There were a couple of points triggered by Jon’s two posts on this, that I wanted to touch. Smaller than his main point, and perhaps off-center.
On the sentence: > In that latter case, probability would remain indispensable, not because we > stand outside reality surveying an already given range of alternatives, but > because finite observers within a singular unfolding need ways to organize > incomplete, repeatable, and action-relevant experience. Jenann Ismael at John’s Hopkins has been on a point close to this recently (maybe a year or two? I think I heard _that_ she was interested in it a while back, but only heard the argument itself within the past 4-5 months. General theme is that the Laplacian Paradigm, as she frames it, was already dead even before quantum mechanics. One of her arguments is that the “paradigm” is a sort of expectation that you are allowed to act as if an agent that can answer anything posed as a “question” can be an actor in the universe it describes. But you can set up liar’s paradoxes if you suppose that, by the usual methods. There are various ways to decide where the mistake is, and the way that feels natural to me is different from the way she presents this, but the main construction is that one, and I have had a chance to ask her about the different framings and she agrees they are all different descriptive frames on the same error. (She then goes on to two other branches of the same argument, one from the problem of causal accessibility in special relativity, and the other from QM. But the one above was what rang as resonant with Jon’s framing.) On quantum mechanics, I was wondering whether there is an incremental way to decide what one has to do. I tend not to want to start with probabilities, because they are too readily a foil for the question: are they “real”, are they “epiphenomenal” of the descriptive mode, etc. I would feel safer starting with a more conservative question: what do we want to think about state vectors? And how should we argue it. To me, the most fundamental step in QM breaking from classical mechanics (CM) was, that in CM we think states and observables are the same “kind of thing”. In the sense that whatever we mean by a “state”, that is just supposed to be a complete set of values for whatever we mean by “observable”. If one hadn’t meant that, what would one have meant? There wasn’t really a question to ask from what CM made visible. QM gave us a way to say that “states” and “observables” were really different _kinds of things_, by building mathematical representations of each and of the relation between them. One as vectors in some vector space, the other as operators on the vectors. So the minimal question, if I were trying to piece together an argument about it, would be: even supposing we think the word “observable” will survive, and that we will give it some kind of status, what do we think will happen to the term “state”; will we continue to think we mean something by it? My guess is that Bohr thought it was a computational artifact, and not something to worry too much over. (If I read history of science, I wouldn’t have to guess; other people know these things well.) To me, Aharonov-Bohm phases, Berry phases, and other such things, say that whatever ontological status we decide we should give to observables, we have to give the same status to the state as a thing that can carry a non-observable but still-consequential phase. So maybe we don’t have to go to a totality, and say everything about the way we represent states is inescapable and can be made totalizing. But if we think that we need observables and the phase-capacities of states to get empirical validity, how much does that lock us into? If it locks us into less-than-everything about the usual setup of QM, what would be the next step to say we can’t be empirically valid without, and that has to be considered ontologically parallel to the status of operators and of the phases in states? Bell inequalities, yes expressed in probabilities, but I guess thinkable in terms of limits on events. Is there anything incremental that stops short of the standard machinery, or is the standard machinery actually rather thin already, so it doesn’t take a very large number of empirical commitments to lock most of the method in? Eric > On Aug 16, 2026, at 6:21, Jon Zingale <[email protected]> wrote: > > Jochen, > > Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think we are more aligned than may be > apparent, and I appreciate your clarification of the problem you are actually > trying to address. I only want to clarify that my concern does not rest on an > older deterministic picture, nor on quantum indeterminacy as its alternative. > > My concern is with a background assumption that matters especially for > Everettian universal-wavefunction and super-deterministic pictures: that > there is a globally given state whose complete history is fixed. Chaos limits > predictability, but it need not challenge that stronger image. That is the > image I am trying to question, in part because it affects what we can > legitimately infer from generalities, averages, and ensembles. > > Regarding quantum theory, I want to leave open a speculative possibility. > What appears to us as quantum probability may arise partly from the > object-oriented form of inquiry. We isolate, reidentify, and compare entities > such as electrons across preparations and measurements, then form ensembles > and extract stable frequencies. In doing so, we presuppose, or perhaps > construct, an effective space of repeatable objects and possible outcomes. > > If the actual unfolding is singular and non-computable, the resulting > probabilities may describe the best regularities available to finite > observers making successive approximations, rather than probabilities over a > fully given underlying state space. Electrons would remain real as stable > operational objects, but their probabilistic behavior would not by itself > establish fundamental stochasticity or a globally specifiable space of > possibilities beneath the phenomena. > > I suppose I am wary of moving too quickly from successful ensemble > descriptions to claims about the ontology of the singular world. Physics > works with electrons, states, probabilities, and averages because they are > extraordinarily stable and useful handles. But probability begins by > constructing a space of possible outcomes and assigning a measure over it. > That is indispensable for inquiry, but it does not by itself decide the > ontology. It may be that reality is exhaustively represented by a structured > space of possibilities, perhaps even by an Everettian multiplicity. But it > may also be that we belong to a singular unfolding whose regularities can > only be approached through the possible spaces and ensemble descriptions we > construct locally. > > In that latter case, probability would remain indispensable, not because we > stand outside reality surveying an already given range of alternatives, but > because finite observers within a singular unfolding need ways to organize > incomplete, repeatable, and action-relevant experience. > > I expect that many on the list could point out where these speculations fail > or need sharper formulation. For instance, I see that Marcus has just brought > up unitarity. I certainly do not claim authority on these questions. Anyway, > I do not mean to further detract from the actual point of your writings, > which is concerned with agents doing agent stuff. > .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... > --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,SHDEdW8mv9XhL_8d3qKKVKzn47USuV9q15iRHEHNZpG-xCimMd8OeE19h5FjaX7wtSClaRuVcMEXq0cDo6VWe7MfbFyJL4MyJa5yPteXSfrKXZdw1fyK6pSQq6A,&typo=1 > to (un)subscribe > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,sgDE8g4SHSFQksOnMv8TjoOf_I2iwX_I3lNowOv2-2e4jJCLBwgN4ebQQCAaPFtMJr3TlTLqOsOLfTfrwk0Z9C8Db6oJHZ85R9oIm9lJBY1SyMxl&typo=1 > FRIAM-COMIC > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,fDZsLAZwpjX9X3DwZb5tS-4S2y36IzDKcpsHJjS-JGX2LHcg6dDnjrc67oNSDRiTXG7ELrMfL0aGaCuMX9sXpe7IKMHv9uBGysmTMOqT6hV8sjG--10,&typo=1 > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,i1kwyPCeQCrhbCiq2CDCMXW1-0BJD5dKIofYpuH62AZ38Tik3nFTgQv0xmK11HE0ufTUEFZvjxwNz9azl1U-mR3L9G-xK4AgGGk5GG8JVDuTsXJ-0w,,&typo=1 > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
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