Wednesday, March 26, 2014

The wave function and the nature of reality

I am reading The Wave Function edited by Ney and Albert (Oxford U. Press, 2013).  It is mostly a debate between those who believe in an ontology involving particles and waves in 4 space and those who prefer quantum fields in (a much larger) configuration space (or vectors in a Hilbert space).  Of course one could also believe in BOTH (i.e. www.robert-w-jones, philosopher, quantum mechanical dualism).  And one need not think that all entities in an ontology are all equally "useful" or equally "valid" or equally "true."  (see my blogs of 17 Aug. 2013 and 12 Sept. 2013)  My Asa H artificial intelligence does not make such an assumption about the concepts it forms/evolves.  Ontologies used by other artificial intelligence projects (expert systems) typically contain entities of various degrees of usefulness, validity, truth. Process metaphysics might complicate matters even more.(Process Metaphysics, N. Rescher, SUNY Press, 1996)  Ontologies may have to change over time just as they do in Asa H and in humans.

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