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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics

Ontic structural realism and quantum field theory: Are there intrinsic properties at the most fundamental level of reality?

Philipp Berghofer

Published Sep 14, 2017• 17 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1016/j.shpsb.2017.09.003

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This note provides the formal ontological basis for Ontological Resolution Theory (ORT). ORT posits a strict separation between the fundamental substrate (Backend) and the observer interface (Frontend). In this framework, standard physical concepts such as "field", "spin", "electromagnetism", "particle", and "spacetime" are not fundamental entities, but decoder tags generated by a limited-bandwidth A0-interface. The underlying reality operates exclusively on a discrete FCC graph defined by the tuple (G, R, U). This approach represents a radical form of ontic structural realism, where relations are primary, and objects/properties are strictly emergent interface artifacts. This document provides the translation dictionary between standard quantum-theoretical tags and their structural graph counterparts
Structural realism attempts to make a compromise between scientific realism and empiricism, by restricting our realist commitment to the relational structure of scientific theories. There are two main versions of the position: ontic, or epistemic. According to ontic structural realism, the nomological relations expressed by theories are the primitive entities of reality. This ontic version is motivated in particular by arguments to the effect that epistemic versions are not really distinct from mere empiricism. However according to some authors, it’s not clear that ontic structural realism can differentiate between physical and mathematical relations, and account for the relations between scientific theories and their experimental basis. These difficulties can be related to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, which also concerns the link between theoretical models and experiments. It appears that epistemic structural realism is in a better position to respond to these difficulties. A compromise between both versions of structural realism could allow us to keep the advantages of both.
In this chapter it is argued that the decisive argument against the reducibility of causal relations comes from quantum physics. Bell’s theorem proves that no dynamics based on the local, intrinsic properties of quantum objects can yield the empirical predictions of quantum mechanics. Nonetheless, it is argued that quantum entanglement by no means implies that we have to abandon an ontology of objects in favour of an ontology of structures. All extant proposals for a quantum ontology of matter in spacetime are committed to objects, whose dynamics are determined not by their local, intrinsic properties, but by an holistic property instantiated by all the objects together—a structure that takes all the objects in the universe as its relata. The view set out in this chapter combines ontic structural realism with an ontology of objects that can be conceived as substances.