated in quantum mechanics as shown by Bell theorem.…
While complex numbers are essential in mathematics, they are not needed to describe physical experiments, expressed in terms of probabilities, hence real numbers. Physics however aims to explain, rather than describe, experiments through…
Quantum mechanics stands in conflict with local realism only in its treatment of separated systems. A modification of quantum mechanics that changes the handling of separated systems is suggested that can reconcile quantum mechanics with…
The Hilbert space formalism describes causality as a statistical relation between initial experimental conditions and final measurement outcomes, expressed by the inner products of state vectors representing these conditions. This…
Realism about quantum theory naturally leads to realism about the quantum state of the universe. It leaves open whether it is a pure state represented by a wave function, or an impure (mixed) one represented by a density matrix. I…
In this article we present a possible way to make usual quantum mechanics fully compatible with physical realism, defined as the statement that the goal of physics is to study entities of the natural world, existing independently from any…
The hard problem in consciousness is the problem of understanding how physical processes in the brain could give rise to subjective conscious experience. In this paper, I suggest that in order to understand the relationship between…
Many physicists limit oneself to an instrumentalist description of quantum phenomena and ignore the problems of foundation and interpretation of quantum mechanics. This instrumentalist approach results to "specialization barbarism" and mass…
We discuss some conceptual issues that any approach to quantum gravity has to confront. In particular, it is argued that one has to find a theory that can be interpreted in a realist manner, because theories with an instrumentalist…
Quantum Mechanics, the physical theory describing the microworld, represents one of science's greatest triumphs. It lies at the root of all modern digital technologies and offers unparalleled correspondence between prediction and…
In this paper, we argue that there are foundational dilemmas in theoretical physics related to the concept of reality and the nature of mathematics in physics. Physical theory is treated as a conceptual organism which develops under the…
Quantum theory is a tremendously successful physical theory, but nevertheless suffers from two serious problems: the measurement problem and the problem of interpretational underdetermination. The latter, however, is largely overlooked as a…
I distinguish two types of reduction within the context of quantum-classical relations, which I designate "formal" and "empirical". Formal reduction holds or fails to hold solely by virtue of the mathematical relationship between two…