SMuK 2023 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 8: Quantum Foundations 4

AGPhil 8.1: Hauptvortrag

Donnerstag, 23. März 2023, 11:00–11:45, JAN/0027

Interpreting Quantum Mechanics on an Informational Approach — •Michael Cuffaro — Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich, Germany

The traditional metaphysical picture of the world takes observation-independent properties as primary and to be the origin of values of dynamical quantities revealed in experiments. It is naturally suggested by classical mechanics, since the classical state fixes the values of all such quantities in advance. Famously this is not true of the quantum state. Although Everett is the most natural interpretation of quantum mechanics given the traditional metaphysical picture, in this talk I defend an informational interpretation. What we preserve from classical mechanics is not the metaphysical picture it suggests, but the empiricist methodology through which one reasons, from the probability distributions over the values revealed in experiments, to a global picture of the world that is anchored in the contextual models one gives of phenomena under the dynamical assumptions characterising each of them. A priori, the question of how to conceive of reality is, on our approach, open; but the answer suggested by the novel kinematical framework of quantum mechanics is that a description of the world that does not include a reference to the possibilities of observation is inadequate for physics. Since observers are represented schematically, our kinematical resolution of the measurement problem reveals the observation-independent structure of the world, but it is a mistake to interpret this structure in substantival terms.