At 11:40 AM 11/8/2014, Benjamin Udell wrote:
Howard, you wrote:
there is general agreement that QM cannot be
interpreted by Peircean Realism. In fact, most
teachers of QMÂ struggle with the intuitively
realist perspectives of introductory students.
In teaching QM, Realism blocks the path of inquiry.
[End quote]
It's hard to see how there can be general
agreement, at least among physicists, about QM's
being uninterpretable by Peircean Realism when
most physicists are not well acquainted with Peircean Realism.
HP: You are right. I should not have modified
Realism with Peirce's name. But many physicist
were aware of Peirce. Wigner quotes Peirce but
only in the context of the mystery of how
"unreasonably effective" abstract mathematical
symbols are for modeling Nature, because Peirce
also saw the symbol-matter relation as "occult and mysterious."
In any case, if you are hoping that Peirce's type
of realism will resolve the mysteries of quantum
theory, I am afraid you will be disappointed. He
could not have understood the problem. In
particular, the discovery of the irreducuble
quantum discreteness would have been a total
surprise to him, as it was to everyone else.
Perhaps even more so since it is contrary to his synechism.
BU: Peircean realism favors real, in-principle
uncertainty and vagueness in nature itself, by
reason of the imperfectibility of measurement,
I.e., that which, even _in principle_, inquirers
could never find, nature itself cannot find.
HP: Here, Peirce would completely agree with
<https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/file/index/docid/235987/filename/ajp-jphysrad_1959_20_1_43_0.pdf>Max
Born's argument, except Born was not a realist.
BU: Moreover, Peirce's realism includes the idea
that there are real individuals, real
existences. (So the 'complementarity' of
generalism versus individualism is already
encompassed in Peirce's brand of realism.) In
particular, Peirce regards individual existence
as a matter not merely of location or proximity
in space and time, but of reaction, resistance,
interaction, like so many natural measurements.
This is congenial to the QM view of things as
becoming determinate through interaction with
the environment, the 'observer', the 'measurer',
etc. If one holds with basicness of
reaction/resistance for individual existence,
and with the indeterminacy of the future, and
takes into account similar considerations
involving a signal speed limit (the light cone
etc.), then QM starts to seem more a solution than a problem.
HP: Well, I've never heard that interpretation of
QM before. I have to agree with Bohr that if you
don't think QM is a problem, then I'm afraid you don't understand QM.
Howard
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