The previous post argued that most interpretative crises in quantum mechanics arise from a grammatical inflation: treating structured potential as if it were already actualised instance.
A fair objection immediately follows:
“Fine in principle. But interference patterns and Bell-type experiments aren’t grammatical confusions. They are hard empirical facts. Surely they force us to treat superposition and entanglement as ontologically real.”
Let us examine that claim carefully.
Not rhetorically.
Structurally.
1. Interference: Does It Prove Co-Actuality?
Consider the double-slit experiment.
An interference pattern emerges even when particles are sent one at a time. The pattern cannot be explained if each particle simply passes through one slit or the other as a classical object would.
The usual conclusion is drawn:
The particle must have gone through both slits.
Superposition must be ontologically real.
But pause.
What the experiment demonstrates is this:
The structured potential governing possible detection events includes phase relations that constrain actual outcomes.
The distribution of actualised instances (individual detection events) reflects the structure of that potential.
Interference shows that potential has determinate structure.
It does not show that incompatible paths were co-actualised as phenomena.
No detector registers “both paths.”
No first-order phenomenon corresponds to simultaneous passage through each slit.
What is empirically confirmed is that the space of possible instances cannot be decomposed into independent classical alternatives.
That is a claim about structure.
Not about co-actuality.
The inflation occurs when formal multiplicity is reinterpreted as phenomenal simultaneity.
Interference forces us to abandon classical separability of possibilities.
It does not force us to multiply instances.
2. Bell-Type Results: Does Nonlocality Demand Ontic Excess?
Now to the stronger challenge.
In 1964, John Stewart Bell demonstrated that no local hidden-variable theory can reproduce the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics.
Subsequent experiments have repeatedly confirmed violations of Bell inequalities.
The usual conclusion:
But what precisely do Bell-type results show?
They show that the structured potential of entangled systems cannot be factorised into independent subpotentials with pre-assigned local values.
In other words:
The space of possible joint instances is irreducibly relational.
That is a profound result.
But again, note what is — and is not — established.
Bell does not demonstrate:
-
that superposed outcomes are co-actual,
-
that multiple worlds branch,
-
or that physical influences travel faster than light as ontic signals.
Bell demonstrates that any attempt to treat the system as composed of independently actualised local instances fails.
The relational structure belongs to potential.
When one outcome is actualised at each wing of an experiment, the joint statistics reflect that underlying relational structure.
No metaphysical telepathy is required.
What is ruled out is a classical decomposition of potential into pre-existing local instances.
What is not ruled out is the distinction between structured potential and singular actualisation.
3. The Strongest Counterargument
A physicist might now press further:
“If the structure of potential produces empirically observable interference and nonlocal correlations, in what sense is it not real? Are you not merely relocating ontology?”
This is the decisive question.
The response must be precise.
Structured potential is real.
But it is not instance.
Reality is not exhausted by actualised events.
Nor is it reducible to a hidden substrate of determinate facts.
Potential has determinate structure.
That structure constrains and shapes actualisation.
But it does not consist of multiple co-actual phenomena.
To insist that it must be either:
-
fully actual substance, or
-
mere epistemic ignorance,
is to retain a binary inherited from classical metaphysics.
Quantum theory pressures that binary.
It reveals that relationally structured potential is irreducible.
But irreducible does not mean “already actual.”
4. What Bell and Interference Actually Force
Interference forces this revision:
Potential cannot be modelled as a set of independent classical alternatives.
Bell forces this revision:
Potential cannot be decomposed into local pre-actualised values.
Both results destabilise classical metaphysics.
Neither compels ontological inflation.
The leap from:
“Classical separability fails”
to
“Reality must consist of branching worlds or spooky substances”
is interpretative excess.
The experimental data demand structural revision.
They do not demand ontic multiplication.
5. The Discipline of the Distinction
If we preserve the distinction:
System (structured relational potential) → Cut → Instance
then:
-
Interference demonstrates the nonclassical structure of the system.
-
Bell demonstrates the irreducibly relational structure of that system.
-
Actualised outcomes remain singular.
Only structured potential, relationally articulated, and the singularity of actualisation under a cut.
The Real Revolution
Quantum mechanics did not teach us that reality is absurd.
It taught us that classical intuitions about possibility were impoverished.
But that lesson concerns the grammar of potential.
The crisis began when potential was inflated into substance.
Interference and Bell do not refute the distinction between potential and instance.
They make that distinction indispensable.
And once it is maintained, the pressure to multiply worlds, collapses, or hidden substrates begins to look less like necessity—
and more like metaphysical impatience.
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