Quantum Ontology and Context Dependence

Philippe Grangier

Alexia Auffèves, Philippe Grangier

Décio Krause

Rodrigo A. Aguayo Roco

This paper is the mathematical core of a three-paper programme around the Ontological Totality Functional (OTF). Its claim is not that physics needs one more totalizing action, but that it lacks a rigorous language for physical admissibility: the conditions under which a configuration can count as physically stable rather than merely mathematically specifiable. The paper recasts the OTF accordingly. The backbone is a local-to-global construction on a finite 2-complex of contexts. Local states, pointer subalgebras, and quantum channels are assigned to vertices and edges. Two defect terms measure admissibility: the gluing defect, defined from failures of triangular composition of channels in the diamond norm, and the noetic defect, defined from distance to a pointer subalgebra via conditional expectations. Together with a sector-dependent effective action, they define an admissibility functional whose minimizers form the admissible set at cutoff Lambda. Four controlled results are proved in finite-dimensional truncations: existence of minimizers, a zero-defect criterion for the noetic sector, an observable bound implying approximate classicality when the noetic defect is small, and a global path-consistency theorem showing that local triangle defects bound route dependence across any filled disk in the context complex. A continuum scalar surrogate for coarse-grained coherence defects is also introduced, and its effective stress tensor is shown to be conserved on shell. Finally, the paper defines the central target of the programme: mixed category-algebra-scale fixed points, namely compatible families of admissible minimizers across cutoffs. This record is part of the Ontological Totality Functional (OTF) series. Companion works include OTF II, OTF III, OTF IV, and the OTF Master Edition. Companion records in the OTF series:OTF II — DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19075284OTF IV — DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19076867OTF Master Edition — DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19077303

Valia Allori

David Rooney

Abstract Wisdom is a very difficult construct to work with in research and practice. One reason for this is that wise people can deal with metaphysical questions and experience spiritual phenomena, both of which are hard to measure meaningfully. Although metaphysical and spiritual matters are not imponderable, they have significant measurement problems that are also part of the shortcomings of standard social science statistical frameworks. A second reason is that for many wisdom theorists, wisdom is context-dependent because wisdom is defined by and responds to what its context presents to it. We can therefore argue that wisdom is essentially context, which in quantum physics is theorised as a superposition of random variables that interact. This chapter, therefore, ponders the ‘immeasurable’ from the perspective of quantum-like social science and quantum theory to render wisdom, including its spirituality component, in formal mathematical models. The mathematical formalism of quantum physics allows for the presence of metaphysical phenomena in its ontological foundations and its mathematical models. This chapter, therefore, also presents an argument for understanding wisdom from the superposition perspective and, in particular, the internal interactions between random variables contained within it. If the challenge of measuring wisdom as a nondeterministic system is met, we may finally have an opportunity to measure wisdom in ways that embrace wisdom's complex ontology. A third reason is that wisdom depends on people making first-person subjective judgements. Subjectivity is central to many interpretations of quantum theory, and we can borrow the analytical formalism used in quantum physics for wisdom research. Finally, the chapter discusses future approaches to empirical wisdom research that adopt quantum-like social science methods.