Inlägg

Objectivity After Babel

A Mythopoetic Reading of Observer-Equivariance Most of my recent work on observer-equivariance has moved in the direction of greater precision. I have tried to separate formal results from physical calibration, and physical calibration from philosophical interpretation. That discipline matters. A suggestive idea can otherwise acquire the appearance of a theorem merely by being placed next to mathematics. Here I want to pause that work and let the imagination move more freely. The thought that prompted this essay was that the forgiveness of sins might be recognizable as an archetypal pattern within my interpretation of observer-equivariance. If no part is finally isolated from the whole, perhaps guilt cannot simply be expelled onto an alien part. The whole must somehow bear what has happened within it. I still think this intuition contains something important. It also carries a serious moral risk: it can erase differences in responsibility that must remain visible. This essay is a...
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One World, Many Perspectives: Relational Quantum Mechanics, QBism, Leibniz, and Taoism

Relational quantum mechanics and QBism both reject the idea that quantum theory offers a view from nowhere. Yet they understand the observer, reality, and the relation between perspectives in importantly different ways. Leibniz and Taoism can illuminate this difference, provided that philosophical comparison is not mistaken for physical evidence. Leibniz’s harmony also raises a narrower theological question about responsibility. The question behind the interpretations A discussion about personal identity and moral responsibility recently led me back to a more general question: If reality is always encountered from a perspective, what makes different perspectives perspectives on the same world? This question appears in several forms. In special relativity, different observers assign different coordinates to the same events. In quantum mechanics, different observers may assign different states—or even different sets of definite facts—to the same physical system. In phil...
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When Science Meets Spirituality: Dialogue, Synthesis, and the Direction of Inference

Attempts to bring science and spirituality together are treated very differently. A theory claiming that quantum physics points towards a universal consciousness may quickly be accused of pseudoscience. At the same time, a university can offer a course combining physics, philosophy and religion without causing much controversy. Is this merely a cultural preference for established Christianity over newer forms of spirituality? There is probably an element of institutional asymmetry. But I believe that a more fundamental distinction is involved. The crucial difference is not simply between Christianity and New Age spirituality. It is between bringing different disciplines into dialogue and claiming that physics directly establishes a spiritual worldview. Four projects hidden in one phrase The expression “uniting science and spirituality” can refer to at least four different projects. First, science, philosophy and religion can be compared. One may ask how they approach q...
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Can Quantum Physics Select a Here and Now?

Can Quantum Physics Select a Here and Now? Relativity does not abolish the local present. It abolishes the assumption that a local present automatically determines a global present throughout space. An ordinary quantum measurement is often described as selecting one outcome, or one branch, from a superposition. But could relativistic quantum physics contain a more ambitious operation—one that selects not only what happens, but also a spacetime “here and now” in which it happens? The short answer is that relativistic quantum theory contains several structures that come close, but no universally accepted sharp projection operator that performs both tasks. The closest operational object is a spacetime-indexed quantum instrument : a family of quantum operations whose outcomes may include both a detector result and a spacetime event. Objective-collapse theories can go further and treat such events as elements of physical reality, but they add structure beyond standard quantu...
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Objectivity as What Survives Between Perspectives

Objectivity as What Survives Between Perspectives I have uploaded a new version of my article Observer Equivariance as a Condition for Shared Physical Law: A Lean-Verified Categorical Model . It is available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20589336 The article uses an abstract mathematical language — category theory, fibrations, group actions, and formalization in Lean — but its starting question is fundamental: what must be shared between different perspectives for us to speak of the same physical law? Physics is not about how the world looks from an absolute standpoint. Physics is about what can be shared between different perspectives. This may sound philosophical, but it is already part of modern physics. Two observers in relativity may measure different times and different lengths. They may even disagree about the order of certain events. Yet they can still describe the same physics. What makes this possible is not that one description is "the real one...
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