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arXiv:2607.05459

Against Totalitarianism -- Introduction to Tractatus Quanticum

Jenann Ismael, Huw Price

quant-phphysics.hist-phSubmitted Jul 5, 2026• Announced Jul 7, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Tractatus Quanticum (arXiv:2512.06034 [quant-ph]) is described by its authors as 'a re-editing, which takes quantum mechanics into account, of Wittgenstein's famous Tractatus.' The original Tractatus appeared with an introduction by Bertrand Russell. For Tractatus Quanticum, that role fell to us. This is the result.
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10 pages, no figures

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Recently we proposed the linguistic Copenhagen interpretation (or, quantum language), which has a great power to describe both classical and quantum systems.Thus we think that quantum language can be viewed as the language of science.Therefore, it makes sense to study, from the quantum linguistic point of view, Wittgenstein's picture theory, since he must have wanted to create a language of science.In this paper, we show that the proposition that Wittgenstein studied in his book "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" can be regarded as a binary projective measurement in classical quantum language.And thus, we conclude that Wittgenstein's language (i.e., the language that he supposed in his book) is realized by classical quantum language.Hence, now we can fully understand Wittgenstein's picture theory since the reason his book is incomprehensible is that he did not define his language.
This article reads two recent tractatus-style texts - Niccolo Covoni and Carlo Rovelli's Tractatus Quanticus (arXiv:2512.06034) and Mikolaj Sienicki and Krzysztof Sienicki's Tractatus de Conscientia (arXiv:2607.05459) - together with Jenann Ismael and Huw Price's interpretive introduction Against Totalitarianism (arXiv:2601.01070), as parts of what may be called a New Tractatus Program. The program is unified by a single pressure point: the demand for a perspective-free description of reality, whether as a final inventory of facts, a world viewed from nowhere, or a self placed outside the physical order. On the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, Tractatus Quanticus revises Wittgenstein's opening claim by replacing the world as the totality of facts with the world as what is the case from some perspective. Against Totalitarianism then makes the philosophical stakes of this move explicit by challenging the idea of the world as one closed totality. Tractatus de Conscientia carries the same discipline into the theory of consciousness, where conscious experience is treated neither as a mysterious substance nor as mere behavior, but as an integrated, temporally thick, operationally accessible perspective. Read together, these texts point toward a post-classical philosophy of partiality: reality is not abolished, but de-absolutized; consciousness is not mystified, but constrained by access, coupling, memory, and evidence; and the limits of language become inseparable from the limits of perspective. The article does not claim that relational quantum mechanics is the only viable interpretation of quantum theory. It instead develops the philosophical consequences of the relational reading. Its aim is programmatic rather than demonstrative: it does not prove a new ontology, but organizes a family of arguments around disciplined perspective-dependence.