Introducing a Kantian interpretation of quantum physics : in accordance with Kant's philosophy of science in the Critique of the power of judgment, reinterpreted and reworked with special attention to the supersensible realm
In this thesis I confront the problem of indeterminism in quantum physics. The first pioneers accepted indeterminism as part of their Copenhagen interpretation and it was incorporated in Von Neumann's formulation (as the "projection postulate"). But how deep does this indeterminism go? With the arrival of quantum physics, the idea that the world is fundamentally deterministic has been shattered. Redhead's work showed that the experimental confirmation of the violation of Bell's inequality means that determinism has broken down; he even formulated a version of the Bell inequality that is not dependent on local hidden variables and showed that the violation thereof negates even what might be called "stochastic" determinism - at least in the framework of the Lorentzian space-time manifold (Redhead 1987:83, 103). With the acceptance of non-determinism as part of our world, we are confronted with the question: How can the possibility of non-determinism be explained and how can it be reconciled with determinism in one coherent conceptualization of the world? I use the philosophy of science that Immanuel Kant developed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment to develop an answer to these questions. In this part of his philosophy of science Kant is concerned with the possibility and conceivability of a spontaneous (albeit effective) causality in nature's producing its products. Kant developed the idea of this causality in analogy to the achievement of human ends, conceptualizing it as a capacity that non-extended wholes and parts have to be realized as parts forming an aggregated whole in nature. An important feature of my approach is that I develop a new interpretation of Kant's philosophy as presented in his well-known Critique of Pure Reason. In contrast with the two-object and twoaspect views in Kantian interpretation, I argue that the noumenal realm refers to an ontologically distinct realm outside nature, problematically assumed. This agrees with Kant's view in the Critique of the Power of Judgment where it is conceptualized as the substratum of nature and forms a central part of his philosophy of science. It is only when the noumenal (supersensible) realm is conceptualized in this manner that spontaneous causality becomes not only logically possible, but also conceivable within the framework of his philosophy. In my Kantian interpretation of quantum physics his concept of nature is taken as referring to the "classical realm" (where the theories of relativity would apply). His non-extended wholes and parts, which belong to the supersensible realm, find application in superpositions of states, which I argue belong to an ontologically distinct realm - the pre-measurement "quantum realm". Since the classical and quantum realms are taken as ontologically distinct realms, there is no contradiction in ascribing two heterogeneous laws, namely of deterministic and spontaneous causality (which is manifest in the reduction of the wave packet), to these realms which are combined in one description in quantum mechanics. In my view spontaneous causality grounds a non-spatiotemporal potentiality which explains why superpositions of states have the ability to collapse to reduced states. I develop these ideas in the framework of the various interpretations of quantum mechanics.
In this thesis I confront the problem of indeterminism in quantum physics. The first pioneers accepted indeterminism as part of their Copenhagen interpretation and it was incorporated in Von Neumann's formulation (as the "projection postulate"). But how deep does this indeterminism go? With the arrival of quantum physics, the idea that the world is fundamentally deterministic has been shattered. Redhead's work showed that the experimental confirmation of the violation of Bell's inequality means that determinism has broken down; he even formulated a version of the Bell inequality that is not dependent on local hidden variables and showed that the violation thereof negates even what might be called "stochastic" determinism - at least in the framework of the Lorentzian space-time manifold (Redhead 1987:83, 103). With the acceptance of non-determinism as part of our world, we are confronted with the question: How can the possibility of non-determinism be explained and how can it be reconciled with determinism in one coherent conceptualization of the world? I use the philosophy of science that Immanuel Kant developed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment to develop an answer to these questions. In this part of his philosophy of science Kant is concerned with the possibility and conceivability of a spontaneous (albeit effective) causality in nature's producing its products. Kant developed the idea of this causality in analogy to the achievement of human ends, conceptualizing it as a capacity that non-extended wholes and parts have to be realized as parts forming an aggregated whole in nature. An important feature of my approach is that I develop a new interpretation of Kant's philosophy as presented in his well-known Critique of Pure Reason. In contrast with the two-object and twoaspect views in Kantian interpretation, I argue that the noumenal realm refers to an ontologically distinct realm outside nature, problematically assumed. This agrees with Kant's view in the Critique of the Power of Judgment where it is conceptualized as the substratum of nature and forms a central part of his philosophy of science. It is only when the noumenal (supersensible) realm is conceptualized in this manner that spontaneous causality becomes not only logically possible, but also conceivable within the framework of his philosophy. In my Kantian interpretation of quantum physics his concept of nature is taken as referring to the "classical realm" (where the theories of relativity would apply). His non-extended wholes and parts, which belong to the supersensible realm, find application in superpositions of states, which I argue belong to an ontologically distinct realm - the pre-measurement "quantum realm". Since the classical and quantum realms are taken as ontologically distinct realms, there is no contradiction in ascribing two heterogeneous laws, namely of deterministic and spontaneous causality (which is manifest in the reduction of the wave packet), to these realms which are combined in one description in quantum mechanics. In my view spontaneous causality grounds a non-spatiotemporal potentiality which explains why superpositions of states have the ability to collapse to reduced states. I develop these ideas in the framework of the various interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Kant’s philosophy of science has been applied to quantum physics since the time when Niels Bohr formulated his interpretation of quantum physics. In recent years various Kantian interpretations of quantum physics have been put forward. One aspect that still needs further exploration is what a Kantian approach to the epistemic status of quantum entities would entail. In this paper a new kind of judgment consistent with Kant’s system, called a transcendental judgment, able to account for the real existence of quantum entities in the pre-measurement phase is discussed. The advantage of this kind of judgment is that it allows for a fine-tuning of the Kantian system to account for the discovery of quantum entities that are known to exist but whose existence can epistemologically not be accounted for in traditional Kantian philosophy. With this new kind of judgment, a wider range of possible judgments becomes available which can determine the epistemological status of concepts/ideas/theories quite carefully, discriminating between different kinds of knowledge claims.
For Bohr quantum mechanics is complete. It expresses all that can be said about the atomic world, which he regards as a newly discovered and separate ontological component of reality, operating at the Planck scale, and describable only with a separate physics, namely, quantum mechanics. The classical world, in contrast, represents its binary and symbiotic counterpart, which is also ontologically substantive, but operates according to 'classical concepts'. The different physics of each component indicates a different ontology, the classical one is accessible to us, as we are classical objects, where the Planck scale does not apply, while the other is not. The measurement problem cannot therefore be solved through the discovery of hidden variables as these are classical in nature and therefore ineffective in explaining the quantum world. The measurement problem is therefore not due to epistemological limitations but emerges directly from a 'two worlds' dualism. Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation has therefore been erroneously misunderstood as a positivist retreat rather than as a view of reality proposing an ontological structure which is dualistic. l then propose similarities between Bohr and a ‘two worlds’ view of Kant, where noumena is an ontology which is inherently unknowable as it is devoid of a priori agents, much as the quantum world is unknowable as it is devoid of Bohr's classical concepts. However, just as classical concepts in Bohr are crucial in constituting classical reality, a priori intuitions and concepts in Kant are crucial in constituting phenomena, which are real ontological objects and not just appearances. The noumenal and quantum realms are therefore both substantive, but impossible to investigate. The phenomenal and classical worlds are also substantive. They are where objects and therefore meaning condenses. They are therefore open to our investigations.
Quantum indeterminism seems incompatible with Kant's defense of causality in his Second Analogy. The Copenhagen interpretation also takes quantum theory as evidence for anti-realism. This first article of a two-part series argues that the law of causality, as transcendental, applies only to the world as observable, not to hypothetical (unobservable) objects such as quarks, detectable only by high energy accelerators. Taking Planck's constant and the speed of light as the lower and upper bounds of observability provides a way of interpreting the observables of quantum mechanics as empirically real even though they are transcendentally (i.e., pre-observationally) ideal.
The Critique of the Quantum Power of Judgement analyzes the a priori principles which underlie the empirical knowledge provided by quantum theory. In contrast to other transcendental approaches to quantum physics, none of the transcendental principles established by Kant is modified in order to cope with the new epistemological situation that arises with the asumption of the quantum postulate. Rather, by considering Bohr’s views, it is argued that classical concepts provide the mathematical formalism of quantum theory with physical reference through symbolic analogies in the strict Kantian sense. The main result of the investigation is the determination of the highest principle under which quantum objects are subsumed. This principle states that the conditions of the possibility of the systematic unity of contextual experience are at the same time the conditions of the possibility of quantum objects. Upon this principle rests the possibility of any a priori synthetic knowledge of quantum objects. Therefore, the Critique of the Quantum Power of Judgement yields the prolegomena to any future quantum metaphysics.
On the Limits of “Undecidability”: Quantum Physics, Deconstruction, and Anti-realism Christopher Norris (bio) I Philosophers of science have responded in various ways to the conceptual and interpretative problems thrown up by quantum mechanics. These problems emerged a century ago from Planck’s researches into black-body radiation and have scarcely been resolved—rather, if anything, deepened and complicated—by the intensive debate that has surrounded them since that time.1 For some theorists, the resultant dilemmas (of observer “interference,” wave/particle dualism, quantum superposition, nonlocal causality, superluminal [faster-than-light] propagation, etc.) are such as to entail drastic revisions to our very idea of the physical world as existing and exerting its causal powers quite apart from our current best theories or investigative methods.2 For others again, quantum mechanics just is the best theory currently available, whatever the problems that it happens to create for our normal habits of logical thought or consistent reasoning on the evidence. Thus logic itself may have to be revised—right down to putative “laws of thought” such as noncontradiction and excluded middle—if these turn out to conflict with the results of quantum-mechanical theory or experiment.3 This is the view taken by Hilary Putnam in his writings on quantum logic and also by others, von Neumann among them, for whom the working rule in any such trade-off is to keep the physics as simple as possible even if the result is to complicate logic by introducing values other than those of determinate (bivalent) truth or falsehood.4 Very often it consorts with the argument that if quantum mechanics is right—at any rate on the standard Copenhagen interpretation—then we had best give up any hope of retaining a “classical” Einsteinian ontology, that is to say, a Lorentz-invariant account of space-time coordinates where the speed of light is the limiting value for assignments of position, velocity, and causal propagation.5 Hence Einstein’s famous series of debates with Niels Bohr when he devised a whole range of increasingly elaborate thought-experiments designed to prove that the quantum-mechnical description of reality had to be in some way “incomplete,” or not to have reckoned with some crucial factor that would bring it into line with logical reasoning and a causal-realist ontology. For on Einstein’s view there was simply no room in science for a theory—such as Bohr’s—that involved either the suspension of classical truth/falsehood [End Page 407] values or the idea of some “spooky action-at-a-distance” which contravened both commonsense realism and the requirements of Special Relativity.6 However it is Bohr who is generally thought to have carried the day in these debates. In which case—so it is argued—we are left with a choice between three possible “solutions.” These are (1) the hypothesis that quantum mechanics is “incomplete” or open to an alternative (“hidden-variables”) interpretation;7 (2) the adoption of an alternative (many-valued or non-bivalent) quantum logic that effectively conjures such problems away;8 or (3) the conclusion that realism may have to be abandoned in favour of some radically different ontology or worldview which counts this a price worth paying in order to conserve the predictive power of the standard quantum formalisms.9 On option (3) there is a further choice of interpretative views according to the theorist’s preferred choice between the various models (or possible-world scenarios) currently on offer. Thus the model may be one that embraces nonlocal simultaneous particle interaction, or which gives up space-time covariance (relative to the speed of light) as required by Einstein’s Special Theory. Or again it may be one that somehow envisions—strangest of all—the splitting-off of multiple coexistent but non-interacting “worlds” whenever the wave-packet collapses or whenever an act of measurement is performed upon any such quantum-system whose properties must be thought of as strictly indeterminate until that moment.10 For, according to its partisans, this theory is the most economical—i.e., involves least conflict with the standard quantum formalisms—despite its baroque proliferation of alternative worlds and its well-nigh unthinkable implications when applied...
[Author’s Note (April 2026)]Supersession Notice: This 2025 paper explores the early KB-Flux framework. It has been structurally overhauled and formally superseded by “The Light & Flux (L&F) Framework (2026)”. While the 2025 version relies on cognitive metaphors—treating the wave function as a “generative model” —the 2026 L&F framework provides a rigorous mathematical proof deriving complex Hilbert space from finite-inference constraints. It replaces “phenomenal grammar” with the Simplex Projection (𐍀), grounded in metabolic and thermodynamic mandates. Researchers seeking the formal Non-Derivability Principle and a stratified three-tier ontology should refer to the 2026 version. Original AbstractReaders are advised to treat the present paper strictly as a historical record of the framework’s initial development. For the current, accurate formulation, please refer to the new publication.The measurement problem—why quantum superpositions yield definite outcomes upon observation—has persisted as the central interpretative challenge of quantum mechanics for nearly a century. This paper proposes that the problem dissolves when viewed through the joint lens of Kantian epistemology and predictive processing (Bayesian brain) theory. Drawing on Kant’s distinction between phenomena (experience) and noumena (reality-in-itself), we argue that the quantum wave function (Ψ) does not represent a physical field in the noumenal world, but rather the generative model of a prediction-generating cognitive agent. In this framework, "superposition" represents a state of uninitialized probabilistic expectation (Latent Space), while "collapse" is reinterpreted as a Bayesian belief update—the discrete transition from a probability distribution to a definite value, necessitated by the information-processing constraints of the observer. By treating the observer not as a passive witness but as an active inference engine, this framework: Naturalizes the collapse postulate: Measurement is the update of an internal model, not a physical discontinuity in nature. Resolves nested-observer paradoxes: Wigner's Friend is resolved by treating reality as a distributed system with eventual consistency, where distinct agents hold distinct local cache states. Grounds the Born Rule: We argue that the squared-amplitude probability rule (P=∣Ψ∣2) serves as a transcendental constraint (akin to Gleason’s Theorem) required for the internal consistency of any probabilistic agent. This interpretation suggests that the "weirdness" of quantum mechanics reflects the necessary architectural constraints of any finite mind attempting to model an inaccessible reality, effectively treating physics as the "User Interface" of reality.