The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery!

Leon Trotsky, What is National Socialism?

Introduction

In one of my favorite Coen Brothers’ movies, The Man Who Wasn’t There, the main character Ed Crane, played by Billy Bob Thornton and based on Camus’s Meursault, is an alienated and indifferent barber, a spectator and ghost of a man. After a series of seemingly meaningless and ironic events, Crane finds himself on trial for murder. He hires a top-notch lawyer from Sacramento named Riedenschreinder. The hire bankrupts him.

The lawyer presents his case in a hilarious satire on the sophistry characteristic of much legal art, but it is also a revelatory moment about the place of quantum mechanics in our culture. The lawyer’s argument is simple. It is worth presenting the “Reidschneider defense” in full:

They got this guy, in Germany. Fritz Something-or-other. Or is it? Maybe it's Werner. Anyway, he's got this theory, you wanna test something, you know, scientifically - how the planets go round the sun, what sunspots are made of, why the water comes out of the tap - well, you gotta look at it. But sometimes you look at it, your looking changes it. Ya can't know the reality of what happened, or what would've happened if you hadn't-a stuck in your own goddamn schnozz. So there is no "what happened"? Not in any sense that we can grasp, with our puny minds. Because our minds... our minds get in the way. Looking at something changes it. They call it the "Uncertainty Principle". Sure, it sounds screwy, but even Einstein says the guy's on to something.

In this defense, Quantum mechanics “shows” that nothing is knowable with certainty. One might assume that one knows that an object besides us has certain qualities. But it turns out that looking at the object generates those very qualities, perhaps the object itself. As nothing can be known without reasonable doubt, the jury must acquit. It is a universal legal defense based on the absolute instability of all knowledge claims. If the reader ever finds herself in legal trouble, she can share it with her own legal defense. A quantum get-out-of-jail-free card.

Quantum mechanics (QM) is a scary set of words, and much is made of this scientific theory. In pop-science, it is taken as the key to all metaphysical enigma, and the statement-form “quantum mechanics tells us x” is probably the most hackneyed piece of verbiage in scientific discourse. It is utilized to justify all kinds of woo and crankery, used to soothe the philosophical conscience of this or that irrationalist by providing scientific fodder for their pet beliefs. One hears that the “uncertainty principle” proves nothing is certain, but even more egregiously that quantum mechanics “disproves” materialism and “proves” idealism, i.e., that all reality is the product of human mental activity.

Marxists should defend materialism, or at least a philosophy that does not deny the deep knowability of the natural and social world, for any such denial correlates with the belief that this same world is frozen in place, unchangeable. Idealism by itself does not imply such pessimism. But often it veers towards forms of mysticism that make knowledge private, or ritualistic, promising a deeper understanding of a hidden order beyond our purview, a hidden and immutable order only accessible via indefeasible procedure. Because quantum mechanics (QM) is seen, rightfully so, to have scientific authority, idealistic and mystical philosophers appropriate QM to give their philosophy the patina of science. Marxism must have a response to such use of scientific theory as a means of giving legitimacy to idealist philosophy. In this paper I hope to demonstrate one simple thing. I want to show that the foundations of QM, as taught to students and assumed by most physicists, do not defeat all realism and do not compel one to believe in the forms of instrumentalism which justify idealism (and do this all without resorting to mathematics). My argument, in summary, is that the measurement problem does not contradict a form of entity realism; in fact, QM does not decide ontological or entity realism, period. All this may not make sense until you have read the paper, but come back to it later.

Realism versus Instrumentalism

Let us clarify realism versus instrumentalism. These two positions divide on several dimensions, and are distinct movements^[1] about scientific knowledge. These are more local distinctions than the materialism versus idealism divide but closely related.

Realists believe there exists a mind-independent world and that this mind-independent world is made up of the sort of stuff talked about in natural and social science. Instrumentalists believe that there may or may not be a mind-independent world, and that even if there is a mind-independent world, we have no warrant to make truth-claims about it independent of our relation to it. So fundamentally, the difference is epistemological.^[2] Realists believe that we can know this mind-independent, human-insensitive world. Our scientific knowledge is about this mind-independent world, and it approximately tracks this world, i.e., it is approximately true in the sense that it corresponds to how things are.

Crucially, realists and instrumentalists often have a different view on what can be termed “theoretical,” or better, “unobservable” entities. The electron is not observable to the human eye. Ostensibly, sense-extending devices are required to “infer” its existence if indeed such a thing exists. Realists tend to argue that mature scientific theory is literal about such entities; i.e., when a scientific theory makes a statement about electrons, it does not refer to the observable effects of that electron but to the electron itself. Instrumentalists differ on this, but they tend to believe that statements about electrons have purchase because they can be “reduced to” or translated into statements about results of experiments, or observations of the sort of typical and medium-sized stuff around us.

I call entity realism the belief that we do not believe such entities exist because of this or that scientific theory or even experiment, but because, in the final instance, we can manipulate their effects in the world; we can “prove” the “this-sidedness” of our knowledge; we have causal histories with them. This means that statements about such unobservable entities are literal; that is, it is a statement about such entities and not their observable effects.

I distinguish two tendencies in instrumentalism. There is a weak version that claims only scientific knowledge does not concern a mind-independent world, but is above all an economic means of accounting for observations, practices, and, more generally, human experience. The minimal instrumentalist claim in quantum mechanics is that quantum mechanics induces us to admit our best knowledge is only an elliptical expression of the results of experiments, an economic means of coordinating observations. I say the electron has spin-½; what I mean is that you pass it through an inhomogeneous magnetic field and half the time it goes up, and half the time it goes down. More generally, when I speak of “electrons”, I am referring not to tiny things but summarizing the results of experiments where I see holes in foil, electrical tracemarks in gas, flashes on a screen, etc. All well and good. The idealist or strong instrumentalist claim, though, has a metaphysical flavor. Not only is quantum mechanics an economic account of observations, but it induces us to admit that our observations do not have their source in a mind-independent reality and that what we term “reality” is in fact the product of human activity. Strong instrumentalist claims, of the metaphysical sort, are utilized in the academy, and they seep into popular culture as apologia to push crude forms of mystical idealism, i.e., that the reality we inhabit and participate in is necessarily the causal product of human, above all mental, activity and that we cannot know by rational, public means. I want to state that weak instrumentalism is a plausible philosophical position to take towards quantum mechanics, although I do not buy in. The potential problems it suffers are of a more philosophical character than being an obvious logical or scientific error. What I am concerned with here is going from rejection of some forms of realism to an affirmation of idealism associated with strong instrumentalism, which itself tries to gain purchase by a certain treatment of the measurement problem (the “measurement problem" will be explained below).

A caveat. Now it is important to be clear: of course some items and features of our world exist because there are humans, e.g., human thoughts, chairs, money, capitalism. No one in good faith can argue that such things existed before human beings. It is also important to admit that part of the world, the literal environment that we inhabit, is in part and contingently marked by our intervention, labor, and practices. But we do not choose the necessary physical makeup or dynamics of the world around us; our actions and effects are constrained by such “rules”. Society may have an industry for the production of the commodity “plane”, a purely social aspect, but the plane, a physical object, must obey certain physical constraints, aeronautic and hydrodynamic.^[3]

Classical Picture:

To understand the basics of QM, we need to know what it builds off, i.e., the Newtonian or classical picture (CP) of the universe. The CP is simple. There exist particles and fields.^[4] These sorts of particles and fields have definite properties and relations; we call them dynamical features, e.g., they have a position, they have momentum, they have energy, whatever we do. These properties are continuous; between any two values there is another; these values are not “lumpy”. We can finally know the properties and relations of these particles and fields with infinite precision, the precision of our empirical knowledge being only a function of the sophistication of our instrumentation and measurement. Space is a 3-dimensional thing. It is absolute; given three numbers, any particle is localizable. There is no other set of numbers. Time is absolute; every particle participates in events, and every event can be ordered according to before and after. There is one unique string of events. Finally, all this means that we live in a fully deterministic universe. To quote Laplace:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past could be present before its eyes.^[5]

The CP’s slogan is: matter in motion within absolute time and space. Now, it is often stated that this classical picture corresponds to our everyday intuitions and to the world “we” perceive. But this is deeply misleading; after all, who is this “we” referred to? “We” is not all humanity. I am, after all, a citizen of a core imperialist and capitalist society.

The fact that I think, and I am sure at least some Cosmonaut readers, in terms of forces, impulses, accelerations, momentum, etc., that we see the apple falling because of gravity, is a product of the long history of science and technology, stemming even before Aristotle and crystallizing first in the Newtonian revolution, “seeping” into the wider culture, influencing the very way we perceive. The notion that everything is made of particles, and that these have a definite state, is not a universal feature of all human culture; it may seem trivial to you and I, but it was a tremendous revolution in human cognition. That quantum seems to therefore violate some of these assumptions is not a testament to a violation of “common sense”, or some one standard of “human perception”. The CP is not inbuilt into the human mind.

Quantum Picture:

Now apparently as we shrink down to the size of an atom, some of the above is false. QM is really about the particles that make up the universe. The classical picture is a sort of first guess about those particles. It is a sort of illusion. Let us explain the quantum picture (QP).

I will present some of the textbook standard.^[6] This standard QM is often taken to be the “Copenhagen” interpretation. I don't think there ever was a “Copenhagen” interpretation, and if there was, what we are taught in school today is not it.^[7] Here it goes.

The quantum world assumes classical space and time.^[8] The citizens of this world are particles. But these particles “carry” a special feature, i.e., a wave-function. A wave-function contains all the information we can ever have about the state of a particle, i.e., the values of properties it has.^[9] Now, for a generic dynamical property, e.g., energy, only certain values are allowed as consistent with the “Hamiltonian” and wave-function of the system (do not worry what that means). There is a discrete set of energy values that can be assumed (not a continuum).

Now here comes the fun part. The wave-function evolves unitarily and deterministically according to the Hamiltonian, and its deterministic evolution is encoded in the famous Schrödinger equation. When we measure the properties of the particle, we only get a result in that discrete set of values. And here is the catch. There is only a certain probability that we get such and such a value. If we measure that property again, we can get another value (or the same). We cannot know with zero uncertainty which value we will get, i.e., what the value was “before” the measurement. When we measure, we “change” the particle and its friend, the wave-function. There is a paradoxical dualism in the dynamics of QM: deterministic evolution produced by unitary time evolution and stochastic evolution produced by measurement. This is the infamous “measurement” problem - the infamous collapse of the wave function postulate. We only know the property of a thing “after” the measurement, and with a certain probability, we do not know the state of the particle “before”. It has generated a tremendous amount of bullshit in popular culture, as we have seen instantiated in the Reidschneider defense.

As I said, some of this flies in the face of the CP. Both agree there are particles. But they disagree as to whether they have definite properties, or in fact if the concept of a property is measurement-dependent (mind-dependent). For the CP, properties of particles are definite, and measurement is in some way an acausal process. It is a neutral record of the property; it picks out the value of the property as it is. Not so for QM. And QM is in fact empirically taken to be (and very certainly is) a more accurate account of how things behave at what is, for us, tiny scales.

So does the measurement problem force us to deny all realism, i.e., even if there is a mind-independent world, does this make claims about it independent of our relationship to it nonsense? Do we conclude that “reality” as we believe it to be is a fiction, something we make up to account for observations and our actions? Of course, you are free to conclude all of this if you would like. I have heard less sophisticated statements than the above from high-level physicists. But to deny ontological realism is not necessary once you accept the foundations as they are fleshed out above (and there are even other foundations), and the actual practice of QM seems to be strongly subtended by entity realism. QM does not generate a warrant to deny ontological realism and from there go on to idealism.

Defeating Strong Instrumentalism about QM or Idealism

Absolutely nothing in quantum mechanics forces us to deny entity realism because the existence of particles - say, electrons - is a contingent fact of the universe and not a fiat of QM discourse. In other words, quantum mechanics is in part an algorithm to predict properties of given entities, but it does not prescribe an ontology; actual practitioners operate with an a priori assumption that there are in fact electrons. In a way, QM is ontologically neutral as to the sort of constituents and furniture of the universe. What is substantive in QM is the dynamical content given the existence of such and such atomic entities.

Some things strictly carry over from CM; QM ports over some conceptual structure in that sense. Particles also must have ascribable to them certain sorts of properties, the dynamical properties like momentum, relational properties like position. What differs is, of course, the character of some of these properties, i.e., some are discrete.^[10] As for uncertainty in the value of a property before measurement, or observation, or whatever you call it, there are many paths to deal with this puzzle that do not require accepting idealism. I list some here:

1. Ontological Indeterminacy: It may just be the case that particles do not have determinate dynamical properties, i.e., properties are intrinsically fuzzy; there just are no properties that are definite except in certain limited contexts. One of those contexts, to be technical, is state preparations and non-demolition measurements.^[11] Probability has an ontological character.
2. Contextual Determinancy: More radically, there is no such thing as a definite state before measurement, so that definite specification is contextually determined by the measurement act. Perhaps a specification simply is an emergent phenomenon which is produced in the interaction between a physical probe and system.
3. Entity Realism without Absolutism: One could also state that the existence of the entities is knowable, but that definite specification of their properties is not. This is a possible route, though we must make perhaps a controversial or less than trivial metaphysical assumption that we do not identify an entity with the sum of its properties. But I see no a priori reason to assume such a conceptual distinction is false, nor does QM decide the status of that distinction.
4. Measurement as Physical Disturbance: Measurement is itself a physical process- maybe the quantum world is so sensitive that any measurement will disturb the particles and contribute its own effect to the state of the particle.

All of these answers, however, challenge the ambitions of an absolute realism for which not only is the mind-independent world knowable but that it is possible to know this mind-independent world fully and exactly as it is, i.e., to give an absolute and exact description of all its constituents with all their features and relations. I see no such problem in renouncing such a claim and no reason to prescribe absolute certainty as a truth condition for all realisms. I find such absolute realism to be in fact inspired by theological notions of god's omniscience. It also flies in the face of the open-ended and non-final process of scientific inquiry. Realism does not imply anti-fallibilism.

The second and third answers do seem to have a certain weakness. The obvious retort to the distinction between a thing and its properties is that, of course, as a matter of language we distinguish the two, but as a matter of fact we always know such and such a thing through its properties. If the specific values of such properties of a thing are unknowable outside the measurement act, then how do we know with certainty such things exist before the act? This infects doubt into the second answer as well.

I truthfully have no knockdown argument against this except to insist that we primarily acquire precise valuations of such objects via theory and experiment. But our theories and experiments substantially transform. It does not follow that the electron no longer exists. We do not require exact specification of a thing in order to be able to successfully refer to it. If that were the case, we would never refer to anything ever; we would have to be referential nihilists. What stabilizes reference to something is our causal history and doings with the thing.

The last answer, however, requires some parsing. It makes perfect sense that the classical assumption of “record-neutrality” or "measurement-neutrality” is false. Measurement is an act. Measurement instruments are physical things obeying the laws of nature. Experiments to measure such and such dynamical properties are physical events in which, it must be assumed, all participants obey the laws of nature. We should hope for a monism where laws of measurement and physical evolution of the wave-function are the same. But then the "disturbance picture” of measurement should somehow be incorporated into the deterministic evolution encoded by the Schrödinger equation. We should have one equation. But such a one equation has never been adopted widely; we do not dispense with stochasticity of measurement in some way.^[12] This we may find less comforting. It is a sort of Kantianism after all. We may assume that there is a mind-independent world, some noumenal world, but we can only know it as it is for us, as we interact with things and not in-itself. The strong instrumentalist/idealist picks up on this moment to slide into mind creating all reality, the very universe.

For Wigner, for instance, the measurement act = collapse of the wave-function, and the collapse of the wave-function occurs in the human brain. Insofar as things are specified by the measurement act, the brain is an indispensable part of the determination of state. The human brain therefore is a fundamental part of the ontology and dynamics of the known universe.^[13] But this raises an interesting cosmological question: we make historical statements about the big-bang, about the cosmic microwave background radiation, about the quark-qluon plasma, we make physical retrodictions about the past, about what really happened and not as it was for a present observer (for which we have no evidence there was one). One might get around this by stating a primordial mind, or perhaps denying the big bang, but I have no idea what this could possibly mean; perhaps God or some such thing.

Even with this last answer, nothing requires that we reject a spatio-temporal world composed of the sort of happy fellows spoken of in physics, all enjoying certain sorts of dynamical properties like momentum, angular momentum, and energy. It is logically possible to assume a mind-independent world and that knowledge is about a mind-dependent world. But even then it is logically possible to assume the obverse of the mind-dependent content of knowledge. Given the measurement problem, one may only need to deflate the absolute position, one that itself requires certain non-obvious commitments, and in the definiteness and maximal knowability of the state of particles and the world writ large in order to affirm realism. The material character of our world, and of us as certain sorts of material beings, is such that there are limits to our knowledge. These are not a priori gnoseological constraints like the Kantian categories.

But this does not mean we do not need to make revisions or additions to our world picture. I prefer to reject the very notion of definite specification of a thing before measurement is meaningless, that a determinate specification is itself contextually determined, that it is an emergent phenomenon coming from interaction of knowers and the world, and that knowers are not exclusively human. Furthermore, quantum mechanics inflates the dynamical properties. Quantum objects have spin and are either fermionic, anyonic, or bosonic. These properties are nowhere found in the CP. They are properly quantum.^[14] I have also not spoken of rather mysterious “modes of existence”, if they are indeed modes of existence, i.e., superposition and entanglement. “Entanglement” is a phenomenon that may require us to reject preconceived notions of causality and adopt some form of physical holism, but this should sit perfectly well with Marxists who often are radical holists, emphasizing the continuous change and interconnectedness of the universe, though often repeated mindlessly in Hegelese as nothing more than empty, pseudo-philosophical nostrums. In other words, QM may indeed have something deep to say about our world picture but nothing so deep as to decide the issue of materialism/idealism. QM, in some respects, does not possess an independent ontology; its existential claims piggyback on our causal doings with things and the world. We have assumed electrons to exist; we have assumed certain sorts of properties as applicable to these material beings. These are all familiar characters.

Some Last Thoughts: Quantum Mechanics and Rationalism

In this brief essay, I wanted to show that the above account of the fundamentals of QM does not require denial of ontological realism, and in fact is deeply compatible with an entity realism that supports it, and does not require the affirmation of a strong instrumentalism amounting to idealism. We concluded furthermore that QM may prescribe a different dynamic than strict determinism. It also may be interpreted to give a deeper picture than Newtonian materialism: states are contextual, specifications emergent, causality non-local, and things have exotic properties like spin.

I gave some possibilities for defending entity realism, but I hope above all that I gave some tools to deflate wild claims about quantum mechanics. Now, I did not get into other elaborate debates about, say, the uncertainty principle, superposition, wave-particle duality, entanglement, the sorts of phenomena that are irreducibly quantum. I could get into them if the demand arises. I also have not spoken of alternative foundations of QM, i.e., Bohmian mechanics, or many-worlds mechanics.^[15] The reason I did not is that idealistic claims are made on the basis of the “conventional” account, and these alternative foundations were themselves developed, in part, to precisely weaken idealistic claims (at least that is what I believe motivated Bohm).

But there is one thing I would like to impress or repeat ad nauseam. There is a world “beyond us”- no QM can prove or disprove that- it is, in fact, a special proposition that is “metaphysical” in the sense of “before” or more general than a statement derived from physics. That world is made of the stuff we talk about in science, or at least that's the best warrant we have to say what the world is like. But the world is not a machine, made of little bits and balls dictated by Laplace’s demon. Most Marxists are comfortable with this “metaphysical” proposition; they term such a deterministic view “mechanical materialism”. For whatever reason, we inhabit a world that is both lawful and uncertain, in process and interconnected. Probability is a figure to stay. However, that world is not fully chaotic (in the loose sense), and if it were, we could never really know or change the world, the two being intimately connected. In the Hegelian sense, the world is rational because it is intelligible; it is changeable because it is knowable.

The problem with idealistic mysticism is not that it is religious or committed to belief in the supernatural. The problem is that it tends to be irrational. By irrational, I do not strictly mean unscientific. Someone who is irrational holds beliefs such that there is no intersubjectively accessible way to defeat their claims.^[16] If there is no social and democratic means of deliberating over an issue, one in which participants give and revise their reasons, the conversation ends there, and we cannot cooperate except to regulate our affairs by force or chicanery or some combination.^[17] Ideal scientific inquiry is a profoundly social enterprise in which persons not only must know and discover, but show others of their discovery and knowledge, and furthermore, be skeptical and open to revising their beliefs. The fruit of this dialectical process is the human race's collective ability to profoundly change the world, for good or bad, epitomized in the tragic destruction of our planet.^[18] Mystical forms of idealism reject this “pre-discursive” social agreement and, in doing so, they reinforce the pathological social order that is capitalism.

Our epistemic social order, how we regulate knowledge in our society, is profoundly ill. Side by side with the creation of the most devastating and wondrous technologies, with the acceleration of the AI arms race, Tucker Carlson and other idiots peddle peasant-brained tales of Sumerian demons and the Jewishness of algebra.^[19] The epistemic community breaks down. This is a profound crisis of the human mind, a moment in a wider crisis of capitalism. Of course, ignorance is forever with us; class society allocates knowledge like surplus, ideology affects ignorance in order to legitimate class rule. But we, the human race, cannot afford to stay under the cloud of ignorance. With the emergency of climate change, which promises ecocide, and the intensification of inter-imperialist competition, which can only result in World War, both of which augur the devastation of our species, now more than ever we need to know and change the social and natural world. We do not have the luxury of staring in agape at the great and unknowable beyond.

1. I specifically say movement because it is not helpful to pin down one form of scientific realism or instrumentalism. Instead, like Ian Hacking, it is helpful to think of them in analogy to “movements” in art and literature. The analogy is that it is often very hard to summarize what distinguishes such movements in decisive terms i.e. there is no algorithm to decide with “mathematical precision” what is at a given moment in time such and such movement.

   ↩

2. The distinction is obviously not so clear cut in practice. But there is a distinction. We distinguish what is from what we know. If the two were not distinct, the discovery of facts would not be contingent, but necessary. It is not.

   ↩

3. Furthermore, what is fascinating is that “social being” exhibits a phantasmagoric objectivity. Social items and relations emerge via the complex interplay of humans with humans, humans and nature. Social relations take on dynamics which are irreducible to any given person, seemingly irrational and outside our control, acting on us like alien forces. That external, overbearing character makes it seem that social dynamics acts on us like natural laws themselves.

   ↩

4. In fact, it might be argued that for most classical physicists , the concept of field is only taken to exist insofar as it helps explain the dynamics of particulate matter. So for some it did not exist at all. The “ether” was conceptually designed to help explain away fields e.g. the electromagnetic field was a sort of impression on a primordial jelly.

   ↩

5. Laplace, Pierre Simon, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, translated into English from the original French 6th ed. by Truscott, F.W. and Emory, F.L., Dover Publications (New York, 1951) p.4.

   ↩

6. A particularly clear presentation of this at an undergraduate physics level is given in David H. McIntyre, Quantum Mechanics: A Paradigms Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 27-28. I only present some of the axioms found in a section aptly named “Postulates”, section 1.5.

   ↩

7. We learn a derivative or codification of Paul Dirac’s and John Von Neumann’s quantum mechanics as “axiomatically” formalized in books such as P. A. M. Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), and John von Neumann, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, trans. Robert T. Beyer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955).

   ↩

8. I am speaking of non-relativistic QM. In a relativistic QM i.e. quantum field theory, space is a 4-dimensional manifold, Minkowski space, the infamous spacetime. Also quantum field theory today, the distinction between particles and fields is not so clear cut. In field theory, particles are excitations of quantum fields, these particles are discrete but not strictly localized. There is a similar fuzziness about the concept of particles in classical relativity theory, a particle being a relatively localized dense patch of mass-energy.

   ↩

9. Think of it in an abstract way as a sort of machine, it takes in say the position and spits out a complex number, a complex number that encodes the probability of being in that position. It is a machine that, given input, encodes information about the state of the particle.

   ↩

10. Some are discrete, but within QM position and momentum are sometimes taken as continuous. Time is itself not a dynamical quantity but a parameter. It parametrizes the wave-function and operators but is itself not a dynamical quantity implemented via Hermetian operator.

    ↩

11. Vladimir B. Braginsky et al., Quantum Nondemolition Measurements. Science 209, 547-557(1980).DOI:10.1126/science.209.4456.547

    ↩

12. The most famous is probably Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber theory G. C. Ghirardi, A. Rimini, and T. Weber, “Unified Dynamics for Microscopic and Macroscopic Systems,” Physical Review D 34, no. 2 (1986): 470–491, https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.34.470. This theory of spontaneous collapse does not negate what I said above because stochasticity is not eliminated from the theory. We still have a dualism of determinism/indeterminism.

    ↩

13. Wigner, Eugene P. "Remarks on the Mind-Body Question." In The Scientist Speculates: An Anthology of Partly-Baked Ideas, edited by I. J. Good, 284–302. London: Heinemann, 1961.

    ↩

14. Although, classical field theoretical treatments have been given of “spin”. Ohanian, Hans C. “What is spin?” American Journal of Physics 54 (1986): 500-505, claims that spin can be seen classically. No one buys it.

    ↩

15. For a good philosophical and pedagogical introduction to Bohmian mechanics consult David Z. Albert, Quantum Mechanics and Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). For those with some mathematical background look at his original paper: David Bohm, “A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of ‘Hidden’ Variables. I,” Physical Review 85, no. 2 (1952): 166–179. And David Bohm, “A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of ‘Hidden’ Variables. II,” Physical Review 85, no. 2 (1952): 180–193.

    ↩

16. I understand that this is a profoundly simplified, almost impoverished understanding of rationality, but bear with me for the sake of demonstration.

    ↩

17. Which is the case sometimes. And paradoxically it is rational to admit it. We Marxists cannot place our faith in convincing the bourgeoisie to enter into the arduous journey of abolishing class society. It is unreasonable to assume that they would be. No conversation can decide this state of affairs.

    ↩

18. I understand the major cause of climate change socially is the dynamics and effects of capitalism. But capitalist reproduction and accumulation depends on fossil fuel energy and the effects of mass fossil fuel use is a major, preponderant physical cause of climate change. We cannot conflate the two sorts of causes, because they require different solutions.

    ↩

19. The irony being that Algebra comes from the Arabic word “Al-Jabr”. Al-Jabr (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, Arabic: الكتاب المختصر في حساب الجبر والمقابلة al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wal-muqābala) by Khawarizmi a Arabic speaking Persian polymath.

    ↩