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WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks

The Measurement Problem: Decoherence and Some Interpretations that Admit an Ontology of Quantum Objects and Events

Published Aug 31, 2022• 0 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1142/9789811241147_0006

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We introduce an ontology of objects and events that is particularly well suited for several interpretations of quantum mechanics. It leads to an important revision of the notion of matter and its implications. Within this context one can show that systems in entangled states present emergent new properties and downward causation where certain behavior of parts of the system are only determined by the state of the whole. Interpretations of quantum mechanics that admit such an event ontology solve the problem of emergence.
Quantum mechanics is empirically extraordinarily successful yet continues to admit a wide range of competing interpretations. While the formalism constrains probabilistic relations between preparation procedures, measurements, and outcomes, it does not uniquely determine the ontology that realises those relations. Interpretations such as Everettian quantum mechanics, Bohmian mechanics, objective collapse theories, relational quantum mechanics, and QBist approaches preserve the predictive structure of the theory while diverging sharply in their metaphysical commitments. At the same time, developments within quantum theory itself weaken the classical ontology of independently existing objects with intrinsic properties. Entanglement, violations of Bell inequalities, and decoherence theory collectively support the view that physical description is fundamentally relational. Structural realism therefore provides a natural interpretive framework, treating the mathematical structure of physical theory as ontologically primary. However, structural realism alone leaves open the question of instantiation: how relational organisation becomes concrete as a determinate world.This paper develops Experiential Structural Ontology (ESO) as a non-interventionist interpretation of quantum mechanics that addresses this problem. ESO retains the relational ontology suggested by quantum theory while proposing that relational constraint organisation is enacted as manifestation within a fundamental experiential field. On this interpretation, the wavefunction represents relational constraint architecture governing transitions within this field, measurement corresponds to the stabilisation of particular regimes within that structure, and decoherence explains the emergence of classical stability without invoking collapse dynamics or ontological branching.
The "preferred-basis problem" — why does measurement produce definite outcomes in this basis rather than another — is treated in opposite ways by the interpretations of quantum mechanics: posited ab initio (spontaneous collapse), drawn from a contingent environment (decoherence), left to the choice of a framework (decoherent histories), avoided (many-worlds, pilot wave). We show that in the Time–Actualization ontology — where measurement is an instance of the universal process of actualizing quantum potentialities into events — the preferred basis is anchored in the causal past of the event, together with a readiness condition: which events that past has made ready to actualize. TA does not introduce a new selection mechanism: it identifies the environment of einselection with the already-actualized causal past — an environment that is not posited outside the formalism (unlike an external classical apparatus), but is part of the same substrate. The causal location of this environment is foliation-independent; its monitoring content depends on the couplings, not on the bare order alone. Covariance of the associated operations requires the locality hypotheses stated below. The uniqueness of outcomes is posited, not explained. Born's rule remains imported, and empirical equivalence with quantum mechanics on the causal-set substrate is a requirement still to be verified for a complete dynamics. The contribution is ontological and local to the preferred-basis question. A symmetric downstream mechanism — the redundant proliferation of the outcome into the causal future (quantum Darwinism) — in addition accounts for the inter-observer objectivity of the actualized fact, without deriving it.