Heidelberg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik
AGPhil 10: Quantum Mechanics II
AGPhil 10.3: Vortrag
Donnerstag, 24. März 2022, 15:00–15:30, AGPhil-H14
Configuration Space Realism and Fundamentality — •Gabrielle Kerbel1 and Nina Emery2 — 1University of Michigan — 2Mount Holyoke College
The central question of quantum ontology is: what does the wavefunction represent? According to configuration space realism, the wavefunction represents a field (the `wavefunction field') in a high-dimensional space (what we call `cf-space'). According to the standard version of configuration space realism, which we call configuration space fundamentalism, the wavefunction field and cf-space are fundamental. We present a novel version of configuration space realism, called configuration space non-fundamentalism, according to which the wavefunction field and cf-space are non-fundamental. Instead, the wavefunction field and cf-space depend on three-dimensional space and the entities therein. We argue that configuration space non-fundamentalism should be taken at least as seriously as configuration space fundamentalism. Along the way we show how choosing between these different versions of configuration space realism will encourage metaphysicians and philosophers of physics alike to confront significant questions about the structure of grounding relations, the importance of locality and separability, and the nature of supervenience and scientific explanation.