Someone here said I should post this when I finish it so I am posting it. There is a physical copy but I don’t care to make money on it so I am also including a free digital copy.
The book is very technical and contains a lot of math, so it is not a passive book you can just listen to. It includes Octave code at the end of each chapter to even help you implement the math and toy around with it, to help you better understand it.
If you don’t like math, I did write up a blog post awhile ago which explains the point of view all in English without any math.
To be clear, this is a philosophy book. There is a lot of mathematics, but its intention is not to provide a new physical model. All the mathematics used are just standard, orthodox quantum theory. I apply some transformations to it for analysis, but those are all mathematically equivalent transformations. This is about interpreting quantum mechanics, as it currently exists without modification, under a materialist philosophical lens, not introducing a new theory.
People constantly use quantum mechanics to justify weird things, like there is one philosopher Bernardo Kastrup who claimed it proves that “physical reality does not exist.” There is no consensus in the literature on even how to make sense of quantum mechanics.
The main thesis of the book is that, despite common misconception, it is actually quite trivial to fit quantum mechanics into a traditional materialist worldview, by taking inspiration from Albert Einstein, the Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes, and the Soviet physicist Dmitry Blokhintsev, who all advocated for thinking of quantum systems as a kind of non-classical stochastic process.
Indeed, the book even shows you how you can represent universally any quantum circuit in a quantum computer as a set of bits with well-defined values at each time interval but just “hop” to new values stochastically at each logic gate. It then applies this interpretation to all of the major “paradoxes” in QM like the double-slit experiment, Bell’s theorem, the Frauchiger-Renner pardox, Wigner’s friend, the PBR theorem, etc, and shows how it can trivially handle all of them.
However, there is a big caveat, and it is reason why interpretations of quantum mechanics have gotten so messy.
Rather than a traditional materialist viewpoint being ruled out, quite literally the opposite is true: it is underdetermined. What you find is that the structure of quantum theory does not allow for you to unambiguously define a unique materialist ontology, because it is compatible with too many of them.
Hence, if you are a materialist, at least in the traditional sense of believing in just “matter in motion,” you are forced into one of two paths:
1
You admit the underdetermination and just go on with your life. There is no a priori reason as to why the natural world’s physical laws should be structured in such a way to allow unambiguous answers to any question we ask of it.
That doesn’t mean any answer goes. They still must reproduce the mathematics of quantum theory. You can still talk about the class of possible answers and thus makes statements of truth that are generally true for the whole class. For example, you can still show such a worldview is consistent by showing that the whole class is logically consistent.
2
Make arguments that are non-emprical. For example, the physicist David Bohm put forward a theory of exactly this sort. He introduces new assumptions which have the effect of choosing a materialist ontology from the class of possible ontologies. These choices are not empirically motivated. you cannot empirically prove these are the correct choices. But you can justify them on other grounds.
In my view, much of the “quantum weirdness” stems from treating underdetermination as equivalent to non-existence, and the mistake was due to the heavy influence of positivism in the late 19th and early 20th century.
If the structure of the theory restricts you from empirically answering certain questions, rather than just assuming the answer cannot be empirically known, it is concluded, by the positivist, that the property in question doesn’t even ontologically exist.
This is usually framed as justified in terms of Occam’s razor, but deleting these properties leads to logical inconsistencies, and those logical inconsistencies lead to the measurement problem and strange claims like quantum mechanics supposedly proves the existence of the multiverse or even that there is no objective reality at all.
The main point of the book is to caution the reader against taking this extremely positivist stance and to show that maintaining the position that these questions do possess answers, even if they are not empirically verifiable, is a logically consistent worldview that drastically simplifies how you interpret quantum mechanics, because the whole thing just reduces down to a kind of stochastic process.
This book was so much effort I’ll probably never write another one. Even then, I keep wanting to add things to it because I still think it could be a lot better, but I have spent way too many years working on this and I kinda wanted to be free of it so I decided to just publish it as is. It’s imperfect but it’s good enough that it gets all the points across.
If you have any questions about it you can ask in the replies. If you don’t want to read it but just have a general question about something you heard about QM in relation to materialism or realism, I can also answer it as well, since I know a lot about the topic from all the research that went into this.
I don’t have anything pertinent to add but this is awesome, thank you!
I am not convinced. For a work that purports to take on the idealism inherent in the orthodox interpretation it contains itself even more idealism and metaphysical assumptions: the hypothetical preferred spacetime frame, or the non-locality and magical accounting for of past history in physical laws, all of which contradicts relativity.
I don’t agree with the premise here that the orthodox interpretation necessarily leads to solipsism, i just don’t see how that logically follows. The act of observation is simply a physical process, it does not require conscious observers.
And i think one of the fundamental issues throughout this whole line of argumentation presented in the blog post (which, to be entirely fair, is the only thing i have read so far, so it is possible that the full book is more convincing), is that it seems conceptually wedded to the description of quantum objects as particles, which is what leads to these apparent paradoxes, when the wave description would quite simply solve many of these.
While there are points here that i agree with, such as when the author criticizes some of the more esoteric statements made by some who take the interpretation too far and draw conclusions unsupported by empirical evidence, i think overall the interpretation here is more anti-materialist than the orthodox one, especially since the traditional interpretation does not, in my view, require to conclude that “there is no objective reality”.
All in all this reads on the surface like something reasonable, but if you look at the actual arguments being made it appears more and more like pseudo-scientific bunk and a mis-application of dialectical materialism. Rather than drawing conclusions based on observation this appears to be driven by a desire to validate pre-conceived ideas about reality that would conform with a very specific narrow conception of materialism.
