Quantum Reality Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 507-8):

Let us step back from these detailed matters for a moment, and ask what all this is trying to tell us about ‘reality’. Are the dynamical variables ‘real things’? Are the states ‘real’? Or should we say that we have achieved reality only when we have arrived at the seemingly ‘classical’ quantities that arise as eigenvalues of the dynamical variables (or of other operators)? In fact, quantum physicists tend not to be very clear about this issue. Most of them are distinctly uncomfortable about addressing the issue of ‘reality’ at all. They may claim to take what they would call a ‘positivist’ stand, and refuse to consider what ‘reality’ is supposed to mean, regarding such an inquiry as ‘unscientific’. All that we should ask of our formalism, they might claim, would be that it give answers to appropriate questions that we may pose of a system, and that those answers agree with observational fact.

If we are to believe that any one thing in the quantum formalism is ‘actually’ real, for a quantum system, then I think that it has to be the wavefunction (or state vector) that describes quantum reality. My own viewpoint is that the question of ‘reality’ must be addressed in quantum mechanics — especially if one takes the view (as many physicists appear to) that the quantum formalism applies universally to the whole of physics — for then, if there is no quantum reality, there can be no reality at any level (all levels being quantum levels, on this view). To me, it makes no sense to deny reality altogether in this way. We need a notion of physical reality, even if only a provisional or approximate one, for without it our objective universe, and thence the whole of science, simply evaporates before our contemplative gaze!

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, reality is meaning construed of experience. The wavefunction is a construal of experience as potential reality. In an observation, an instance of potential reality is construed as actual reality.