I was going to continue the sub-series on quantum mechanics by talking about waves, but the first installment didn't quite lead to the spirited discussion I was expecting. In an effort not to lose my audience I'm going to take a little detour and tackle another more philosophical topic. I first wrote about this ten years ago. In the intervening time no one has ever pointed me to prior art, and ChatGPT also says that this idea might actually be original with me, so I'm going to present it here in slightly more structured and less chatty style. Maybe this will turn into an actual publication some day.
Ontology is the study of existence, the study of what is, as contrasted with epistemology, the study of what can be known. This has relevance to quantum mechanics because there is debate on the status of (the thing described by) the wave function, and specifically the collapse of the wave function under the Copenhagen interpretation: is collapse an ontological phenomenon, i.e. a reflection of something that actually physically happens, or is it merely epistemological, i.e. a reflection of change in our knowledge of reality rather than an actual change in reality?
To apply the scientific method we have to restate this question as a scientific Problem, that is, as an observation (or a set of observations) that cannot be adequately explained by current theories. In this case the Problematic observation is not a traditional scientific measurement but rather a kind of meta-observation: all of our laboratory observations are completely in accord with quantum theory, to the extent that the lack of any experimental result that contradicts the Standard Model since it was first developed over fifty years ago has precipitated a major crisis in particle physics. The Problem is not that our theories are inadequate, the Problem is that we have too many of them. We have multiple formulations of quantum mechanics, all of which make the same predictions and are therefore experimentally indistinguishable from one another. But these formulations are radically different from each other in their fundamental structure, and in particular in their ontologies, i.e. their accounts of what actually exists, what is actually "out there" (if anything). This is a Problem for the widely accepted (meta-)hypothesis that there does exist an objective reality, and that science is effective because it produces explanations and models that faithfully reflect this.
The source of this Problem is, I claim, two tacit assumptions built into the generally understood meaning of the word "exist". As an analogy, distinguishing between "space" and "time" is an impediment to understanding reality because reality is relativistic. The distinction between space and time is real, but it is observer-dependent rather than a component of objective reality itself.
I will eventually get around to arguing that existence is likewise observer-dependent, i.e. the Objective Reality Hypothesis is false. But I will not defend that claim here -- I need to lay a lot more foundation in QM before I can do that, but as a first-order approximation I will point to classic vignettes like Schroedinger's cat, Wigner's Friend, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle as hints that there are manifest disconnects between most people's intuitions about objective reality and actual observations.
The tacit assumption about existence that I wish to challenge here is that existence is a dichotomy: a thing either exists or it does not. There is no third option. In fact there are many, many options, many different "modes of existence", which I have chosen to call "ontological categories." The most familiar ontological category is the category of material objects, which includes everything comprised of atoms, like chairs, cats, humans, baseballs, and scientific instruments. But another example is the ontological category of activities or processes which includes things like baseball games, elections, chemical reactions, reading, writing, and calculation. A third familiar example is information. This includes things like software, digital images, thoughts, ideas, opinions, experimental data, and instructions.
All of these are (I hope) examples of things whose existence is uncontroversial. I can't imagine anyone arguing in good faith that baseball games do not exist. But the way in which baseball games exist is clearly different from the way in which baseballs exist. Baseballs are material objects. They have mass. They are made of atoms. The defining characteristic of a baseball is the arrangement of a set of atoms relative to each other.
Baseball games are not material objects, they are activities, processes. The defining characteristics of a baseball game do involve material objects, but an essential component of a baseball game is their dynamics. You can have all of the components of a baseball game assembled -- the players, the field, the balls, the bats -- but the game itself will not actually come into existence until these components start to move in a certain way, until they actually start to play baseball.
The repertoire of ontological categories is not fixed. The boundaries between ontological categories are not sharp, and they form a hierarchy rather than an exhaustive partition. They are also often a matter of taste. For example, most people would agree that "sportsmanship" exists, but it is far from clear what ontological category it belongs in. It obviously has something to do with activities (sportsmanship isn't made of atoms). We talk about "good sportsmanship" and "bad sportsmanship" to distinguish certain kinds of human behaviors, but these can only happen in the context of certain kinds of competitive activities. But the difficulty in categorizing something like "sportsmanship" into its proper ontological category is not a threat to the theory of ontological categories any more than the fact that there is no bright line delineating chairs from non-chairs is a threat to the Objective Reality Hypothesis. Just because we can't necessarily agree on what is and is not a chair in no way threatens the Objective Reality Hypothesis, i.e. the idea that the English phrase "chairs actually exist" denotes some true and useful truth about the world.
A much more interesting challenge arises when we try to pin down what it means for something not to exist. Canonical examples of things that do not exist include fictional or mythical characters like Santa Claus, Superman, Albus Dumbledore, the Eater Bunny, unicorns, and leprechauns. But these things manifestly do exist in the ontological category of mythical and fictional characters because people can recognize the truth of propositions like, "Albus Dumbledore is a fictional character" and "Albus Dumbledore was headmaster of Hogwarts." Likewise they can recognize the falseness of propositions like "Harry Potter delivers presents on a flying sleigh at Christmas", notwithstanding that this is actually plausible within the context of the (fictional) world that Harry inhabits.
This maneuver may appear to render the theory of ontological categories vacuous. If Santa Claus exists (in the ontological category of ideas) then everything exists. We could even posit weird ontological categories like, "Things no one has ever thought of" or "things that are impossible for anyone to ever think of." But this is missing the point. The utility of the theory of ontological categories is not to explain anything about the world, it is to explain features of human discourse, and in particular, to help break the impasses that often arise when people address existential questions.
The elephant in the room, of course, is the question of whether or not God exists, and the baby elephants standing next to it are questions like: Do numbers exist? Does the (thing described by the) quantum wave function exist? And so on.
As a practical example, consider the question: do human rights exist? This question is often posed as a rhetorical trap by religious apologists in YouTube debates because it sounds like the answer should be either "yes" or "no" but both options subtly lead to conclusions favorable to the apologist. (It is similar in structure to the familiar canard, "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Note that this same structure can be repurposed in myriad ways: Have you stopped having sexual fantasies about squirrels yet? Have you asked God to forgive your sins yet?)
All of these questions are rhetorical traps because they "assume facts not in evidence". In order to give an answer that doesn't sound pedantic you have to tacitly accept these assumptions, i.e. that you have in fact beaten your wife in the past, or indulged in sexual fantasies about squirrels, or committed sins that require God's forgiveness. The tacit assumption built in to "Do human rights exist?" is the idea that existence is a boolean. This is the false assumption that the theory of ontological categories challenges.
Yes, human rights exist, because everything exists in some ontological category or other. That is not the interesting question. The interesting question is which ontological category human rights (and God, and Loki, and angels, and demons, and climate change, and morality, and consciousness, and so on and so on) belong to. If you (tacitly) restrict the admissible answers to existential questions to "yes" and "no" then you (tacitly) constrain everything to a single ontological category. If human rights exist then they must exist in the same way that chairs and baseballs and baseball games exist, and this ultimately leads otherwise bright people to talk about "Platonic forms" or "the Mind of God" and other such philosophical nonsense when the actual truth is much, much simpler: yes, human rights exist, but they (obviously!) don't exist in the same manner as baseballs and chairs. Human rights exist in the ontological category of social constructs, which is a sub-category of the ontological category of ideas, which is a sub-category of the ontological category of information. The ontological category of social constructs includes things like law, justice, money, authority, democracy, sport, and art. All of these things exist when large enough groups of people get together and agree that they exist. When this agreement ceases to exist, the things it gave rise to likewise cease to exist.
Philosophically interesting questions about ontological categories arise in physics as well. For example, I don't think anyone would dispute that forces exist, but what is their ontological category? From the point of view of classical mechanics, forces are in an ontological category of their own, and this is in some sense a "root" category in the hierarchy of ontological categories. The ontological category of forces is not a sub-category of anything else, and indeed there is no English word to distinguish the category from its exemplars. The word "forces" has to do double-duty here. It is a similar situation for "the quantum wave function", which is a phrase that can denote either a mathematical object, or some physical (or metaphysical) thing that this mathematical object describes. The ontological status of this hypothetical thing, which has no name in any natural language, is the subject of spirited debate.
So the interesting question is not "Does God exist?" The answer is yes. The interesting question is: to what ontological category does God belong? Is God just an idea, a fictional mythical figure like Superman or Albus Dumbledore, or is He something different, something more, and if so, what?
Note that I do not intend for my comparison of God to Superman and Albus Dumbledore to be pejorative, though I recognize that it could easily be construed that way. Even if God turns out to be nothing more than a mythical character, He is clearly not just any old mythical character. People don't worship Superman or Albus Dumbledore. They don't build cathedrals in their honor. In some ways, God is the ultimate mythical character. God with a capital G is a god with a lower-case g, and not just any old god, but the ultimate god, alpha and omega, the uncaused cause. That makes it challenging to pose questions about God's ontological category in a non-pejorative-sounding way because any example that I choose will necessarily be in some sense "lesser". There can only be one God with a capital G, though manifestly many different conceptions of what this One God actually "looks like", if indeed He "looks like" anything, if indeed He is a "he" and not a "she" or a "s/he" or an "it". Here again, human language fails (though, ironically, responsibility for this can be laid at God's feet).
Even saying something as superficially innocuous as "God is in the ontological category of deities" can sound pejorative because it implies that there could be other exemplars, other gods besides God. But notice that the pejorative implications of these questions are themselves a social construct. Hinduism is the world's third most popular religious tradition, with over a billion adherents, and it is polytheistic. In the ancient world, polytheism was the norm. You can even find evidence of polytheistic traditions in ancient Judaism. In Genesis God refers to Himself in the first person plural (Ge3:22 ... Behold, the man is become as one of us [emphasis added]). The First Commandment is "Thou shalt have no other gods before me", which doesn't make much sense if there are no other gods. The Torah even mentions some of these other gods by name (Baal, Moloch, Chemosh, Ashtoreth, Milcom) and recounts battles waged between them and Jehovah.
Of course, monotheism dominates most of the modern world, and so these references to other gods are not considered evidence that these gods actually exist (or actually existed), whatever that means. These were "false gods". There is widespread agreement among modern western religious traditions that there is only one true god, though considerable disagreement regarding this deity's nature. Christians, for example, nominally profess monotheism but also claim that their god is "triune". Many Christians also profess the existence of angels and demons, and Catholics direct prayers and attribute miracles to saints. One would be hard-pressed to draw a principled distinction between these are a pantheon of demigods, but it is manifestly impossible to do so if mere boolean existence is all that matters. Did Jesus exist? Most likely. That is not the interesting question. The interesting question is: was he something more than an apocalyptic Jewish preacher who had a legend grow up around him after being crucified? In other words, to which otological category does Jesus belong? To which ontological category does Brahma belong? The Buddha? The Prophet Mohammed PBUH? Jehovah? Allah? Angels? Demons? The saints? Mary? Elijah? Moses? Zeus? Loki? The wave function? Spacetime? Qualia? (Note that the reason I listed Elijah is that he alone among the prophets of the Old Testament is allegeged to have ascended bodily into heaven.)
I want to reiterate that the theory of ontological categories is a theory of language, not physics. It is a hypothesis about the referents of words. It makes the claim that many of the seemingly intractable disagreements about existence are not disagreements about truth but disagreements about the meanings of words, and in particular, disagreements that arise because of different tacit assumptions that people bring to bear when they are forced into the straight jacket of treating existence as a boolean property when it isn't. Things whose existence is completely uncontroversial clearly exist in different ways. The way in which baseballs exist is completely different from the way in which baseball games exist. Refusal to acknowledge this is a denial of basic reality on a par with insisting that the earth is flat.
And yet I strongly suspect that many people will deny it. I base this prediction on the fact that this this idea is not common knowledge. In fact, ChatGPT says it might even be original with me, though I have a hard time believing that I'm really the first human to ever have this idea cross their minds. It's just too obvious. And yet philosophers and theologians and physicists from time immemorial unto the present day have argued and continue to argue over the existence of particles and fields and the wave function and God as if they hadn't even considered the possibility that existence might not be a boolean. The closest thing I've found is the idea of mereological nihilism, which is kind of on the right track. It correctly identifies that existence is often a question of what state a system is in. But it doesn't go all the way to the final conclusion, and it definitely runs off the rails in calling itself a kind of "nihilism". My conception of ontological categories is about as far from nihilism as you can get. To this Problem all I can think to say is: hypothesis non fingo.
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