Quantum mechanics, actually explained

I always knew I had fans but it’s nice to come across them!

Here is what Matthew Cromer in his blog Science is a method, not a position (how true!) wrote:

I’ve read over most of Ulrich Mohrhoff’s website over the past few days, and pored through his papers on quantum mechanics.

For the first time, I think I am actually beginning to understand why quantum mechanics is the way it is. Not in great depth or detail, because this is not my domain of expertise. However, enough so that it actually makes sense why the quantum world appears the way it does, and something about its relationship with the more ordinary world we experience as human beings.

I outlined this understanding in a comment on Michael Prescott’s blog (who is also on a QM tear the last couple weeks). Here is what I wrote there about what I believe Mohrhoff is pointing out:

What [the Pondicherry interpretation of quantum mechanics] is saying, essentially, is that the quantum universe represents the “edge” of the classical world. Quantum behavior is necessary to create the apparent [material] world of separate particles and evolution through time that we live in out the actual inherent oneness and wholeness of Reality.

It is not that the quantum rules are bizarre. It’s that in order to create a classic[al] world out of what is essentially an undivided whole, you need the quantum world in order to do it.

The quantum world is the boundary condition where ultimate Oneness manifests itself as the apparent many, the divided, the dualistic. It is an instrument for the creation of our apparent world of space and time. The purpose of the quantum world is to create the structure needed in order to manifest the ordinary material world of space and time and the possibility of evolution.

I think Mohrhoff is absolutely dead-right about this. A true vision of genius, IMO.

Ulrich, you’re very welcome to comment here, especially if you see something off-base with my personal understanding of the PIQM. A confusing topic, but one I feel is very important and relevant to scientific approaches that go beyond reductionistic materialism.

My (that is, Ulrich’s) comments

Apparently people without too much (wrong) education have it a lot easier to grasp the implications of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics than the hardened quantum mechanicians.

I haven’t myself used the expression “edge of the classical world” because I tend to think from the perspective of the One becoming Many and thus of the physical world itself as a surface projection or “edge” of a larger reality. But from the point of view of the manifestation it’s a felicitous expression.

Of all the weird features of the quantum world, none is more baffling than the supervenience of the microworld on the macroworld. (Supervenience is a philosophical term for a relation between two types of properties. Properties of type B are said to supervene on properties of type A if objects cannot differ in their B-properties without differing in their A-properties.) The microworld supervenes on the macroworld in the sense that atoms and such have the properties that they do because of what happens or is the case in the macroworld of tables, chairs, and lab equipment. The properties of the microworld depend on the properties of the macroworld rather than the other way round, as we are wont to think. In the quantum world, to be is to be measured. A property exists only if, only when, and only to the extent that its possession is indicated by (can be inferred from) a macroscopic event or state of affairs.

My position is that it is no longer appropriate to ask: what are the ultimate building blocks and how do they interact and combine? The notorious difficulty of making sense of the quantum world is not that we don’t understand Nature’s answers. It is due to the fact that Nature fails to make sense of our questions. The right questions to ask proceed from the assumption that what ultimately exists is a single, intrinsically ineffable Being. How does this manifest itself? How does it come to constitute an apparent multitude of objects? How does it realize their properties?

If quantum theory tells us how the world is manifested, rather than how it is put together, then the supervenience of the small on the large is not that hard to understand. Quantum mechanics affords us a glimpse at what “lies between” that single, intrinsically ineffable Being and its manifestation. It allows us to understand the coming into being of multiplicity and form. (Heisenberg once said something to the effect that if atoms and such are to explain the world’s properties, they cannot themselves have these properties.) Yet we cannot describe the transition from formless unity to formed multiplicity except in terms of the finished product — the manifested world. Hence that supervenience.