If the proliferation of interpretations is not a failure of quantum mechanics, then a further question presses: why is this plurality experienced as a problem at all? Why does the openness left by the theory provoke unease rather than acceptance?
The answer lies not in physics, but in a powerful and largely unexamined expectation: the demand for metaphysical closure.
1. What Closure Promises
Metaphysical closure is the expectation that a successful physical theory should deliver a single, settled account of what ultimately exists and how it fits together. A closed theory leaves no remainder. It does not merely predict; it tells us what the world is.
This expectation is rarely stated explicitly. It operates instead as a background norm—a sense of what a theory ought to provide if it is truly satisfactory.
When quantum mechanics fails to meet this norm, dissatisfaction follows.
2. How the Expectation Was Formed
The demand for closure is historically conditioned. Classical physics did not merely succeed empirically; it also offered an intuitively graspable picture of the world. Entities had determinate properties. Dynamics unfolded in time. Explanation meant tracing effects back to causes.
Over time, this picture hardened into an expectation about theory as such. The extraordinary success of classical frameworks made their ontological form seem not contingent, but necessary.
Quantum mechanics disrupts this inheritance. Its formalism does not yield a single, literal world-picture. Instead of prompting reflection on the expectation, the disruption is often attributed to the theory’s alleged incompleteness.
3. Closure as Comfort
Metaphysical closure offers more than intellectual satisfaction. It offers reassurance. A closed picture of reality promises that the world is, at bottom, orderly, intelligible, and fully articulable.
Ontological openness, by contrast, is unsettling. It suggests that no single description exhausts what can be said, and that understanding may depend on perspective, context, or mode of engagement.
The discomfort provoked by quantum mechanics is therefore not only theoretical. It is existential.
4. Why Physics Cannot Supply Closure
No amount of additional physics can satisfy the demand for metaphysical closure in quantum mechanics. The openness is not due to missing variables or incomplete data. It arises from the structure of the theory itself and the limits of empirical constraint.
As long as interpretations remain empirically equivalent, physics has nothing further to say. To insist otherwise is to ask physics to resolve questions that lie beyond its jurisdiction.
The demand for closure thus places physics in an impossible position: it is faulted for failing to do what it cannot, in principle, do.
5. The Cost of the Demand
Clinging to the demand for closure distorts foundational discourse. It turns ontological openness into a defect. It fuels endless debate framed as a search for the “true” interpretation, despite the absence of criteria for resolution.
More subtly, it prevents recognition of what quantum mechanics already offers: a disciplined way of organising expectations and possibilities without pretending to exhaust reality itself.
The price of insisting on closure is perpetual dissatisfaction.
6. Letting Go Without Giving Up
Relinquishing the demand for metaphysical closure does not entail abandoning realism, explanation, or seriousness of intent. It entails recognising that no single ontological story is mandated by the physics.
This recognition opens space for a different posture: one that treats ontological commitments as choices to be made and justified, rather than conclusions forced upon us.
Such a posture does not diminish quantum mechanics. It allows the theory to be appreciated for what it actually achieves.
7. Toward a Different Kind of Satisfaction
The dissatisfaction surrounding quantum mechanics arises from a mismatch between what the theory provides and what we expect it to deliver. Adjusting the expectation resolves the tension without altering the physics.
Quantum mechanics does not promise metaphysical closure.
It offers something else: a powerful, precise, and reliable way of navigating phenomena, while leaving open the question of how reality is ultimately to be construed.
In the final post of this series, we will draw these threads together and argue that the true task ahead is not to complete quantum mechanics with a final ontology, but to cultivate a discipline of ontological responsibility—one that acknowledges its commitments rather than hiding them behind the authority of physics.
No comments:
Post a Comment