Constrained or Unconstrained Quantum?
Issue #54
I’ve noticed something interesting a while ago, but I haven’t had a chance to blog about it yet. And I probably still wouldn’t have, but I was awakened from my incredibly comfortable lazy state (at least as far as blogging is concerned) by a recent Nature editorial on the interpretations of quantum physics.
The basis for the editorial was an extensive survey of more than a thousand quantum physicists (including yours truly) about the interpretations of quantum physics. Have a look at the Nature article for yourself if you feel like it, but the gist is this: we are all still in disagreement about what quantum physics is trying to tell us, but – or so do the editors of Nature conclude – this is for the better (why? Because there is strength in diversity, or something along those lines).
Let me make a sharp turn momentarily before I return to the main topic, which will be to try to explain why researchers who have spent their lives working with quantum physics still end up having completely diverging views about its status and meaning.
Enter: Thomas Sowell, an American economist. Sowell wrote an influential book in the eighties, asking a similar question, but about politics. How can people who all genuinely want to make the world a better place (fairer, more just, more equal, etc) end up taking diametrically opposing views as to the policies required to do so? Crudely speaking, why do some people end up on the left of the political spectrum, while others populate the political right (or, quantum mechanically, why do some people end up supporting the Copenhagen Interpretation while others are Many Worlders?).
Sowell’s insight was this: people fall into two categories as far as their beliefs in human nature are concerned. One bunch, which he called the “unconstrained”, believes that there is no limit to human improvement. The other bunch, the “constrained”, on the other hand, maintains that human nature will never change and that it will always remain fault-prone.
Those who have the optimistic, unconstrained view of human nature also believe that society can nudge people to keep improving ad infinitum. More significantly, they naturally think that some people are already further down this road of improvement and that it would be great to entrust them with the key decision-making facilities (you can see how easily this logic could lead us into a totalitarian society).
The pessimistic view of human nature, in contrast, impels people to believe in the need for strong institutions, the rule of law, traditional values, and so on (all as part of the error-correcting machinery which is necessary for a stable society if human nature is unchanging and faulty). And this, to state the obvious, is the basis of modern liberal societies.
Now, ever since I leant about Sowell’s idea – it’s possible that I read about it in another book – I wanted to adapt it to quantum physics to explain the diversity of its interpretations. Can quantum physicists be classified – again, crudely speaking – into two categories according to some fundamental issue they might have regarding a more basic worldview? What are quantum physicists constrained and unconstrained about?
My feeling is that the relevant question is (and here I am really speculating): will physics be able to explain everything in the Universe? If so, a view some might call “scientism”, this leads us to one interpretation of quantum physics; otherwise, we have non-scientism, and those with such intuitions will see quantum physics very differently.
The researchers in the first category are normally Many Worlders; they are comfortable with determinism, absence of free will, and most of them hold strong AI views (the position maintaining that consciousness can be simulated by computers). The researchers in the second category are either Copenhagen, collapse or Qbist supporters. In a nutshell, they believe that quantum physics needs to be supplemented with something else (something intrinsically classical) to make sense of it. They are almost always anti-determinists; they invariably believe in free will and think that human consciousness transcends not only quantum physics, but possibly also any conceivable computation. Not surprisingly perhaps, members of the second group are more likely to be religious.
Like I said, the above is just my guess based on anecdotal evidence and conversations with my colleagues (Nature magazine can do another survey to try to test my speculation). However, and this is the key difference between science and politics, all quantum physicists agree on all the experiments so far – the mathematics underpinning quantum physics, unlike the logic underpinning a perfect society, has never led anyone astray! But – and an important but at that – different interpretations will stimulate us to ask different questions. Some of these questions will be better than others, meaning that they will more likely take us to a new physical theory (while others are basically just dead ends).
My upcoming book, “Portals to a New Reality”, is all about the kinds of questions we should be asking, experimentally speaking, to finally break through to new physics. And, if you read it, you will most certainly find out which group of physicists I myself belong to.
Take care,
Vlatko
Very nice article, Vlatko. Behind your dichotomy exists an even more fundamental principle, the individuation/belonging conflict, which I believe to be the common thread of physical as well as human reality. What best differentiates the researcher is to be entirely "his" vision of physics or to also belong to others, not by considering them as equivalent but by attributing a probability to each. The "complex" researcher is thus the configuration of the probabilities of all possible states of physics. This is where indeterminism becomes determinism and the world can accommodate them both.