| The Force |
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| The real problem | |
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Page 1 of 2 So quantum theory is both fundamental and complete. What is incomplete is the physical world — in relation to a completely differentiated spatiotemporal background, which only exists in our imagination. While this incompleteness of the objective world is exciting and important news, the non-existence of an underlying microcausal nexus, of any process by which measurement outcomes determine the probabilities of measurement outcomes, and of causally sufficent conditions for value-indicating events, may be cause for concern.
Random Sphere by Eric J. Heller.
Why? Because we thought that we could continue to delude ourselves with impunity? That quantum physics would let us perform the old sleight-of-hand — transmogrify the kinematics into a complete mathematical description of reality (at any one time) and the dynamics into a complete mathematical description of how reality evolves? The desire to limit What Exists to mathematically describable states and processes is in part a reaction to outdated religious doctrines — it is better to believe in our omniscience-in-principle than in the omnipotence of someone capable of creating a mess like this world and thinking that he did a great job — and in part the sustaining myth of the entire scientific enterprise: we had better believe that the understanding we are trying to obtain can actually be achieved with the means at your disposal. Quantum mechanics forces us to relinquish the belief that reality is describable in purely mathematical terms — unless we play the ostrich and agree with Feynman that nobody understands quantum mechanics or with Penrose that quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense. A mathematical description is far from being the whole story. What is mathematically describable is part of a much larger reality.
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