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  1. Density Matrix Realism.Eddy Keming Chen - 2024
    Realism about quantum theory naturally leads to realism about the quantum state of the universe. It leaves open whether it is a pure state represented by a wave function, or an impure one represented by a density matrix. I characterize and elaborate on Density Matrix Realism, the thesis that the universal quantum state is objective but can be impure. To clarify the thesis, I compare it with Wave Function Realism, explain the conditions under which they are empirically equivalent, consider two (...)
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  • Lagrangian possibilities.Alexandre Guay & Quentin Ruyant - 2024 - Synthese 203 (4):1-22.
    Natural modalities are often analysed from an abstract point of view where they are associated with putative laws of nature. However, the way possibilities are represented in physics is more complex. Lagrangian mechanics, for instance, involves two different layers of modalities: kinematical and dynamical possibilities. This paper examines the status of these two layers, both in the classical and quantum case. The quantum case is particularly problematic: we identify four possible interpretive options. The upshot is that a close inspection of (...)
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  • The Weirdness of the World.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2024 - Princeton University Press.
    How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that’s a good thing Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental (...)
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  • Incoherent? No, Just Decoherent: How Quantum Many Worlds Emerge.Alexander Franklin - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    The modern Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics describes an emergent multiverse. The goal of this paper is to provide a perspicuous characterisation of how the multiverse emerges making use of a recent account of (weak) ontological emergence. This will be cashed out with a case study that identifies decoherence as the mechanism for emergence. The greater metaphysical clarity enables the rebuttal of critiques due to Baker (2007) and Dawid and Th\'ebault (2015) that cast the emergent multiverse ontology as incoherent; responses (...)
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  • Metaphysical indeterminacy in Everettian quantum mechanics.David Glick & Baptiste Le Bihan - 2024 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (3):1-22.
    The question of whether Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM) justifies the existence of metaphysical indeterminacy has recently come to the fore. Metaphysical indeterminacy has been argued to emerge from three sources: coherent superpositions, the indefinite number of branches in the quantum multiverse and the nature of these branches. This paper reviews the evidence and concludes that those arguments don’t rely on EQM alone and rest on metaphysical auxiliary assumptions that transcend the physics of EQM. We show how EQM can be ontologically (...)
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  • Metaphysical indeterminacy in the multiverse.Claudio Calosi & Jessica Wilson - 2022 - In Valia Allori (ed.), Quantum Mechanics and Fundamentality: Naturalizing Quantum Theory between Scientific Realism and Ontological Indeterminacy. Cham: Springer. pp. 375-395.
    One might suppose that Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM) is inhospitable to metaphysial indeterminacy (MI), given that, as A. Wilson (2020) puts it, "the central idea of EQM is to replace indeterminacy with multiplicity" (77). But as Wilson goes on to suggest, the popular decoherence-based understanding of EQM (henceforth: DEQM) appears to admit of indeterminacy in both world number and world nature, where the latter indeterminacy---our focus here---is plausibly metaphysical. After a brief presentation of DEQM (S1), we bolster the case for (...)
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  • Causation and the conservation of energy in general relativity.Sebastián Murgueitio Ramírez, James Read & Andres Paez - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Consensus in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that conserved quantity theories of causation such as that of Dowe [2000]—according to which causation is to be analysed in terms of the exchange of conserved quantities (e.g., energy)—face damning problems when confronted with contemporary physics, where the notion of conservation becomes delicate. In particular, in general relativity it is often claimed that there simply are no conservation laws for (say) total-stress energy. If this claim is correct, it is difficult to see (...)
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  • The first-personal argument against physicalism.Christian List - manuscript
    The aim of this paper is to discuss a seemingly straightforward argument against physicalism which, despite being implicit in much of the philosophical debate about consciousness, has not received the attention it deserves (compared to other, better-known “epistemic”, “modal”, and “conceivability” arguments). This is the argument from the non-supervenience of the first-personal (and indexical) facts on the third-personal (and non-indexical) ones. This non-supervenience, together with the assumption that the physical facts (as conventionally understood) are third-personal, entails that some facts – (...)
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  • The Argument from Locality for Many Worlds Quantum Mechanics.Alyssa Ney - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    One motivation for preferring the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics over realist rivals, such as collapse and hidden variables theories, is that the interpretation is able to preserve locality (in the sense of no action at a distance) in a way these other theories cannot. The primary goal of this paper is to make this argument for the many worlds interpretation precise, in a way that does not rely on controversial assumptions about the metaphysics of many worlds.
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  • Conquering Mount Everett: Branch-Counting Versus the Born Rule.Jake Khawaja - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Abstract: This paper develops and advocates a rule for assigning self-locating credences in quantum branching scenarios, called Indexed Branch-Counting. It is argued that Indexed Branch-Counting can be justified on both accuracy-theoretic grounds and on the grounds that it satisfies a requirement of exchangeability for probability assignments. Since Indexed Branch-Counting diverges from the Born Rule, this poses trouble for Everettian approaches to probability. The paper also addresses a common argument against branch-counting, namely that the rule is incoherent in light of putative (...)
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  • De Broglie-Bohm Theory, Quo Vadis?Vera Matarese - 2022 - Foundations of Physics 53 (1):1-20.
    The purpose of this contribution is to examine the current state of the de Broglie-Bohm theory (dBB) in light of Bohm’s vision as he explicitly set it out in his book Quantum theory [In Bohm, D., Quantum theory, Courier corporation, (1961b)]. In particular, two programmes that differ in many crucial respects are currently being pursued. On the one hand, the Bohmian mechanics school, founded by Dürr Goldstein and Zanghì, considers the theory to be Galilean invariant, regards particles’ motion as determined (...)
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  • The gauge argument: A Noether Reason.Henrique Gomes, Bryan W. Roberts & Jeremy Butterfield - 2022 - In James Read & Nicholas J. Teh (eds.), The physics and philosophy of Noether's theorems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 354-377.
    Why is gauge symmetry so important in modern physics, given that one must eliminate it when interpreting what the theory represents? In this paper we discuss the sense in which gauge symmetry can be fruitfully applied to constrain the space of possible dynamical models in such a way that forces and charges are appropriately coupled. We review the most well-known application of this kind, known as the 'gauge argument' or 'gauge principle', discuss its difficulties, and then reconstruct the gauge argument (...)
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  • Testing Spacetime Orientability.James Read & Marta Bielińska - 2022 - Foundations of Physics 53 (1):1-25.
    Historically, a great deal of attention has been addressed to the question of what it would take to test experimentally the metrical structure of spacetime. Arguably, however, consideration of this question has been at the expense of comparable investigations into what it would take to test other structural features of spacetime. In this article, we critique and expand substantially upon an article by Hadley (Hadley in Class Quantum Gravity, 19:4565–4571, 2002), which constitutes one of the best-known paper-length studies of what (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Wentaculus: Density Matrix Realism Meets the Arrow of Time.Eddy Keming Chen - manuscript
    Two of the most difficult problems in the foundations of physics are (1) what gives rise to the arrow of time and (2) what the ontology of quantum mechanics is. They are difficult because the fundamental dynamical laws of physics do not privilege an arrow of time, and the quantum-mechanical wave function describes a high-dimensional reality that is radically different from our ordinary experiences. -/- In this paper, I characterize and elaborate on the ``Wentaculus” theory, a new approach to time’s (...)
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  • Not Just Many Worlds but Many Universes? A Problem for the Many Worlds View of Quantum Mechanics.Peter Baumann - 2022 - Metaphysica 23 (2):295-305.
    The many-worlds view is one of the most discussed “interpretations” of quantum mechanics. As is well known, this view has some very controversial and much discussed aspects. This paper focuses on one particular problem arising from the combination of quantum mechanics with Special Relativity. It turns out that the ontology of the many-worlds view – the account of what there is and what branches of the universe exist – is relative to inertial frames. If one wants to avoid relativizing ontology, (...)
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  • Two Forms of Functional Reductionism in Physics.Lorenzo Lorenzetti - 2024 - Synthese 203 (2).
    Functional reductionism characterises inter-theoretic reduction as the recovery of the upper-level behaviour described by the reduced theory in terms of the lower-level reducing theory. For instance, finding a statistical mechanical realiser that plays the functional role of thermodynamic entropy allows for establishing a reductive link between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. This view constitutes a unique approach to reduction that enjoys a number of positive features, but has received limited attention in the philosophy of science. -/- This paper aims to clarify (...)
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  • Understanding probability and irreversibility in the Mori-Zwanzig projection operator formalism.Michael te Vrugt - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (3):1-36.
    Explaining the emergence of stochastic irreversible macroscopic dynamics from time-reversible deterministic microscopic dynamics is one of the key problems in philosophy of physics. The Mori-Zwanzig projection operator formalism, which is one of the most important methods of modern nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, allows for a systematic derivation of irreversible transport equations from reversible microdynamics and thus provides a useful framework for understanding this issue. However, discussions of the MZ formalism in philosophy of physics tend to focus on simple variants rather than (...)
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  • Douglas Hofstadter's Gödelian Philosophy of Mind.Theodor Nenu - 2022 - Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness 9 (2):241-266.
    Hofstadter [1979, 2007] offered a novel Gödelian proposal which purported to reconcile the apparently contradictory theses that (1) we can talk, in a non-trivial way, of mental causation being a real phenomenon and that (2) mental activity is ultimately grounded in low-level rule-governed neural processes. In this paper, we critically investigate Hofstadter’s analogical appeals to Gödel’s [1931] First Incompleteness Theorem, whose “diagonal” proof supposedly contains the key ideas required for understanding both consciousness and mental causation. We maintain that bringing sophisticated (...)
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  • Entanglement, Complexity, and Causal Asymmetry in Quantum Theories.Porter Williams - 2022 - Foundations of Physics 52 (2):1-38.
    It is often claimed that one cannot locate a notion of causation in fundamental physical theories. The reason most commonly given is that the dynamics of those theories do not support any distinction between the past and the future, and this vitiates any attempt to locate a notion of causal asymmetry—and thus of causation—in fundamental physical theories. I argue that this is incorrect: the ubiquitous generation of entanglement between quantum systems grounds a relevant asymmetry in the dynamical evolution of quantum (...)
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  • Centering the Everett Interpretation.Isaac Wilhelm - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (4):1019-1039.
    I propose an account of probability in the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. According to the account, probabilities are objective chances of centered propositions. As I show, the account solves a number of problems concerning the role of probability in the Everett interpretation. It also challenges an implicit assumption, concerning the aim and scope of fundamental physical theories, that is made throughout the philosophy of physics literature.
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  • One world is (probably) just as good as many.Jer Steeger - 2022 - Synthese 200 (97):1-32.
    One of our most sophisticated accounts of objective chance in quantum mechanics involves the Deutsch-Wallace theorem, which uses state-space symmetries to justify agents’ use of the Born rule when the quantum state is known. But Wallace argues that this theorem requires an Everettian approach to measurement. I find that this argument is unsound. I demonstrate a counter-example by applying the Deutsch-Wallace theorem to the de Broglie-Bohm pilot-wave theory.
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  • Hempel’s Dilemma: Not Only for Physicalism.Erez Firt, Meir Hemmo & Orly Shenker - 2021 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 34 (2):101-129.
    According to the so-called Hempel’s Dilemma, the thesis of physicalism is either false or empty. Our intention in this paper is not to propose a solution to the Dilemma, but rather to argue as follows: to the extent that Hempel’s Dilemma applies to physicalism it equally applies to any theory that gives a deep-structure and changeable account of our experience or of high-level theories. In particular, we will show that it also applies to mind-body dualistic theories. The scope of Hempel’s (...)
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  • The Powers of Quantum Mechanics: A Metametaphysical Discussion of the “Logos Approach”.Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo & Jonas R. Becker Arenhart - 2023 - Foundations of Science 28 (3):885-910.
    This paper presents and critically discusses the “logos approach to quantum mechanics” from the point of view of the current debates concerning the relation between metaphysics and science. Due to its alleged direct connection with quantum formalism, the logos approach presents itself as a better alternative for understanding quantum mechanics than other available views. However, we present metaphysical and methodological difficulties that seem to clearly point to a different conclusion: the logos approach is on an epistemic equal footing among alternative (...)
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  • Strong Determinism.Eddy Keming Chen - 2024 - Philosophers' Imprint 24 (1).
    A strongly deterministic theory of physics is one that permits exactly one possible history of the universe. In the words of Penrose (1989), "it is not just a matter of the future being determined by the past; the entire history of the universe is fixed, according to some precise mathematical scheme, for all time.” Such an extraordinary feature may appear unattainable in a world like ours. In this paper, I show that it can be achieved in a simple way and (...)
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  • Stating structural realism: mathematics‐first approaches to physics and metaphysics.David Wallace - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):345-378.
    I respond to the frequent objection that structural realism fails to sharply state an alternative to the standard predicate-logic, object / property / relation, way of doing metaphysics. The approach I propose is based on what I call a ‘math-first’ approach to physical theories (close to the so-called ‘semantic view of theories') where the content of a physical theory is to be understood primarily in terms of its mathematical structure and the representational relations it bears to physical systems, rather than (...)
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  • The Open Systems View.Michael E. Cuffaro & Stephan Hartmann - 2023
    There is a deeply entrenched view in philosophy and physics, the closed systems view, according to which isolated systems are conceived of as fundamental. On this view, when a system is under the influence of its environment this is described in terms of a coupling between it and a separate system which taken together are isolated. We argue against this view, and in favor of the alternative open systems view, for which systems interacting with their environment are conceived of as (...)
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  • The spectrum of metametaphysics: mapping the state of art in scientific metaphysics.Jonas R. Becker Arenhart & Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo - 2021 - Veritas – Revista de Filosofia da Pucrs 66 (1):e41217.
    Scientific realism is typically associated with metaphysics. One current incarnation of such an association concerns the requirement of a metaphysical characterization of the entities one is being a realist about. This is sometimes called “Chakravartty’s Challenge”, and codifies the claim that without a metaphysical characterization, one does not have a clear picture of the realistic commitments one is engaged with. The required connection between metaphysics and science naturally raises the question of whether such a demand is appropriately fulfilled, and how (...)
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  • Emerging into the Rainforest: Emergence and Special Science Ontology.Alexander Franklin & Katie Robertson - manuscript
    Many philosophers of science are ontologically committed to a lush rainforest of special science entities ), but are often reticent about the criteria that determine which entities count as real. On the other hand, the metaphysics literature is much more forthcoming about such criteria, but often links ontological commitment to irreducibility. We argue that the irreducibility criteria are in tension with scientific realism: for example, they would exclude viruses, which are plausibly theoretically reducible and yet play a sufficiently important role (...)
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  • The physics and metaphysics of Tychistic Bohmian Mechanics.Patrick Duerr & Alexander Ehmann - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 90:168-183.
    The paper takes up Bell's “Everett theory” and develops it further. The resulting theory is about the system of all particles in the universe, each located in ordinary, 3-dimensional space. This many-particle system as a whole performs random jumps through 3N-dimensional configuration space – hence “Tychistic Bohmian Mechanics”. The distribution of its spontaneous localisations in configuration space is given by the Born Rule probability measure for the universal wavefunction. Contra Bell, the theory is argued to satisfy the minimal desiderata for (...)
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  • Essays on the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics.Eddy Keming Chen - 2019 - Dissertation, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
    What is the proper metaphysics of quantum mechanics? In this dissertation, I approach the question from three different but related angles. First, I suggest that the quantum state can be understood intrinsically as relations holding among regions in ordinary space-time, from which we can recover the wave function uniquely up to an equivalence class (by representation and uniqueness theorems). The intrinsic account eliminates certain conventional elements (e.g. overall phase) in the representation of the quantum state. It also dispenses with first-order (...)
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  • The metaphysics of decoherence.Antonio Vassallo & Davide Romano - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (6):2609–2631.
    The paper investigates the type of realism that best suits the framework of decoherence taken at face value without postulating a plurality of worlds, or additional hidden variables, or non-unitary dynamical mechanisms. It is argued that this reading of decoherence leads to an extremely radical type of perspectival realism, especially when cosmological decoherence is considered.
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  • Quantum indeterminacy and the double-slit experiment.Claudio Calosi & Jessica Wilson - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (10):3291-3317.
    In Calosi and Wilson (Phil Studies 2019/2018), we argue that on many interpretations of quantum mechanics (QM), there is quantum mechanical indeterminacy (QMI), and that a determinable-based account of metaphysical indeterminacy (MI), as per Wilson 2013 and 2016, properly accommodates the full range of cases of QMI. Here we argue that this approach is superior to other treatments of QMI on offer, both realistic and deflationary, in providing the basis for an intelligible explanation of the interference patterns in the double-slit (...)
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  • (1 other version)Making New Tools From the Toolbox of Metaphysics. [REVIEW]Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo - 2023 - Erkenntnis (5):2251-2257.
    In this review, I specify the metametaphysical background against which Alastair Wilson’s “_The Nature of Contingency_” (Oxford University Press, 2020) should be properly understood. Metaphysics, as a philosophical discipline, is standing on thin ice. The caricature of the situation is polarized, and is often presented as follows: metaphysics is either entirely extracted from science or it is entirely independent of science. There is a recent trend that focuses on the middle ground between these extremes, searching the philosophical literature for metaphysical (...)
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  • Energy Non-conservation in Quantum Mechanics.Sean M. Carroll & Jackie Lodman - 2021 - Foundations of Physics 51 (4):1-15.
    We study the conservation of energy, or lack thereof, when measurements are performed in quantum mechanics. The expectation value of the Hamiltonian of a system changes when wave functions collapse in accordance with the standard textbook treatment of quantum measurement, but one might imagine that the change in energy is compensated by the measuring apparatus or environment. We show that this is not true; the change in the energy of a state after measurement can be arbitrarily large, independent of the (...)
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  • Against ‘Interpretation’: Quantum Mechanics Beyond Syntax and Semantics.Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo & Gilson Olegario da Silva - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (6):1243-1279.
    The question “what is an interpretation?” is often intertwined with the perhaps even harder question “what is a scientific theory?”. Given this proximity, we try to clarify the first question to acquire some ground for the latter. The quarrel between the syntactic and semantic conceptions of scientific theories occupied a large part of the scenario of the philosophy of science in the 20th century. For many authors, one of the two currents needed to be victorious. We endorse that such debate, (...)
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  • Electron Charge Density: A Clue from Quantum Chemistry for Quantum Foundations.Charles T. Sebens - 2021 - Foundations of Physics 51 (4):1-39.
    Within quantum chemistry, the electron clouds that surround nuclei in atoms and molecules are sometimes treated as clouds of probability and sometimes as clouds of charge. These two roles, tracing back to Schrödinger and Born, are in tension with one another but are not incompatible. Schrödinger’s idea that the nucleus of an atom is surrounded by a spread-out electron charge density is supported by a variety of evidence from quantum chemistry, including two methods that are used to determine atomic and (...)
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  • Humeanism in light of quantum gravity.Enrico Cinti & Marco Sanchioni - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10839-10863.
    Quantum Theory and Humeanism have long been thought to be incompatible due to the irreducibility of the correlations involved in entangled states. In this paper, we reconstruct the tension between Humeanism and entanglement via the concept of causal structure, and provide a philosophical introduction to the ER=EPR conjecture. With these tools, we then show how the concept of causal structure and the ER=EPR conjecture allow us to resolve the conflict between Humeanism and entanglement.
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  • Memory, the fork asymmetry, and the initial state.Athamos Stradis - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):9523-9547.
    Why do we have records of the past and not the future? Entropic explanations for this ‘record asymmetry’ have been popular ever since Boltzmann. Foremost amongst these is Albert and Loewer’s account, which explains the record asymmetry using a low-entropy initial macrostate plus an initial probability distribution. However, the details of how this initial state underpins the record asymmetry are not fully specified. In this paper I attempt to plug this explanatory gap in two steps. First, I suggest the record (...)
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  • John Bell on ‘Subject and Object’: An Exchange.Hans Halvorson & Jeremy Butterfield - 2022 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (2):305-324.
    This three-part paper comprises: (i) a critique by Halvorson of Bell’s (1973) paper ‘Subject and Object’; (ii) a comment by Butterfield; (iii) a reply by Halvorson. An Appendix gives the passage from Bell that is the focus of Halvorson’s critique.
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  • The Problem of Molecular Structure Just Is The Measurement Problem.Alexander Franklin & Vanessa Angela Seifert - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Whether or not quantum physics can account for molecular structure is a matter of considerable controversy. Three of the problems raised in this regard are the problems of molecular structure. We argue that these problems are just special cases of the measurement problem of quantum mechanics: insofar as the measurement problem is solved, the problems of molecular structure are resolved as well. In addition, we explore one consequence of our argument: that claims about the reduction or emergence of molecular structure (...)
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  • Symmetry fundamentalism in quantum mechanics.David Schroeren - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):3995-4024.
    Modern particle physics suggests an intriguing vision of physical reality: we are to imagine the symmetries of the world as fundamental, whereas the material constituents of the world are ontologically derivative of them. This paper develops a novel ontology for non-relativistic quantum mechanics which gives precise metaphysical content to this vision.
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  • The Landscape and the Multiverse: What’s the Problem?James Read & Baptiste Le Bihan - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7749-7771.
    As a candidate theory of quantum gravity, the popularity of string theory has waxed and waned over the past four decades. One current source of scepticism is that the theory can be used to derive, depending upon the input geometrical assumptions that one makes, a vast range of different quantum field theories, giving rise to the so-called landscape problem. One apparent way to address the landscape problem is to posit the existence of a multiverse; this, however, has in turn drawn (...)
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  • Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space.Sean M. Carroll - 2022 - In Valia Allori (ed.), Quantum Mechanics and Fundamentality: Naturalizing Quantum Theory between Scientific Realism and Ontological Indeterminacy. Cham: Springer. pp. 211-224.
    I defend the extremist position that the fundamental ontology of the world consists of a vector in Hilbert space evolving according to the Schrödinger equation. The laws of physics are determined solely by the energy eigenspectrum of the Hamiltonian. The structure of our observed world, including space and fields living within it, should arise as a higher-level emergent description. I sketch how this might come about, although much work remains to be done.
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  • What does the world look like according to superdeterminism.Augustin Baas & Baptiste Le Bihan - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (3):555-572.
    The violation of Bell inequalities seems to establish an important fact about the world: that it is non-local. However, this result relies on the assumption of the statistical independence of the measurement settings with respect to potential past events that might have determined them. Superdeterminism refers to the view that a local, and determinist, account of Bell inequalities violations is possible, by rejecting this assumption of statistical independence. We examine and clarify various problems with superdeterminism, looking in particular at its (...)
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  • (1 other version)Lessons from realistic physics for the metaphysics of quantum theory.David Wallace - 2020 - Synthese 197 (10):4303-4318.
    Quantum mechanics, and classical mechanics, are framework theories that incorporate many different concrete theories which in general cannot be arranged in a neat hierarchy, but discussion of ‘the ontology of quantum mechanics’ tends to proceed as if quantum mechanics were a single concrete theory, specifically the physics of nonrelativistically moving point particles interacting by long-range forces. I survey the problems this causes and make some suggestions for how a more physically realistic perspective ought to influence the metaphysics of quantum mechanics.
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  • Is the World a Heap of Quantum Fragments?Samuele Iaquinto & Claudio Calosi - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178:2009-2019.
    Fragmentalism was originally introduced as a new A-theory of time. It was further refined and discussed, and different developments of the original insight have been proposed. In a celebrated paper, Jonathan Simon contends that fragmentalism delivers a new realist account of the quantum state—which he calls conservative realism—according to which: the quantum state is a complete description of a physical system, the quantum state is grounded in its terms, and the superposition terms are themselves grounded in local goings-on about the (...)
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  • The Past Hypothesis and the Nature of Physical Laws.Eddy Keming Chen - 2023 - In Barry Loewer, Brad Weslake & Eric B. Winsberg (eds.), The Probability Map of the Universe: Essays on David Albert’s _Time and Chance_. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 204-248.
    If the Past Hypothesis underlies the arrows of time, what is the status of the Past Hypothesis? In this paper, I examine the role of the Past Hypothesis in the Boltzmannian account and defend the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law of nature. Such a view is known to be compatible with Humeanism about laws, but as I argue it is also supported by a minimal non-Humean "governing'' view. Some worries arise from the non-dynamical and time-dependent (...)
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  • The Cosmic Void.Eddy Keming Chen - 2021 - In Sara Bernstein & Tyron Goldschmidt (eds.), Non-Being: New Essays on the Metaphysics of Nonexistence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    What exists at the fundamental level of reality? On the standard picture, the fundamental reality contains (among other things) fundamental matter, such as particles, fields, or even the quantum state. Non-fundamental facts are explained by facts about fundamental matter, at least in part. In this paper, I introduce a non-standard picture called the "cosmic void” in which the universe is devoid of any fundamental material ontology. Facts about tables and chairs are recovered from a special kind of laws that satisfy (...)
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  • Bell’s Theorem, Quantum Probabilities, and Superdeterminism.Eddy Keming Chen - 2022 - In Eleanor Knox & Alastair Wilson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics. London, UK: Routledge.
    In this short survey article, I discuss Bell’s theorem and some strategies that attempt to avoid the conclusion of non-locality. I focus on two that intersect with the philosophy of probability: (1) quantum probabilities and (2) superdeterminism. The issues they raised not only apply to a wide class of no-go theorems about quantum mechanics but are also of general philosophical interest.
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  • Fundamental Nomic Vagueness.Eddy Keming Chen - 2022 - Philosophical Review 131 (1):1-49.
    If there are fundamental laws of nature, can they fail to be exact? In this paper, I consider the possibility that some fundamental laws are vague. I call this phenomenon 'fundamental nomic vagueness.' I characterize fundamental nomic vagueness as the existence of borderline lawful worlds and the presence of several other accompanying features. Under certain assumptions, such vagueness prevents the fundamental physical theory from being completely expressible in the mathematical language. Moreover, I suggest that such vagueness can be regarded as (...)
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