Mind, Values, and Metaphysics by Anne Reboul

Author:Anne Reboul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

20.3 Many Worlds?

As mentioned above, the term “measurement problem” is misleading: This problem has nothing to do with measurement in particular. It concerns the empirical content of quantum mechanics . One can take (1.A) and (1.B) in the quotation from Maudlin above to express the bare formalism of quantum mechanics. But the conjunction of (1.A) and (1.B) implies that (1.C) is false. Hence, the bare formalism of quantum mechanics is not able to accommodate facts about the localization of objects in physical space , such as the pointer of a measuring device pointing upwards instead of downwards. It thereby has no empirical content, since it does not yield any propositions about observable phenomena (see, Albert 1992, Chaps. 1–4, for a detailed discussion of this problem) . What is more, basing oneself on the bare formalism of quantum mechanics, one comes to the conclusion that there is nothing of the sort of what we take to make up the empirical content of a theory.

This is indeed the consequence that Albert (1996) regards as mandatory for any form of realism about quantum mechanics , that is, any ontology of quantum mechanics:

…it has been essential (…) to the project of quantum-mechanical realism (in whatever particular form it takes…) to learn to think of wave functions as physical objects in and of themselves. And of course the space those sorts of objects live in, and (therefore) the space we live in, the space in which any realistic understanding of quantum mechanics is necessarily going to depict the history of the world as playing itself out (…) is configuration space. And whatever impression we have to the contrary (whatever impression we have, say, of living in a three-dimensional space, or in a four-dimensional space-time) is somehow flatly illusory. (Albert 1996, p. 277, emphasis in the original)

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