Commentary on my article “Quantum Wittgenstein” in Aeon Magazine
If you go to Aeon.co today you will see my article on the front page:
If you go to Aeon.co today you will see my article on the front page:
How Wittgenstein might 'solve' both philosophy and quantum physics | Aeon Essays
I first learnt about Plato's allegory of the cave when I was in senior high school. A mathematics and English nerd - a…aeon.co
Months in the making, this article tells the story of my journey to interpretations of physics looking through the eyes of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The article itself is free to read, so feel free to click through and read it before reading on here.
I want to talk here about some of the motivations for why I think this article needed to be published and what it means and doesn’t mean.
First off, I have been writing about quantum interpretation theories for over two years, starting with my book The Infinite Universe (2020). At the time, I was deeply ignorant of everything that was out there. Like most people I was only familiar with the interpretations that were common in popular culture. I also had no reason to question the need for an interpretation.
After all, I had for a long time subscribed to a realist interpretation (as I mention in my article) but I also had nagging doubts about it. Was everything we said about the universe real or partially real? Could we ever be purely objective? If not, how subjective is our understanding of the universe? Could one, by argumentation alone, find the answers to these questions?
I was inspired to learn about Wittgenstein because I had read that he had undertaken to solve this conflict between realism and anti-realism once and for all. I started by reading articles about Wittgenstein and then moved on to reading the master himself. I quickly connected his ideas about interpretations to quantum theory and the idea for the article was born.
I am a mathematician and physicist by formal training. My day to day work is very math and computation heavy. Indeed, I probably spend more time programming computers or directing the programming of others than anything else. Yet, everything I do, I recognize must have some underpinning of meaning, and I have spent my life looking for meaning in everything.
Although my degree is not in philosophy, I’m no stranger to it. I started with Plato’s Republic as well as Apology and Phaedrus in High School. My philosophy addiction only increased from there, and over the past 25 years I have read numerous books of and about the ancient discipline, so intimately connected to my own field of mathematics.
Despite all my reading, I realized long ago that philosophy never settles anything, and that is precisely what Wittgenstein suggests, but he says so much more. Yet he is oft misunderstood. In rejecting the underlying concept of philosophy as a discoverer of Truth, Wittgenstein is often accused of being anti-realist, when his goal was to question the validity of such debates as real vs. anti-real and ground meaning securely within human activity. Such an attitude demotes Truth from its lofty throne to that of mere usage, but at the same time frees us to dream while reminding us to keep it grounded in what we do in the world. Many modern physics debates are sadly in need of reminding that physics is about doing, not merely theorizing.
Wittgenstein does not say that we can’t have narratives or interpretations of reality. In fact, I think human beings would have trouble thinking without them. We are beings of story. Stories are how we understand and compress all the data coming in from the world.
The problem is that science has created a “false” narrative that there is one true story, a factual one, about the world and that all other stories should be rejected.
Quantum physics put a monkey wrench in this plan, and physicists are still wrestling with the problem without realizing that the best solution is to drop the 300 year old “one true narrative” program.
Wittgenstein also does not say, however, that the converse is true, that all narratives are equally valid. That is an extreme post-modernist view that he would not have agreed with. Wittgenstein would simply say that narratives are either useful or useless (or somewhere in between). That is, our usage of those narratives is what is important, not the narratives themselves. If I propose a narrative that, for example, climate change isn’t real, then my narrative is useless because it goes against what we observe in the world. We use the word “false” to describe such useless narratives.
Let’s consider an example:
If I say “the universe is expanding”, what is the narrative that describes that?
First of all, scientists observe the universe expanding because of cosmic redshift and other observations.
Theorists meanwhile observe the universe expanding in their equations like the FLRW model allowing them to calculate things about the universe and match them to observations.
These are two very useful narratives, and their usage defines what we mean when we say the universe is expanding.
When we say that the “fabric of the universe is stretching” or even the universe is a spacetime manifold with a metric that is increasing in spatial scale, these are meta-narratives about the narratives of calculation and observation. They do not give the statement: “the universe is expanding” its meaning at all. They are merely pictures drawn to illustrate.
Hence, an explanation is a superfluous meta-narrative, meant to help people visualize or contextualize reality but far from giving meaning to anything.
That doesn’t mean that reality isn’t real nor does it mean that it is. Such questions are themselves superfluous meta-narratives.
That is what Wittgenstein wants to tell us. He doesn’t mean for us to stop telling stories, but he does want us to take a step back and recognize that our meta-narratives are not fundamental in any endeavor, including science.
We can continue to make them, and can we really stop? But we can also redefine them as decoration rather than content.
If you apply this to basic questions like: what is a particle? Or what is the universe? You find that you get very different answers than if you assume that meta-narratives are fundamental. Many physicists already recognize this fact but continue to construct meta-narratives for public consumption as if they are more than heuristic because they are afraid of confusing people.
Thus, the article is not purely about a pragmatist approach to science. I do not reject meta-narratives entirely. I simply suggest that debates between meta-narratives resolve nothing. These meta-narratives simply remind us of that which follows from what we already know. Hence, a debate such as the great Einstein-Bohr debates is a case of Einstein and Bohr reminding one another of that which follows from quantum theory. While it is not pointless to be so reminded and refine one’s thoughts, the debate itself resolves nothing. If you would like to comment on one that you think does resolve a question about reality, please do so.