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Oxford University Press eBooks

Physics Interface

Stig Stenholm

Published Jun 30, 2011• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

It is argued that the Tractatus is an analogy of the classical description of physical reality. We know that this had to be replaced by the much more ephemeral quantum theory. It is argued that many of the features of Wittgenstein's later work could have been applied to quantum physics, if only he had known about this. The argument at some points refers directly to modern physics in a way Wittgenstein could not have done; he did not know modern science.

DOI
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199603589.003.0007

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Cambridge University Press eBooks•Jan 24, 2005•1 citation
It is argued that the Tractatus is an analogy of the classical description of physical reality. We know that this had to be replaced by the much more ephemeral quantum theory. It is argued that many of the features of Wittgenstein's later work could have been applied to quantum physics, if only he had known about this. The argument at some points refers directly to modern physics in a way Wittgenstein could not have done; he did not know modern science.
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.
This chapter outlines the motivation for the work. It is argued that, acknowledging the remarkable progress of science, it is essential to dissect the modern world view from the aspects of physics. The physicist may be the outsider here, but he may also bring new light on a confusing situation. In order to combine the thinking in physics with that of philosophy, the lives and achievements of Bohr and Wittgenstein have been chosen and are discussed in some detail. The analysis is based on personal experiences; it thus remains a fiction: The Myth of Physics and the World.
INTRODUCTION In 1965 Hilary Putnam published the standard work on the interpretation of quantum mechanics, a piece that all philosophers of quantum mechanics of the time had to come to terms with. He laid out one-by-one in a clear non-technical way each of the available approaches to the problem and explained, again non-technically but very exactly, what is wrong with them. In his own final words Putnam took ‘the modest but essential step of becoming clear on the nature and magnitude of the difficulties’ (1965, 158). In the almost forty years since there have been a variety of advances, technical developments and new points of view. But none of these is uncontroversial. In fact each suffers from some one or another of the very difficulties that Putnam summarised. Many of the newer approaches explain why the problem is not a problem after all; a few bury the problems in technical detail; and some make heroic assumptions, often metaphysical, that cause the problems to disappear. My conclusion surveying the contemporary literature is the same as Putnam's in 1965: ‘no satisfactory interpretation of quantum mechanics exists today’ (1965, 157). The time scale is amazing. Putnam's important piece was written forty years after the first formulations and successes of quantum mechanics. I am writing forty years later, and about a theory that has transformed our technology and our way of thinking about the world. Why does this theory still have ‘no satisfactory interpretation’?