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When Probability Is Not the Real: Stability and Concretion in Quantum Physics

David Cota

Published Dec 31, 2025• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

This essay proposes fundamental ontological clarification within contemporary debates on quantum physics: the rigorous distinction between probability as a regime of prediction and the real as material dynamics. Against the widespread view according to which quantum indeterminacy would imply a vague, unstable, or “merely statistical” reality, the text argues that probability belongs to the epistemic plane of knowledge and anticipation, not to the ontological plane of what exists. Quantum physics does not describe an ontologically fluctuating world, but a world whose symbolic access is structurally limited. On this basis, the essay examines the role of Born’s statistical interpretation, decoherence theory, Bell’s theorems, and the Pusey–Barrett–Rudolph result, showing how these impose formal costs on any ontology that conflates formalism and reality. In critical dialogue with QBist, relational, and agential-realist approaches, the text develops a conception of concretion grounded in the notion of mark: the concrete emerges when a material interaction is irreversibly inscribed in a physical support. Stability, far from meaning fixity, is understood as emergent robustness—movement in regime—sufficient to sustain practices, techniques, and historical continuity. The essay concludes by arguing that quantum physics, rather than dissolving the real, demands a more exacting ontology capable of distinguishing precisely between the real, the concrete, and theory.

DOI
10.5281/zenodo.18111227

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This essay proposes fundamental ontological clarification within contemporary debates on quantum physics: the rigorous distinction between probability as a regime of prediction and the real as material dynamics. Against the widespread view according to which quantum indeterminacy would imply a vague, unstable, or “merely statistical” reality, the text argues that probability belongs to the epistemic plane of knowledge and anticipation, not to the ontological plane of what exists. Quantum physics does not describe an ontologically fluctuating world, but a world whose symbolic access is structurally limited. On this basis, the essay examines the role of Born’s statistical interpretation, decoherence theory, Bell’s theorems, and the Pusey–Barrett–Rudolph result, showing how these impose formal costs on any ontology that conflates formalism and reality. In critical dialogue with QBist, relational, and agential-realist approaches, the text develops a conception of concretion grounded in the notion of mark: the concrete emerges when a material interaction is irreversibly inscribed in a physical support. Stability, far from meaning fixity, is understood as emergent robustness—movement in regime—sufficient to sustain practices, techniques, and historical continuity. The essay concludes by arguing that quantum physics, rather than dissolving the real, demands a more exacting ontology capable of distinguishing precisely between the real, the concrete, and theory.
This essay argues that many interpretative paradoxes in quantum mechanics arise from a systematic confusion between regimes of description and regimes of existence. It therefore proposes an operative distinction between the real (material dynamics), the concrete (the mark as a stabilising inscription), and theory (the symbolic organisation of prediction). On this basis, degeneracy is reinterpreted as a limit of individuation defined by the experimental cut: where there is no difference at the level of the mark, formal multiplicity amounts to an excess of description rather than to ontological plurality. Likewise, the density matrix is treated as an epistemic operator appropriate to incomplete knowledge and variability of preparation, thereby avoiding the reification of “mixture” into an entity. Interference and superposition are traced back to the manner in which the calculus organises possibilities prior to their separation by a mark. Entanglement is analysed as epistemic correlation inherited in the absence of present interaction, and is distinguished from dynamical non-separability except in cases of effective coupling. In the context of EPR/Bell, it is argued that the update of the predictive regime following a local mark does not constitute a physical process in the distant system; Bell inequalities constrain certain classical grammars of factorisation without determining a positive ontology of superluminal influences. The paper concludes with a critical comparison of consistent histories, informational approaches, and collapse models in terms of their respective ontological costs.
This essay proposes an operative ontology of quantum mechanics grounded in a disciplined separation of levels between the real, the concrete, and theory. It argues that to exist is to acquire material stability under constraints, that is, to maintain sufficient functional consistency to produce real differences; the mark grounds only observable factuality, as an irreversible inscription on a support. On the basis of this framework, the core concepts are clarified: constraints as the material delimitation of real possibilities; emergent stability as scale-dependent functional robustness; the mark as a criterion of traceability and validation; and the epistemic state as a symbolic operator for predicting possible marks. This framework allows classical paradoxes (superposition, interference, entanglement, and measurement problems) to be dissolved without reifying the formalism or resorting to inflationary ontologies, by rigorously distinguishing material dynamics, inscription, and symbolic organization.
This essay argues that the controversy over the status of ψ is distorted when three irreducible planes are conflated: the real (material dynamics), the concrete (the coupling that produces an irreversible mark), and theory (the symbolic organisation of predictions). Under this discipline, the Pusey–Barrett–Rudolph theorem is reassessed: its result does not show that ψ is a physical entity, but only constrains models that posit a hidden-state space Λ of ontic states λ and a bridge μψ(λ) between preparation and ontology. It is shown that this bridge reifies the linear structure of Hilbert space and clashes with Born’s quadratic rule, failing to carry phases and cancellations; the problem becomes visible with identical particles and with measurements in entangled bases. The argument also relies on strong assumptions (preparation independence and “strict zeros”) that are not imposed by standard quantum theory. By fixing the mark as a criterion of factuality (not a criterion of existence), the text dissolves false dilemmas: state update is an epistemic reorganisation at the level of theory after inscription, not a superluminal physical event; non-separability encodes inherited correlations, not action at a distance; and uncertainty expresses limits of concretion, not a deficit of information. The conclusion is that ψ can remain a symbolic operator for predicting distributions of possible marks, without ontological inflation.
This argues that many familiar “paradoxes” in quantum mechanics persist because a category mistake is repeatedly made: symbolic operators of prediction are treated as if they were autonomous constituents of material reality. It distinguishes three regimes—the real (material dynamics), the concrete (empirical inscription as marks), and the symbolic (theoretical formalism)—and shows that the wavefunction belongs to the third: it is a calculational operator whose empirical content is fixed only through specified procedures of preparation and measurement. Probability, correspondingly, is treated as an empirical–operational predicate over outcome frequencies under controlled interaction, not as a physical entity. Canonical experimental constraints (Born statistics, single-quantum interference, decoherence as suppression of accessible coherences, Bell/CHSH violations, and contextuality) are used as anchors that support this stratification without licensing ontological inflation. The conclusion is not an anti-realist denial of structure, but a disciplined limit on what may be ontologised: formal success requires an explicit bridge argument to material inscription; absent such a bridge, reifying the wavefunction confuses the map with the territory.
Abstract This paper develops a metaphysical interpretation of quantum probability under the title Distributed Presence (DP). The central claim is that quantum probabilities should not be understood as measures of ignorance, nor merely as formal devices for predicting measurement outcomes, but as expressions of an objective mode of being: a system’s structured distribution of presence across mutually available channels of realization. On this view, a quantum system prior to measurement is neither fully actual in one determinate outcome nor reducible to a set of hidden definite properties. Rather, it exists in a non-binary mode, articulated by normalized presence fractions associated with the possible outcomes defined by a given interaction context. The Born rule is accordingly not replaced, but reinterpreted: the standard probability assignment is read as the operational expression of an underlying ontological distribution. The paper argues that this framework provides a unified reading of several familiar quantum features. Superposition is understood as a real distribution of presence rather than as epistemic indeterminacy; measurement is interpreted as single-channel actualization rather than as the physical destruction of alternatives; wave-particle duality is recast as the relation between distributed structure and localized realization; and quantum randomness is treated as intrinsic yet structurally constrained. The proposal remains fully compatible with the standard Hilbert-space formalism and introduces no hidden variables, additional collapse dynamics, or many-world branching. Its aim is interpretive rather than revisionary. Beyond its relevance to the foundations of quantum theory, DP is advanced as a contribution to the ontology of probability more broadly. It seeks to show how probability may be objective, physically meaningful, and ontologically basic without collapsing into determinism on the one hand or epistemicism on the other. In that sense, the paper offers a realist, single-world, structurally articulated account of quantum chance.
The classical deterministic worldview that dominated science from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century has been profoundly challenged by developments in modern physics and biology. Quantum mechanics has revealed that indeterminacy and probability are not merely epistemic limitations, but intrinsic features of physical reality. At the same time, evolutionary biology has shown that random genetic variation, filtered by natural selection, is the fundamental driver of biological diversity and adaptation. This article explores the conceptual parallel between quantum indeterminacy and evolutionary randomness, not as a reduction of biology to physics, but as an epistemological reflection on how stability and order emerge from probabilistic processes across different levels of organization. By examining emergence, contingency, historical irreversibility, and the limits of prediction, the paper argues that determinism is best understood as a scale-dependent approximation rather than a foundational ontological principle. The absence of finality in nature does not imply chaos or nihilism, but invites a renewed philosophical understanding of explanation, responsibility, and scientific humility in a probabilistic universe.