The ‘Reality’ Of The Wavefunction Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 516):

But even if we accept that, at least at the level of formal mathematical description, we must adopt this curious ‘jumping’ procedure, there is the question of what this tells us about the ‘reality’ of the wavefunction. This ‘jumping’ of the quantum state — a process that does not seem to be covered by any continuous evolution in accordance with the Schrödinger equation — is what leads a great many physicists to doubt that the evolution of the state vector can possibly be taken seriously as an adequate description of physical reality. Schrödinger himself was extremely uncomfortable with ‘quantum jumps’, and he once remarked in a conversation with Niels Bohr:

If all this damned quantum jumping were really here to stay then I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum theory.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the 'jumping' of the quantum state is the instantiation of potential when an observation construes experience as meaning. What this tells us about the 'reality' of the wavefunction is that it is a model of potential 'reality', not a model of actual 'reality'.

The problem here, for physicists, is that physics cannot provide an understanding of 'quantum jumps'. Understanding 'quantum jumps' requires (i) understanding the distinction between potential and actual, and the relation between them, and (ii) understanding the epistemological distinction between the 'transcendent' view of meaning, assumed in science since Galileo, and the 'immanent' view of meaning that the findings of quantum physics supports. In this latter view, meaning does not transcend semiotic systems.