Philosophical Psychology, Volume 24, Issue 4, Page 561-573, August 2011.

In this paper two different approaches to unification will be compared, Relational Blockworld (RBW) and Hiley’s implicate order. Both approaches are monistic in that they attempt to derive matter and spacetime geometry ‘at once’ in an interdependent and background independent fashion from something underneath both quantum theory and relativity. Hiley’s monism resides in the implicate order via Clifford algebras and is based on process as fundamental while RBW’s monism resides in spacetimematter via path integrals over graphs whereby space, time and (...) matter are co-constructed per a global constraint equation. RBW’s monism therefore resides in being (relational blockworld) while that of Hiley’s resides in becoming (elementary processes). Regarding the derivation of quantum theory and relativity, the promises and pitfalls of both approaches will be elaborated. Finally, special attention will be paid as to how Hiley’s process account might avoid the blockworld implications of relativity and the frozen time problem of canonical quantum gravity. (shrink)

The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, following the time-symmetric formulation of electrodynamics, uses retarded and advanced solutions of the Schrödinger equation and its complex conjugate to understand quantum phenomena by means of transactions. A transaction occurs between an emitter and a specific absorber when the emitter has received advanced waves from all possible absorbers. Advanced causation always raises the specter of paradoxes, and it must be addressed carefully. In particular, different devices involving contingent absorbers or various types of interaction-free measurements (...) have been proposed as threatening the original version of the transactional interpretation. These proposals will be analyzed by examining in each case the configuration of absorbers and, in the special case of the so-called quantum liar experiment, by carefully following the development of retarded and advanced waves through the Mach-Zehnder interferometer. We will show that there is no need to resort to the hierarchy of transactions that some have proposed, and will argue that the transactional interpretation is consistent with the block-universe picture of time. (shrink)

A Gedanken experiment is presented where an excited and a ground-state atom are positioned such that, within the former’s half-life time, they exchange a photon with 50% probability. A measurement of their energy state will therefore indicate in 50% of the cases that no photon was exchanged. Yet other measurements would reveal that, by the mere possibility of exchange, the two atoms have become entangled. Consequently, the “no exchange” result, apparently precluding entanglement, is non-locally established between the atoms by this (...) very entanglement. This quantum-mechanical version of the ancient Liar Paradox can be realized with already existing transmission schemes, with the addition of Bell’s theorem applied to the no-exchange cases. Under appropriate probabilities, the initially-excited atom, still excited, can be entangled with additional atoms time and again, or alternatively, exert multipartite nonlocal correlations in an interaction free manner. When densely repeated several times, this result also gives rise to the Quantum Zeno effect, again exerted between distant atoms without photon exchange. We discuss these experiments as variants of interaction-free-measurement, now generalized for both spatial and temporal uncertainties. We next employ weak measurements for elucidating the paradox. Interpretational issues are discussed in the conclusion, and a resolution is offered within the Two-State Vector Formalism and its new Heisenberg framework. (shrink)