The Collapse Of The Wave Function As ‘All In The Mind’ Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 784):

Despite their diametrically opposing natures, the viewpoints (a) and (b) have some significant points in common, with regard to how |ψ⟩ [the wave function] is taken to relate to our observed ‘reality’ — by which I mean to the seemingly real world that, on a macroscopic scale, we all experience. In this observed world, only one result of an experiment is taken to occur, and we may justly regard it as the job of physics to explain or to model the thing that we indeed normally refer to as ‘reality’. 

Neither according to (a) nor according to (b) is the state vector |ψ⟩ taken to describe that reality. And in each case, we must bring in the perceptions of some human experimenter to make sense of how the formalism relates to this observed real world. 

In case (a) it is the state vector |ψ⟩ itself that is taken to be an artefact of that human experimenter’s perceptions, whereas in case (b), it is ‘ordinary reality’ that is somehow delineated in terms of the perceptions of the experimenter, the state vector |ψ⟩ now representing some kind of deeper overriding reality (the omnium) that is not directly perceived. 

In both cases the ‘jumping’ of R [the collapse of the wave function] is taken to be not physically real, being, in a sense, ‘all in the mind’!

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the wave function specifies potential 'observed reality', where 'reality' is the meaning construed of experience in the process of making an observation. The one result of an experiment is the one observation that instantiates one of the potential meanings as actual.

The Copenhagen Interpretation (a) acknowledges that the wave function involves the meaning of an observer, and in the Many Worlds Interpretation (b), the potential construed by the wave function is misunderstood as actual: as a 'deeper, overriding reality'.

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the collapse of wave function is physically real, because physical reality is meaning construed of experience, as through mental processes of perception and cognition. The mind is the process of construing experience as meaning.