This series began with a simple observation: quantum mechanics works extraordinarily well as physics, yet leaves many physicists dissatisfied. Over the course of these posts, that dissatisfaction has been traced not to predictive failure, mathematical inadequacy, or experimental anomaly, but to a persistent confusion about what quantum mechanics ought to provide.
The confusion concerns ontology.
In this final post, we draw the threads together and ask what follows once that confusion is brought into view.
1. What Quantum Mechanics Has Shown Us
Quantum mechanics has not revealed that reality is unknowable, incoherent, or absurd. Nor has it demonstrated that the world defies explanation. What it has done is expose the limits of a long-standing expectation: that a physical theory should deliver a single, closed, perspective-free account of what ultimately exists.
The theory’s formal success is unquestionable. Its ontological openness is not a flaw to be repaired, but a condition to be understood.
2. The Cost of Ontological Denial
Much of the turbulence in quantum foundations arises from a refusal to acknowledge when physics gives way to ontology. Ontological commitments are made implicitly, defended passionately, and denied rhetorically. Philosophy is disavowed even as it is practised.
The result is not rigour, but confusion. Debates persist without resolution because their real terms are never stated. Interpretations multiply because no criteria for ontological choice are recognised as such.
This is the price of ontological denial.
3. From Ontology-as-Discovery to Ontology-as-Responsibility
A central shift is now required. Ontology must no longer be treated as something waiting to be discovered by physics, as though the right experiment or formal trick would finally reveal what reality really is.
Instead, ontology should be understood as a practice of commitment. To adopt an ontology is to choose a way of organising explanation, intelligibility, and possibility in light of a theory’s formal structure.
Such choices are not arbitrary. They can be more or less coherent, more or less fruitful, more or less aligned with our explanatory aims. But they are not forced upon us by experiment.
This is what ontological responsibility consists in: recognising when a choice is being made, and taking responsibility for it.
4. What Responsibility Requires
Ontological responsibility demands several disciplines:
Explicitness: making commitments visible rather than hiding them behind appeals to “reality.”
Comparability: assessing ontological proposals in relation to one another, rather than as rivals for an imagined final truth.
Restraint: refusing to attribute to physics conclusions that it does not license.
Pluralism without confusion: accepting multiple ontological construals without mistaking plurality for failure.
None of this diminishes physics. It clarifies its scope and protects its authority.
5. After Metaphysical Closure
Letting go of the demand for metaphysical closure does not leave us with emptiness. It leaves us with a different kind of intellectual maturity.
Quantum mechanics teaches us how to operate reliably within a domain of phenomena while remaining agnostic about the ultimate furniture of the world. This is not a weakness. It is a disciplined achievement.
The mistake has been to treat this discipline as a defect.
6. A Reoriented Task
The task ahead is not to complete quantum mechanics with a final ontology. It is to cultivate better habits of thinking about what theories do, what they do not do, and how ontological commitments arise alongside them.
Physics advances by experiment and formal innovation. Ontology advances by reflection, articulation, and comparison. Confusing the two does justice to neither.
7. A Different Satisfaction
Quantum mechanics does not leave us without a picture of reality. It leaves us without the illusion that there must be only one.
The satisfaction it offers is not metaphysical closure, but conceptual clarity: a clear view of where physics ends, where ontology begins, and what responsibility consists in when the boundary is crossed.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from quantum mechanics, it is not that reality has slipped beyond our grasp.
It is that grasping for too much was never physics to begin with.
No comments:
Post a Comment