Philosophy of Quantum Theory

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 Epistemic Interpretation: 

Epistemology is, according to Encyclopaedia Brittanica, "The philosophical study of the nature, origin and limits of human knowledge." . In regards to quantum mechanics this means that we only concern ourselves with what it is possible to know. The quantum world is that of probability, we can define nothing with certainty until it is actually measured and thus epistemically trying to talk about anything prior to a measurement of a quantum system is a waste of time as it is merely a gap in human knowledge that we can never bridge.

Perhaps one of the fundamental issues with this interpretation is the very basis of it and the inherent ambiguity of it all. This is the fact that it assumes that no quantum system is worth talking about until it is measured. Where, however do we draw the line between a quantum system and a classical one? It is easy to say that we draw this distinction based on the laws the system obeys, one quantum mechanics, one classical, but then we must ask at what exact point does this thin line occur? At what size does something suddenly flip from nice, simple SUVAT to the frankly horrible world of QM?

 Ontic Interpretation: 

Ontology however, is not the study of knowledge but that of being. Ontological interpretations of quantum mechanics thus say that to place no significance on the mess of ambiguity that is the wave function of a quantum system is to ignore what makes the system a whole. Niels Bohr went as far as saying that we should ignore all information we glean by measuring the system as it is so fundamentally changed by our measurement that it is no longer of any use.

Unfortunately all of these are just interpretations of formalisms anyway and cannot be tested in any way as simply by measurement collapse the wave function of a system and thus cannot know what was going on prior to the collapse. None of these interpretations can actually make predictions of anything and are thus not theories in their own right, they are merely people desperately philosophising to try and understand something that by definition seems impossible to gain a true understanding of.

 Measurement Problem 

Myrvold, Wayne, "Philosophical Issues in Quantum Theory", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL  Accessed 23/10/2018

https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.1318 Accessed 23/10/2018

'The undivided universe' -David Bohm and Basil J Hiley, edition published 2009, first published in 1993 by Routledge, New York