Rex Kerr
2 min readJun 29, 2024

--

Yes--not in the deBroglie-Bohm view but in the Copenhagen view.

However, the macroscopic system has no ontological weight: it's all just a consequence of the temporal evolution of the equations. Knowing the microphysics is enough. There is no privileged status as an "observer". Rather, certain configurations admit only a very very narrow set of possibilities in temporal evolution. That's it. Macroscopic objects tend to be deeply constrained. Get correlated with a deeply-constrained object and you, too, will be deeply constrained. A "measurement" is basically just declaring that a particular process is close enough to classical that you're not going to worry about the difference any longer. And there are lots of cases where this is true (including, but not limited to, interaction with human observers: we're macroscopic).

This is why quantum computing is so hard, by the way. You want to constrain microscopic states so they can interact with each other in meaningful ways but not with the containment device which ruins the special properties you're trying to take advantage of.

In the deBroglie-Bohm view (which quite likely is different physics, unlike many worlds vs collapse, which are interpretations of the same physics using radically different ontology--but finding any difference experimentally is, by construction, practically impossible) there is a nonlocal quantum-mechanical guiding force ("pilot wave") that acts on particles with an always-real location; in general, the pilot wave can be dependent everything but in many specific cases your evolution will be dependent on much less. Regardless, in this case every particle is in a real location, and the pilot wave depends on macroscopic configuration (i.e. the statistical constraints demanded by physics + large numbers of particles) in ways that agree with classical physics in the limit of large numbers of particles.

Regardless, there's no need either way for an idealized observer, human observer, or any observer at all, just the regularity in interaction between certain configurations. If you don't grant that waves and cliffs have any ontological weight, you certainly can't grant that any "observation" does, because that's exactly the same sort of thing: temporal evolution depends on configuration.

--

--

Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

Responses (1)