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If usefulness isn’t a guide to what’s real, what is?

Seems like I’ve been writing a lot about quantum mechanics lately. Apparently so have a lot of other people. One thing that keeps coming up is the reality or non-reality of the quantum wave function. Raoni Arroyo and Jonas R. Becker Arenhart argue for non-reality: Quantum mechanics works, but it doesn’t describe reality: Predictive power is not a guide to reality. (Warning: likely paywall.)

Along similar lines, in an article about what he says are quantum myths, Ethan Siegel argues that superpositions are not fundamental to quantum physics:

Superpositions are incredibly useful as intermediate calculational steps to determine what your possible outcomes (and their probabilities) will be, but we can never measure them directly.

Arroyo and Arenhart take a similar line. They argue that it would be more intellectually honest for wave function realists to call their position wave function pragmatism. As they note in the title of their piece, they don’t see predictive success as a guide to reality.

The question I want to ask these people is, if predictive power, if usefulness, isn’t your guide to what is real, then what is?

It’s worth thinking about why we care whether something is real or not. Is the sound I’m hearing from outside rain? Is the rain real? To say it is is to say I need to take an umbrella with me when I go outside, or be prepared to get wet. To say it isn’t is to say I can walk outside without worry of getting wet. We get similar considerations when trying to decide if a stock rally is real or illusory, or, from an evolutionary perspective, whether the sound in the bushes is a real predator or just a figment of your imagination. Reality is that which makes a difference, something which there’s a possible cost to ignoring.

Admittedly, this is a strange point to make when talking about quantum states. It might seem like whether they’re real has little to no bearing in our daily lives. But they do seem to make a difference for experimenters and quantum computing engineers. They have to take the dynamics implied in these mathematical tools seriously. In the case of quantum computing, it’s the very dynamics that seem to enable what they’re trying to do. Failure to treat them as real has consequences.

Now, I’m a structural realist. I think what we can count on being real in successful scientific theories are the structures they describe, at least to some level of approximation. That doesn’t mean we can count on them being fundamental, or that we know what they may be structures of. This is particularly important to remember with quantum theory, where the structures are all we currently have.

Does that mean that, rather than being structures of objective reality prior to a measurement, they could actually be structures of subjective expectations as the QBists argue? Or of the way the experimental equipment has been set up, as other antirealists argue? I suppose so. But that seems to imply the possibilities are completely set by these expectations or preparations, that if scientists really wanted to, they could get any result they wanted.

In practice, something seems to constrain the possible results. Of course, if I put on the epistemic hat, I could argue that those constraints are the constraints on their thoughts (QBism) or practical equipment limitations (other epistemics), not anything in the quantum realm. But taking this literally, that seems to imply that quantum physics is a big illusion, a side effect of the way scientists think or construct experiments. If so, how could anyone be sure that any scientific measurements beyond human senses are to be trusted?

All of that is before remembering that if we think anything objective at all is happening in the physics prior to a measurement, that there are mathematical theorems which kick in and demonstrate that quantum states must describe something real. Epistemic interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as Copenhagen, QBism, and RQM avoid this be saying there is no such objective physics prior to measurement (or interaction). Which, to me, makes calling them “epistemic” misleading. Qbists in particular argue for a “participatory reality,” a notion they inherited from John Wheeler’s “it from bit” idea.

This selective application of antirealism has always felt like gerrymandering to me. Most of the proponents want to resist the idealism label, but they seem to want to take from metaphysical antirealism just what they need to avoid quantum state realism. It all feels forced.

Interestingly enough, that doesn’t appear to have been Niels Bohr’s take. Historians often argue that he was more of a neo-Kantian than either an instrumentalist or idealist. His take seemed to be that the quantum realm was real, but inaccessible, the noumena always beyond the phenomena. Of course, this predates the theorems I mentioned above, which is what forces stronger stances from contemporary epistemic proponents.

But my issue with the Kantian view is it pushes reality into something utterly and forever unknowable. Reportedly, Kant’s motivations for doing this were to preserve space for God, the soul, free will, and morality in response to the “Crisis of the Enlightenment,” which seemed to call all of those things into question. I suspect neo-Kantians are trying to preserve different things, but that kind of preservation likely remains part of their motivation.

But the cost of doing so is to remove the practical aspects I noted above when deciding what’s real or not. In my view, it removes any utility from the concept of reality, except for talking in terms of theology or overall metaphysics.

Which may be why Arroyo and Arenhart want to use the word “pragmatic” instead. I think a better strategy is to retain our grounded everyday meaning for “real,” but admit that we never know whether we’ve reached ultimate reality. But this is coming from someone who doesn’t share the Kantian or neo-Kantian concerns.

Overall, my theory of reality is pragmatic. But I continue to wonder, for the people arguing against that take, what standard are they using?

What do you think? Are there issues with a pragmatic take on reality I’m overlooking? If so, what would be a better standard?

#antirealism #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Physics #QuantumMechanics #realism #structuralRealism

Home - Objective Standard Institute Nov 21

Moral Realism vs. Anti-Realism Is a False Alternative

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://objectivestandard.org/moral-realism-vs-anti-realism-is-a-false-alternative/

Home - Objective Standard Institute Nov 5

Moral Realism and Anti-Realism vs. the Metaethics of Life

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://objectivestandard.org/moral-realism-and-anti-realism-vs-the-metaethics-of-life/

SelfAwarePatterns Feb 15, 2025

Why I’m an ontic structural realist

Scientific realism vs instrumentalism

A long standing debate in the philosophy of science is about what our best scientific theories tell us. Some argue that they reveal true reality, that is, they are real. Others that scientific theories are only useful prediction frameworks, instruments useful in the creation of technology, but that taking any further implications from them is misguided.

In practice, most people are a mix, taking a realist attitude toward theories whose implications they like, and an antireal or instrumentalist one toward those they dislike. For example, it’s pretty common for people to take an antireal stance toward the quantum wave function, while being realist toward much of the rest of science.

The most common argument for instrumentalism is the pessimistic meta-induction, the observation that a theory can be predictive of current observations yet later still turn out to be very wrong, with the Ptolemaic earth centered model of the cosmos being the most famous example. For centuries it predicted naked eye astronomical observations, yet its view of reality was completely overturned by the post-Copernican models.

The most common realist response is the no miracles argument, that if our best successive theories aren’t give us at least an increasingly closer approximation of reality, it amounts to a miracle.

Theory scope

As someone whose take on reality is that the real is what leads to more accurate predictions, I’ve long thought the above description misses the core difference between these stances, which is the scope of current theories. Instrumentalists tend to regard the scope as only pertaining to current observables. Scientific realists tend view it as broader.

Maybe the biggest practical difference is a realist expects our best theories to eventually converge and reconcile. Albert Einstein, perhaps the most famous realist, made a lot of progress just figuring out ways to reconcile different successful theories. Although he was the first person to struggle to do that with quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Structural realism

Structural realism somewhat straddles the fence between instrumentalism and traditional scientific realism, with the observation that what does get preserved across theory change, at least approximately, is the core structure and relations of the old theory. Ptolemy’s mathematical structure still works, just in a much narrower scope than he might have imagined. And Isaac Newton’s model of motion and gravity remain very useful for many purposes (including most NASA missions), even though general relativity has to be used for more exotic scenarios.

Structural realism seems to get the instrumentalist benefit of minimizing assumptions while accepting that scientific theories are telling us something about reality. It’s worth noting that the difference between structural realism and traditional scientific realism is most prominent in fundamental physics. It’s easier to be a straight realist for much of the rest of science. Although structural realism seems useful in evaluating psychophysical theories. Maybe another way of putting this, structuralism seems most useful at the current boundaries of knowledge.

Epistemic vs ontic structural realism

Epistemic structural realism (ESR) is the stance that while science can tell us about the structure and relations of entities in the world, as well as what they do (relations across time), it doesn’t tell us what they are. In other words, science can’t tell us about their intrinsic nature. Ontic structural realism (OSR) rejects this distinction, arguing that all of the structure and relations of an entity amount to its full nature.

Some variations of ESR resonate with Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism philosophy, that while we can know phenomena, there remains a reality beyond our observations, the noumena. Noumena may or may not be related to the notion of “things in themselves”, considered unknowable by Kantians. It’s commonly noted that with this move, Kant seems to make room for concepts that seemed threatened by the enlightenment of his day: God, the soul, free will, moral realism, etc.

Why ontic structural realism?

When I first discovered the structural realist view, the epistemic option seemed plausible. It seemed like a responsible acknowledgement on the limits of what we can know. But I now realize I was making a very common mistake. It’s completely rational to assume that the structures and relations we know about aren’t the final story, that there remain underlying structures we haven’t discovered yet.

For example, when scientists discovered atoms, they gave them the ancient Greek name for the ultimate building blocks of matter. However, they didn’t know about subatomic particles like electrons, protons, and neutrons. And of course it was later discovered that protons and neutrons are themselves composed of quarks and gluons. It seems entirely appropriate to be cautious about accepting that these entities, which we currently call “elemental particles”, are the final story.

However, these possible hidden underlying components are not the intrinsic nature that ESR is arguing for. They are just more structure, relations, and functions. What then does ESR mean? The only example of an intrinsic nature I’ve seen presented are the quiddities of Russellian monism, which are often taken in panpsychism as the proto-phenomenal properties that make up the phenomenal properties of conscious experience.

But it’s not clear to me what an intrinsic nature might amount to. Whenever I attempt to imagine it, I always end up with something having some kind of structure and relations. Even conscious experience to me seems structural. People often argue that phenomenal properties, like the redness of red or the painfulness of pain, aren’t structural, even if they serve as elements in the overall structures of experience.

But to me this just bring us back to the point above, that it makes sense to be cautious in assuming there aren’t underlying structures and relations. The idea that there aren’t is an assumption of fundamental consciousness, which I argued against a few posts back. Interestingly, the notion that phenomenal properties are composed of proto-phenomenal properties seems to imply an underlying structure, albeit one separate from the normal structure accessible to science.

So my issue with ESR is I don’t know what it could mean by an intrinsic non-relational non-structural nature. Of course, my inability to conceive it doesn’t mean it isn’t reality (see quantum spin, for instance). But then without some kind of evidence for that reality, it leaves me with no reason to assume they exist. Leaving OSR as the only option. At least for now.

What do you think?