Charles Peirce and Quantum Mechanics

R. G. Beil, Kenneth Laine Ketner

Floyd Μerrell

Peder Voetmann Christiansen

Gennaro Auletta

This paper examines complementarity, a concept introduced by Niels Bohr for interpreting quantum mechanics (QM). I will explain that QM has three basic features: the event, the correlations, and the dynamics. These features stem from the nature of quantum information, which is a general paradigm (far more general than classical information) covering the emergence of any dynamic system. It can explain the arising of classically physical systems, but also the emergence of life. If these features of QM are so general, we may ask how philosophers may perceive them. Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Sanders Peirce took this path. Dynamics can be understood as a trade-off between local events and “non-local” quantum correlations, results that were partly anticipated by Peirce and Whitehead. Moreover, according to Peirce, the reason why the three features of QM are so general is that they are imago Dei; that is, they show a Trinitarian structure. I will also briefly consider some consequences for natural theology.

Gennaro Auletta

In this paper, I examine complementarity, a concept introduced by Niels Bohr for interpreting quantum mechanics (QM). I will explain that QM has three basic features: the event, the correlations, and the dynamics. These features stem from the nature of quantum information, which is a general paradigm (far more general than classical information) covering the emergence of any dynamic system. It can explain the arising of classically physical systems, but also the emergence of life. If these features of QM are so general, we may ask how philosophers may perceive them. Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Sanders Peirce took this path. Dynamics can be understood as a trade-off between local events and “non-local” quantum correlations, results that were partly anticipated by Peirce and Whitehead. Moreover, according to Peirce, the reason why the three features of QM are so general is that they are imago Dei; that is, they show a Trinitarian structure. I will also briefly consider some consequences for natural theology.

Rosa Maria Mayorga

Abstract Metaphysicians and physicists both share the proud desire to understand the world and all the things in it, to fully comprehend the nature of reality. Almost one hundred years after it was proposed, quantum theory has radically transformed the science of physics, inviting a conception of reality that is drastically at odds with our most rooted metaphysical convictions. A scientist and metaphysician extraordinaire, Charles Peirce (1839–1914) was singularly poised to recognize some of the “metaphysical prejudices” about the world that quantum theory, developed years later, has revealed. This chapter proposes to trace how Peirce’s realism, inspired by the thirteenth-century Franciscan monk John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308) and adapted for a reconceived scientific metaphysics, parallels some of the familiar enigmas posed by quantum physics in the early twenty-first century.