The Non-Locality Of The Wavefunction Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 512):

So we have just got exactly nowhere in understanding wave/particles — some irate reader will surely object with increasingly justified impatience! But hold on please, we are not through with interpreting our wavefunctions. We have to think of the entire wave as describing (or ‘being’) just a single particle. Although it does, in a definite sense, determine the probability that a spot will occur at the various places on the screen, this probability refers to just the one particle. This interpretation will not work if we think of the wavefunction in a local way, as independently providing a probability of spot formation at each separate place on the screen. We must think of a wavefunction as one entire thing. If it causes a spot to appear at one place, then it has done its job, and this apparent act of creation forbids it from causing a spot to appear somewhere else as well. Wavefunctions are quite unlike the waves of classical physics in this important respect. The different parts of the wave cannot be thought of as local disturbances, each carrying on independently of what is happening in a remote region. Wavefunctions have a strongly non-local character; in this sense they are completely holistic entities.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the 'entire' wave neither describes nor is a single particle. Rather, the wave is a construal of the potential of a particle. The notion of the wave being local or non-local derives partly from misunderstanding the wave as construing the potential of a location rather than the potential of a particle.

Moreover, the wave function neither causes nor creates the appearance of a particle at a location on the screen. It is in the act of observation that experience is construed as meaning: a particle as an instance of quantum potential.

In this view, the important respect in which wavefunctions are quite unlike the waves of classical physics is that they are construals of experience as potential, whereas classical waves are construals of experience as actual. The non-locality of wavefunctions is the "non-locality" of potential.