Bonn 2020 – scientific programme

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 8: Quantum Theory II

AGPhil 8.1: Talk

Thursday, April 2, 2020, 14:00–14:30, H-HS III

Is there room for entanglement relations in the Humean mosaic? — •Lorenzo Lorenzetti — University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland

This paper concerns the notoriously difficult relationship between Humean Supervenience (HS) and quantum entanglement. The most conservative strategy to defend Humean Supervenience is to add the problematic entanglement relations to the supervenience basis, alongside spatiotemporal relations. In this paper I am going to present a novel argument against this strategy. I will analyse the thesis of HS and make explicit one necessary condition - concerning the nature of the relations in the mosaic - that has to be posited a priori to save HS from being trivial. I will then show how entanglement relations fail to satisfy that condition in some particular cases of tripartite entanglement states, i.e. GHZ states. These states are also critical for locality, one of the central tenets of HS. I conclude that the conservative move is untenable and the Humean is therefore forced to pursue more demanding and controversial strategies, e.g. claiming that the physical world is spatially 3N-dimensional.