# Understanding Quantum Mechanics
(Beyond Metaphysical Dogmatism and Naive Empiricism)

Christian de Ronde Fellow Researcher of the Consejo Nacional de
Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. E-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
###### Abstract

Quantum Mechanics (QM) has faced deep controversies and debates since its
origin when Werner Heisenberg proposed the first mathematical formalism
capable to operationally account for what had been recently discovered as the
new field of quantum phenomena. Today, even though we have reached a
standardized version of QM which is taught in Universities all around the
world, there is still no consensus regarding the conceptual reference of the
theory and, if or if not, it can refer to something beyond measurement
outcomes. In this work we will argue that the reason behind the impossibility
to reach a meaningful answer to this question is strictly related to the 20th
Century Bohrian-positivist re-foundation of physics which is responsible for
having introduced within the theory of quanta a harmful combination of
metaphysical dogmatism and naive empiricism. We will also argue that the
possibility of understanding QM is at plain sight, given we return to the
original framework of physics in which the meaning of understanding has always
been clear.
Key-words: Interpretation, explanation, representation, quantum theory.

Philosophy Institute Dr. A. Korn, Buenos Aires University - CONICET
Engineering Institute - National University Arturo Jauretche, Argentina.
Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil.
Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies, Brussels Free University,
Belgium.

Dogma: A fixed, especially religious,
belief or set of beliefs that people are
expected to accept without any doubts.111Definition taken from the Cambridge
Dictionary.

##  1 “Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics”

During his lecture at Cornell University in 1964, the U.S. physicist Richard
Feynman famously declared to a packed audience of young undergraduate
students: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum
mechanics.” In a kind of sarcastic tone Feynman continued his speech by
warning students about the dangers of actually trying to understand the theory
of quanta:

> “So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to
> understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just
> relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you
> will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a
> delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can
> possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will get ‘down
> the drain’, into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody
> knows how it can be like that.” [24, p. 129]

Feynman, the most famous U.S. physicist that has ever lived, was actually
advising young students eager to learn about nature and science not to engage
in any attempt to try to understand the most important theory of the 20th
Century. Instead, he recommended them to passively accept, without asking
further questions, the way that “nature behaves”. These words, spoken by
Feynman, can be only understood in the context of the post-war anti-realist
re-foundation of physics. As described by Olival Freire Jr.:

> “In the US, which after the Second World War became the central stage of
> research in physics in the West, the discussions about the interpretation of
> quantum mechanics had never been very popular. A common academic policy was
> to gather theoreticians and experimentalists in order to favour experiments
> and concrete applications, rather than abstract speculations (Schweber
> 1986). This practical attitude was further increased by the impressive
> development of physics between the 1930s and the 1950s, driven on the one
> hand by the need to apply the new quantum theory to a wide range of atomic
> and subatomic phenomena, and on the other hand by the pursuit of military
> goals. As pointed out by Kaiser (2002, pp. 154-156), ‘the pedagogical
> requirements entailed by the sudden exponential growth in graduate student
> numbers during the cold war reinforced a particular instrumentalist approach
> to physics’.” [28, pp. 77-78]

The orthodox understanding of physics became completely detached from
metaphysical and philosophical considerations and grounded instead in a down
to earth pragmatic approach. At the beginning of the 1960s, Karl Popper [46]
had already described the culmination of this radical transition between
realism and anti-realism: “Today the view of physical science founded by
Osiander, Cardinal Bellarmino, and Bishop Berkeley, has won the battle without
another shot being fired. Without any further debate over the philosophical
issue, without producing any new argument, the instrumentalist view (as I
shall call it) has become an accepted dogma. It may well now be called the
‘official view’ of physical theory since it is accepted by most of our leading
theorists of physics (although neither by Einstein nor by Schrödinger). And it
has become part of the current teaching of physics.” In the U.S., the
philosopher John Dewey developed what he called instrumentalism, a philosophy
that could be regarded as the natural extension of both pragmatism and
empirical positivism. While pragmatism sustained that the value of an idea is
determined by its usefulness; instrumentalism, by explicitly rejecting the
need of any metaphysical fundament, was ready to take a step further and claim
explicitly that the question regarding the reference of theories was simply
meaningless: Scientific theories do not make reference to an underlying
reality. Thus, there would exist no reason to derive a “model” that would
explain how and why “nature behaves” the way it does. Instead, theories should
be regarded as “tools” that allow us, humans, to compute measurement outcomes.
Period. As remarked by Popper, the Manhattan Project —in which Feynman also
took part— had also played an essential role in fundamenting the new doctrine:
“Instead of results due to the principle of complementarity other and more
practical results of atomic theory were obtained, some of them with a big
bang. No doubt physicists were perfectly right in interpreting these
successful applications as corroborating their theories. But strangely enough
they took them as confirming the instrumentalist creed.” Knowing or not,
Feynman was already part of a movement which after many centuries of countless
battles had finally defeated realism and imposed a new (anti-realist)
understanding of physics. Willingly or not, Feynman supported instrumentalism
in two different ways. First, going explicitly against philosophical and
metaphysical considerations. An exposition of his hostility against philosophy
can be found in the first volume of his famous Lectures on Physics [23, p.
8.2] where —making fun of philosophers— he wrote the following: “We can’t
define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of
thought that comes to philosophers who sit opposite each other, one saying to
the other: ‘you don’t know what you are talking about!’. The second one says:
‘what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by
know?’.” Secondly, Feynman expressed the idea that physical theories are just
models which are mainly created in order to “solve problems”. His down-to-
earth perspective about physics is clearly exposed in his autobiographical
book of anecdotes, Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman!, where there are many
examples of his practical approach to physics. In particular, it is
interesting to notice the way in which he described the situation of
physicists in the late 1930s, just before the war [25, p.53]: “At the time
nobody knew what a physicist even was, and there weren’t any positions in
industry for physicists. Engineers, OK; but physicists —nobody knew how to use
them. It’s interesting that very soon, after the war, it was the exact
opposite: people wanted physicists everywhere.” This idea, according to which
physicists provide solutions to problems through the construction of
mathematical models, was an essential part of the instrumentalist creed.

Since Feynman declared more than half a century ago that “nobody understands
quantum mechanics” there has been little progress about this matter. In fact,
the idea that it is simply impossible to understand QM has become completely
sedimented in physics. Today —many decades after Feynman’s lecture— all living
generations of physicists, all around the world, have been trained in an
instrumentalist fashion not to make nasty questions about the meaning of
quantum reality. Today, instrumentalism is stronger than ever and QM is taught
to students in Universities as a “recipe” that predicts how “nature behaves”
—even though nobody can explain how or why it does so. As very clearly
described by the U.S. philosopher of physics, and former physicist, Tim
Maudlin:

> “What is presented in the average physics textbook, what students learn and
> researchers use, turns out not to be a precise physical theory at all. It is
> rather a very effective and accurate recipe for making certain sorts of
> predictions. What physics students learn is how to use the recipe. For all
> practical purposes, when designing microchips and predicting the outcomes of
> experiments, this ability suffices. But if a physics student happens to be
> unsatisfied with just learning these mathematical techniques for making
> predictions and asks instead what the theory claims about the physical
> world, she or he is likely to be met with a canonical response: Shut up and
> calculate!” [38, pp. 2-3]

##  2 Understanding Within Physics: The One and the Many

History is essential to know and understand ourselves. The bounds with our
past are always kernel to understand our present and decide about our future.
The same happens with any community or traditions of thought. In this
particular respect, it is of outmost importance to recognize that the origin
of physics goes back to ancient Greece. As remarked by Jean-Pierre Vernant
[57, p. 400]: “Everything began in the early sixth century BCE, in the Greek
city of Miletos, on the coast of Asia Minor, where the Ionians had established
rich and prosperous colonies. Within fifty years, three men —Thales,
Anaximander, and Anaximenes— appeared in quick succession.” The fascinating
work of these first philosophers was described by Werner Heisenberg with great
mastery in his book Physics and Philosophy [31, p. 27]:

> “[T]he elaboration of the concepts of Matter, Being and Becoming […] started
> in the sixth century BC with Thales, the founder of the Milesian school, to
> whom Aristotle ascribes the statement: ‘Water is the material cause of all
> things.’ This statement, strange as it looks to us, expresses, as Nietzsche
> has pointed out, three fundamental ideas of philosophy. First, the question
> as to the material cause of all things; second, the demand that this
> question be answered in conformity with reason, without resort to myths or
> mysticism; third, the postulate that ultimately it must be possible to
> reduce everything to one principle. Thales’ statement was the first
> expression of the idea of a fundamental substance, of which all other things
> were transient forms. […] The idea of the fundamental substance was then
> carried further by Anaximander, who was a pupil of Thales and lived in the
> same town. Anaximander denied the fundamental substance to be water or any
> of the known substances. He taught that the primary substance was infinite,
> eternal and ageless and that it encompassed the world. This primary
> substance is transformed into the various substances with which we are
> familiar. Theophrastus quotes from Anaximander: ‘Into that from which things
> take their rise they pass away once more, as is ordained, for they make
> reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to
> the ordering of time.’ In this philosophy the antithesis of Being and
> Becoming plays the fundamental role. […] The third of the Milesian
> philosophers, Anaximenes, an associate of Anaximander, taught that air was
> the primary substance. ‘Just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so
> do breath and air encompass the whole world.’ Anaximenes introduced into the
> Milesian philosophy the idea that the process of condensation or rarefaction
> causes the change of the primary substance into the other substances. The
> condensation of water vapor into clouds was an obvious example, and of
> course the difference between water vapor and air was not known at that
> time.” [31, p27-29]

As Vernant continues to make explicitly clear, the revolution that begun with
the Milesians in Greece was one of enormous proportions. One that determined
the origin of science itself.

> “[Before the Milesians,] [e]ducation was based not on reading written texts
> but on listening to poetic songs transmitted from generation to generation.
> […] These songs contained everything a Greek had to know about man and his
> past —the exploits of heroes long past; about the gods, their families, and
> their genealogies, about the world, its form, and its origin. In this
> respect, the work of the Milesians is indeed a radical innovation. Neither
> singers nor poets nor storytellers, they express themselves in prose, in
> written texts whose aim is not to unravel a narrative thread in the long
> line of a tradition but to present an explanatory theory concerning certain
> natural phenomena and the organization of the cosmos. In this shift from the
> oral to the written, from the poetic song to prose, from narration to
> explanation, the change of register corresponds to an entirely new type of
> investigation —new both in terms of its object (nature, physis) and in terms
> of the entirely positive form of thought manifested in it.” [57, p. 402]

Physics talks about physis —also translated as ‘reality’ or ‘nature’. That is
why it was called ‘physics’. In general terms, one might consider the main
idea constituting and characterizing both physics and philosophy as a common
attempt to capture the famous interplay between the One and the Many. As
Heisenberg [31, p. 29] would reflect: “Looking back to the development of
Greek philosophy up to this point one realizes that it has been borne from the
beginning to this stage by the tension between the One and the Many. For our
senses the world consists of an infinite variety of things and events, colors
and sounds. But in order to understand it we have to introduce some kind of
order, and order means to recognize what is equal, it means some sort of
unity.” Indeed, physis, what the first philosophers considered the fundament
of the whole existence, was seen as possessing an internal order, what the
Greeks called —after Heraclitus— a logos. This order could be actually known
through the development of theories, grounding the praxis of physics in the
creation of unified, consistent and coherent schemes of thought that would
explain phenomena. It is mainly this possibility brought in by theories to
relate, on the one hand, to physis (the One), and on the other hand, to the
multiplicity of phenomena (the Many), which marks the characteristic feature
of scientific understanding. While ‘The One’ implies a unified theoretical
standpoint of analysis grounded in physis, ‘The Many’ relates to the
multiplicity of different phenomena and observations. In this way, theories
became the bridge between the whole of nature and experience. As a young Pauli
would explain to Heisenberg during a conversation in 1921:

> “knowledge cannot be gained by understanding an isolated phenomenon or a
> single group of phenomena, even if one discovers some order in them. It
> comes from the recognition that a wealth of experiential facts are
> interconnected and can therefore be reduced to a common principle. […]
> ‘Understanding’ probably means nothing more than having whatever ideas and
> concepts are needed to recognize that a great many different phenomena are
> part of coherent whole. Our mind becomes less puzzled once we have
> recognized that a special, apparently confused situation is merely a special
> case of something wider, that as a result it can be formulated much more
> simply. The reduction of a colorful variety of phenomena to a general and
> simple principle, or, as the Greeks would have put it, the reduction of the
> many to the one, is precisely what we mean by ‘understanding’. The ability
> to predict is often the consequence of understanding, of having the right
> concepts, but is not identical with ‘understanding’.” [33, p. 63]

This is the way in which physicists and philosophers engaged in the wildest
enterprise that humanity had ever before witnessed: the understanding of
reality. The search for consistent and coherent explanations united the Greeks
in a common adventure. As described by Schrödinger in his beautiful book,
Nature and the Greeks:

> “[T]he true subject [of the ancient Greeks] was essentially one, and that
> important conclusions reached about any part of it could, and as a rule
> would, bear on almost every other part. The idea of delimitation in water-
> tight compartments had not yet sprung up. […] To put it dramatically: one
> can imagine a scholar of the young School of Athens paying a holiday visit
> to Abdera (with due caution to keep it secret from his Master), and on being
> received by the wise, far-travelled and world-famous old gentleman
> Democritus, asking him questions on the atoms, on the shape of the earth, on
> moral conduct, God, and the immortality of the soul —without being
> repudiated on any of these points. Can you easily imagine such a motley
> conversation between a student and his teacher in our days?” [50, pp. 14-15]

Since everyone could —in principle— learn about a reality that was not ruled
by the wishes and desires of the Gods, physics —which was also concomitant
with the creation of Greek democracy— soon became the most powerful enemy of
the authority based knowledge that prevailed at the time. The many ‘chosen
figures’ like kings, mediums, priests and preachers, who had justified their
ruling in societies in a preferred access to ‘the divine’ had to give up —at
least— part of their power to scientific understanding. For the first time
mystical and religious doctrines had to confront a powerful rival. But this
division —as we already mentioned— was not only part of theoretical thinking,
it was also related to the creation by the Greeks of a new form of society:
democracy. As Moses Finley [50, pp. 13-14] explains: “It was the Greeks, after
all, who discovered not only democracy but also politics, the art of reaching
decisions by public discussion and then of obeying those decisions as a
necessary condition of civilized society.” This new political praxis, as
explained by Vernant, was also intrinsically related to the method of science
itself:

> “Taken out of the realm of the secret, the physicist’s theoria thus becomes
> a subject of debate; it is obliged to justify itself; it must account for
> its claims and lay itself open to critique and controversy. The rules of the
> political game —open discussion, contentious debate, the confrontation of
> opposite arguments— become the rules of the intellectual game. Alongside
> religious revelation, which, in the form of mystery, remains the privilege
> of a restricted circle of initiates, and alongside the mass of common
> beliefs that everyone shares without question, a new notion of truth takes
> shape and is affirmed: open truth, accessible to all, and justified by its
> own demonstrative force.” [57, p. 405]

Like democracy, both physics and philosophy flourished in the beautiful
islands of the Aegean sea turning its capital, Athens, into the center of the
Ancient world. This was until, a few centuries later, the first form of anti-
realism arrived to Athens.

During the 5th. Century B.C., a new group that would became to be known as
‘sophists’ would produced the first assault against realism, fighting the idea
that theoretical knowledge about physis (or reality) was actually possible.
Going back to its original meaning of logos —which philosophers had related to
physis— as discourse, sophists realized that its knowledge had an important
pragmatic application which could be sold in the streets of Athens, namely, to
win debates in the Agora. Grounding their criticisms in a skeptic position
sophists produced a radical attempt to change the perspective, from physis to
the subject, and from theory to empirical perception. Protagoras argued —in a
phrase that would become famously used by positivists of the Vienna Circle—
that: “Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they
are, of the things that are not, that they are not” [DK 80B1]. According to
this exposition, there is no such thing as ‘a reality of things’ —or at least,
we are not able to grasp it—, we can only refer to our own perception. Things
do not have a reality independent of subjects; and even in the case such a
reality would exist we would not be able to know it. We, individuals, have
only a relative access to things which is dependent on our own personal
experience. From this sceptic standpoint, sophists criticized the physical
idea of theoretical knowledge: realists —namely, physicists and philosophers—
are too naive, they believe they can access reality, but even if such thing
would exist no one would be able to do so.222In this respect, it is of outmost
importance to point out that realists (i.e., physicists and philosophers)
never claimed to describe reality as it is. In fact, already the first
philosophers showed a clear recognition of the problem implied by such a niave
idea. There is an affinity between the logos of men and the logos of physis.
However, it is a difficult task to expose the true logos since, as remarked by
Heraclitus, “physis loves to hide.” [f. 123 DK]. Doing so requires hard work
and sensibility, but —following Heraclitus— the latter can be revealed in the
former. In a particular logos one can “listen” something that exceeds it, that
is not only that personal discourse but the logos of physis: “Listening not to
me but to the logos it is wise to agree that all things are one” [f. 50 DK].
We are thus able to represent physis, to exhibit its logos, but this
representation should be not confused mirroring reality.

It was necessary the strength of both Plato and Aristotle to control the
sophist attack and return to the realist path through the development of what
would be called later on ‘metaphysics’, namely, the systematic construction of
a conceptual architectonic derived from first principles. First Plato, and
then Aristotle, would produce the first systems of concepts capable to account
for the One and the Many, giving us the possibility to understand what is the
same within the repetition of difference. In Sophist Plato goes on to re-
define his Theory of Ideas in terms of being as dunamis “And I hold that the
definition of being is simply dunamis” [Sophist, 247e]. The fundamental
reality of everything is, for Plato, dunamis —also translated as potency
(especially when it is Aristotle who uses it), possibility, capacity or power.
Néstor Cordero, in a commentary to the Sophist [9, p. 144], describes it as
“the capacity of an entity, any entity, for relating with another (either
affecting or being affected) and for that reason a few pages later Plato
replaces ‘acting’ and ‘suffering’ by a single verb, ‘communicating’, and he
talks about dunamis koinonas, ‘the possibility or potentiality of
communication’ [Op. cit., 251e]. And since being is communicating, something
that doesn’t communicate doesn’t exist. (…) Plato assimilates this
potentiality to the fact of being and he gives precisions about it: it is the
possibility of communicating, that is, (…) to produce reciprocal bonds”. This
being in everything that is, it is dunamis of affecting and being affected, of
interacting, it is an inherent tendency towards relation, the participation of
a universal relationability (see for a detailed discussion [16]). Aristotle
will also develop a metaphysical scheme in order to describe reality. This
representation will be multiple right from the start. As he will argue: “Being
is said in many ways”. Indeed, it is said as potential, but it is also said as
actual. While the potential realm of existence will be conceived by Aristotle
—following his own interpretation of the philosophical scheme of Heraclitus—
as an indetermined and contradictory realm of existence, he will characterize
the actual realm in terms of the metaphysical principles of existence, non-
contradiction and identity. In this way Aristotle will provide the very first
definition of the concept of entity. According to him an entity is always
partly potential and partly actual, and it is through its actualization —the
process going from the potential to the actual— that the problem of motion and
knowledge finds a common solution. It will be this same notion of entity,
detached from its potential existence, which will survive in modern times as
characterizing a physical objects.

Since the ancient Greeks and for almost two millennia, in the Western world
the works of Plato and Aristotle will be examined, discussed and questioned
—many times under the mask of religious debates. In the context of physics
there will be also a continuous increase in the conceptual and mathematical
levels of abstraction. And yet, the important breakthrough will have to wait
until the 16th and 17th centuries. It is with the creation of infinitesimal
calculus —developed by Newton and Leibniz— that mathematics will be finally
able to capture, through a rigorous definition of the continuum, two of the
main concepts discussed by the Greeks, namely, space and time. Even more
importantly, the Greek relationship between the One and the Many will also
find a rigorous mathematical representation. All these ideas will find a
conclusive exposition in a new metaphysical architectonic due to physicist and
philosopher Immanuel Kant.

##  3 The 17th Century Modern Re-Foundation of Physics

Science is not the accomplishment of single individuals, it is a result of
team work. Individuals can develop scientific knowledge only with the aid of
their communities. It is only in open and prosperous economic societies that
individuals can follow the path of scientific research. It is certainly true
that it was during the 17th Century that the first closed physical theory was
synthesized by Isaac Newton. However, this marvelous creation cannot be
regarded as the accomplishment of a single man. Classical mechanics was in
fact the result of the work of many different individuals, through many
centuries, most of them supported by their communities, all of them following
the path laid down by the Greek scientific tradition. It was of course the
Greeks who had created the basic structure of theories, and it was also them
who had linked physical concepts with mathematical knowledge. Physical
theories were both formal and conceptual right from the start. The first
philosophers considered the elements constituting physis in relation to
geometrical figures and it is widely acknowledged that the mathematical
investigations of Pythagoras of Samos played an essential role in Plato’s
metaphysics. Euclides’ famous book, Elements, produced a geometrical
representation of 3-dimensional space that survived untouched until the end of
the 19th Century and Aristotle’s metaphysics imposed the creation of classical
logic, a scheme which survived up to our days. While from a mathematical
perspective, Zeno’s famous analysis of motion and the continuum can be
regarded as the starting point of the development of infinitesimal calculus by
Newton and Leibniz, the picture of the Universe developed by classical
mechanics was the conclusion of the path laid down by the atomist metaphysics
created by Leucippus and Democritus.333This doctrine, created by Democritus
and Leucipus, argued that the elements constituting physis where being and
not-being, which in term they interpreted as ‘the full’ and ‘the void’.
Contrary to Parmenides, they conceived the existence of a non-being which is
the contrary of being. In their minds, there is void within nature. Being, or
the full, consisted to them of indivisible bodies, indivisible fragments of
mass with a minimum size. Simple bodies. They used an adjective to describe
these bodies: átomos, which means, literally, “not divided”. That adjective
became an -ism and this school was called “atomism”. But all these
developments did not end with the Greeks. Medieval philosophers like Augustine
of Hippo and Thomas of Aquinas made monumental breakthroughs in the philosophy
of time. Nicholas of Cusa went on to develop Aristotelian metaphysics and the
potential realm of existence. As remarkably exposed in Alistair Crombie’s
book, Augustine to Galileo [10, p. xi], there obviously exists an “essential
continuity of the Western scientific tradition from Greek times to the 17th
century and, therefore, to our own day.”

The specific revolution that took place with classical mechanics, which was
also a revolution regarding the notions of space and time, had an enormous
impact in the understanding of science. And it is only by understanding this
essential influence that we can begin to grasp the deep re-foundation that
took place in both physics and philosophy during the 17th Century. In the 2nd
Century A.D., Claudius Ptolemaeus was able to construct a mathematical model
which allowed to predict the movement of the planets with fantastic accuracy.
Following Aristotle, the Earth was placed in the center of the Universe and
the sun together with the rest of the planets were pictured as orbiting it,
following the perfection of circles. It was not until the 16th Century that
Nicolas Copernicus was able to reframe this model by placing the sun —instead
of the Earth— in the center of the Universe. But it was only with Newton that
the final synthesis was reached through a unified, consistent and coherent
theoretical representation of nature. Since Aristotle, space had been
understood as a place, a topos, and time as characterizing the way in which
things changed. Following this understanding, a quite obvious distinction was
drawn between the stars in the sky which, when observed, looked as fixed
static entities, and what happened in the Earth, a place were motion and
change ruled everything. After two millennia in the development of Western
thought, classical mechanics was finally able to unite both realms. But in
order to do so, space and time would become the “containers” of the physical
world itself (see [37]) leaving no space for the potential realm. While for
Aristotle “being is said in many ways”, potential and actual; for Newton the
physical world would become restricted to an actualist space-time
representation. By restricting physis to this specific space-time
representation, there was now place for the consideration of new realms of
existence which essentially differed from (physical) reality.

It was in the first half of the 17th Century that René Descartes would
complete the division between matter and mind, between soul and body. As
remarked by Heisenberg, this essential separation between res cogitans and res
extensa, would also have deep consequences for the division between physics
and philosophy:

> “The great development of natural science since the sixteenth and
> seventeenth centuries was preceded and accompanied by a development of
> philosophical ideas which were closely connected with the fundamental
> concepts of science. It may therefore be instructive to comment on these
> ideas from the position that has finally been reached by modern science in
> our time.
>
> The first great philosopher of this new period of science was René Descartes
> who lived in the first half of the seventeenth century. Those of his ideas
> that are most important for the development of scientific thinking are
> contained in his Discourse on Method. On the basis of doubt and logical
> reasoning he tries to find a completely new and as he thinks solid ground
> for a philosophical system. He does not accept revelation as such a basis
> nor does he want to accept uncritically what is perceived by the senses. So
> he starts with his method of doubt. He casts his doubt upon that which our
> senses tell us about the results of our reasoning and finally he arrives at
> his famous sentence: ‘cogito ergo sum.’ I cannot doubt my existence since it
> follows from the fact that I am thinking. After establishing the existence
> of the I in this way he proceeds to prove the existence of God essentially
> on the lines of scholastic philosophy. Finally the existence of the world
> follows from the fact that God had given me a strong inclination to believe
> in the existence of the world, and it is simply impossible that God should
> have deceived me.
>
> This basis of the philosophy of Descartes is radically different from that
> of the ancient Greek philosophers. Here the starting point is not a
> fundamental principle or substance, but the attempt of a fundamental
> knowledge. And Descartes realizes that what we know about our mind is more
> certain than what we know about the outer world. But already his starting
> point with the ‘triangle’ God-World-I simplifies in a dangerous way the
> basis for further reasoning. The division between matter and mind or between
> soul and body, which had started in Plato’s philosophy, is now complete. God
> is separated both from the I and from the world. God in fact is raised so
> high above the world and men that He finally appears in the philosophy of
> Descartes only as a common point of reference that establishes the relation
> between the I and the world.
>
> While ancient Greek philosophy had tried to find order in the infinite
> variety of things and events by looking for some fundamental unifying
> principle, Descartes tries to establish the order through some fundamental
> division. But the three parts which result from the division lose some of
> their essence when any one part is considered as separated from the other
> two parts. If one uses the fundamental concepts of Descartes at all, it is
> essential that God is in the world and in the I and it is also essential
> that the I cannot be really separated from the world. Of course Descartes
> knew the undisputable necessity of the connection, but philosophy and
> natural science in the following period developed on the basis of the
> polarity between the ‘res cogitans’ and the ‘res extensa,’ and natural
> science concentrated its interest on the ‘res extensa.’ The influence of the
> Cartesian division on human thought in the following centuries can hardly be
> overestimated, but it is just this division which we have to criticize later
> from the development of physics in our time.” [31, pp. 41-42]

This separation allowed not only to restrict science to the exclusive
reference of the (actual) res extensa, it also allowed the introduction of the
subject, the I, as a new realm characterized by the (potential) res cogitans.
It was in Newton’s physics that the potential mode of existence was completely
erased from physical representation, producing an essential step in
sedimenting this new duality between a material (physical) world and a
conscious (human) world. In short, classical mechanics described nature as an
Actual State of Affairs; i.e., a set of systems constituted by definite valued
properties.444As discussed in detail in [17], an Actual State of Affairs (ASA)
can be defined as a system constituted by a set of actual (definite valued)
properties. Formally, a map from the set of properties to the $\\{0,1\\}$.
Specifically, an ASA is a function $\Psi:\mathcal{G}\rightarrow\\{0,1\\}$ from
the set of properties to $\\{0,1\\}$ satisfying certain compatibility
conditions. Where the property $P\in\mathcal{G}$ is _true_ if $\Psi(P)=1$ and
$P\in\mathcal{G}$ is _false_ if $\Psi(P)=0$. The evolution of an ASA is
formalized by the fact that the morphism $f$ satisfies $\Phi f=\Psi$. This new
picture of (physical) reality would be famously portrayed by the French
mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace:

> “Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces
> by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who
> compose it —an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to
> analysis— it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest
> bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would
> be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes. The
> human mind offers, in the perfection which it has been able to give to
> astronomy, a feeble idea of this intelligence. Its discoveries in mechanics
> and geometry, added to that of universal gravity, have enabled it to
> comprehend in the same analytical expressions the past and future states of
> the system of the world.” [41, p. 4]

Going back to the metaphysical premises of Greek atomism, Newton conceived the
universe as constituted by many systems formed by smaller bodies (i.e., atoms)
interacting within space and time. But now, through infinitesimal calculus and
its rigorous mathematical definition of the notion of continuum it was
possible to provide a new understanding of both space and time as the
“containers” of all systems constituting the actual “material” world. But this
was not the only unification that classical mechanics made possible. Far more
important —at least, from the perspective of the Greek tradition— was the
abstract unification between different perspectives or viewpoints. For the
Greeks, the problem of motion, or how to characterize what is the same within
change and becoming, was one of the kernel questions that attracted the
interest of everyone searching for philosophical truth. If, as Heraclitus
would argue, everything is in constant change and motion, if everything is
always different to itself, how can we grasp any knowledge about anything? It
was Aristotle who was able to create through the notion of entity as
constituted by the principles of existence, non-contradiction and identity, a
formal-conceptual representation in which knowledge about ‘things’ would
became possible. Aristotle’s definition imposed a great level of metaphysical
(and logical) abstraction, it talked about the existence, the non-
contradiction and the identity of systems through their own change and motion.
Now, in the 17th Century, through a precise definition of the notion of
reference frame, it was also possible to produce a rigorous account of
invariance. This implied the consistent unification of the One, the same state
of affairs, as mathematically represented by the Many, the different reference
frames.

Invariance is an essential notion of physics allowing the production of a
global representation of a state of affairs through the consistent translation
between the different reference frames (or viewpoints) from which it is
actually described. In this respect, it is not only the invariant static
values of properties (e.g., mass, charge, etc.) but also of the invariant
variations of dynamical properties (e.g., position, momentum, etc.) possessing
distinct values in different reference frames which require a consistent
translation between the multiple descriptions. Newtonian mechanics was able to
account for such a consistency through a rigorous definition of the already
existent —so called— Galilean transformations.555In the case of special
relativity the translation between different reference frames is provided by
the Lorentz transformations. These transformations made possible the invariant
type representation of the state of systems in such a way that all reference-
frame dependent representations could be regarded as different and yet
referring to the the same state of the object. In turn, this kernel idea would
be also developed in conceptual terms. After David Hume’s critical assessment
of the notion of causality science was deathly wounded. Hume had recognized
that empirical observations were incapable to ground a secure path for
scientific knowledge. Causality was not something to be found within
experience, it was something that we humans imposed to phenomena, the result
of mental habit and custom. Thus, physical knowledge could be seen as derived
from our ungrounded faith in induction and causation. Recognizing this
relative aspect of representation, the physicist and philosopher Immanuel Kant
would develop the notion of objectivity in order to restore —at least partly—
the relevance of physical knowledge. Objectivity would secure scientific
knowledge through the acceptance of a single common representation shared by
all humans beings. This meant the acceptance of a transcendental subject
shaped by a specific set of categories (grounded in Aristotelian metaphysics)
and forms of intuition (Newton’s space and time). But as a consequence,
scientific knowledge, which since the Greeks had been always founded on the
reference to physis (i.e., to reality), was now detached from reality and
limited to the subject’s capacity to account for his own experience about
objects. Reality was re-framed as a the Thing-in-Itself (in German, das Ding
an sich), something which physics was now incapable to grasp, and “physical
reality” restricted to the subject’s capacity to account for objective
phenomena. According to Kant, the recognition that we humans are finite,
should restrict the physicist to the acquisition of objective knowledge,
namely, the knowledge coming from objects of experience. Kant had created a
completely new architectonic for scientific knowledge in which reality could
not be reached. This separation between knowledge and reality was the final
conclusion of the Modern re-foundation of physics. A result that would
certainly determine the path of Western thought in the centuries to come.

##  4 The 20th Century Postmodern Re-Foundation of Physics

Since the Enlightenment, the realist understanding of science would remain in
constant siege. In Kant’s co-relational metaphysics, reality was finally
detached from scientific knowledge and replaced by the subject’s capacity to
account for objects of experience. Realism had been deathly wounded. Kant had
argued that the sum of all objects, the empirical world, is a complex of
appearances whose existence and connection occur only in our representations.
Reality, renamed as a beast, das Ding an sich (the Thing-in-Itself), had
survived but only as a monstrous paradoxical creature hiding beyond empirical
sensibility, impossible to be known. As Kant would write in the Prolegomena to
Any Future Metaphysics: “And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense
as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing-in-
itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its
appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown
something.” Kant had introduced the un-knowable within his own metaphysical
system. Arthur Schopenahuer would make clear that the category of causality
could not be applied within Kant’s system to noumenic reality, which remained
disconnected from categorical representation and (objective) experience.
Friedrich Jacobi [1787: 223] famous remark would expose the problem in all its
depth: “Without the presupposition [of the ‘thing in itself,’] I was unable to
enter into [Kant’s] system, but with it I was unable to stay within it.” Kant
had introduced an essential separation between reality and theoretical
representation. But it was still too soon for anti-realism to claim victory.
Anti-realists would still have to wait two more centuries in order to rise as
the supreme indisputable power. It is in our postmodern age, during the 20th
Century, that realism would be finally defeated. And the main field of this
final battle —between realists and anti-realists— would be no other than a new
physical theory called quantum mechanics.

The story of the second re-foundation of physics begins with the critical
attack by the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach to the
inconclusive results of the 17th Century Modern re-foundation of physics. As
described by Bas van Fraassen [56, p. 2]: “Kant exposed the illusions of
Reason, the way in which reason overreaches itself in traditional metaphysics,
and the limits of what can be achieved within the limits of reason alone. But
on one hand Kant’s arguments were not faultless, and on the other there was a
positive part to Kant’s project that, in his successors, engaged a new
metaphysics. About a century later the widespread rebellions against the
Idealist tradition expressed the complaint that Reason had returned to its
cherished Illusions, if perhaps in different ways.” It was by the end of the
19th Century that Mach would be able to produce the most radical
deconstruction of the notions which grounded both Newton’s physics and Kant’s
metaphysics. Through a return to empiricism, Mach developed a new positive
scheme for physics which —grounding itself on observability alone— would
attempt to completely erase any metaphysical remainings from the past. This
meant the abandonment not only of Newtonian absolute space and time —which
acted as a priori notions in the Kantian architectonic— but also the
constitutive elements of the picture itself, namely, atoms. Mach was breaking
the walls of the Modern spatiotemporal cage in which physics had been confined
since Newton. But for him, the destruction of this jail implied also the
destruction of metaphysics itself. Concomitant with Mach’s deconstruction of
classical physics, Friedrich Nietzsche would do the same for philosophy. Their
common enemy had the same name: metaphysics. The success of both Mach and
Nietzsche would leave nothingness as the new postmodern foundation. As a
consequence, the 20th Century would be born in the turmoil of a deep crisis.
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, the godson of Ernst Mach, would reflect about his own
time in the following manner:

> “In many respects the present appears as a time of insecurity of the
> fundamentals, of shaky foundations. Even the development of the exact
> sciences has not entirely escaped this mood of insecurity, as appears, for
> instance, in the phrases ‘crisis in the foundations’ in mathematics, or
> ‘revolution in our picture of the universe’ in physics. Indeed many concepts
> apparently derived directly from intuitive forms borrowed from sense-
> perceptions, formerly taken as matters of course or trivial or directly
> obvious, appear to the modern physicist to be of limited applicability. The
> modern physicist regards with scepticism philosophical systems which, while
> imagining that they have definitively recognised the a priori conditions of
> human understanding itself, have in fact succeeded only in setting up the a
> priori conditions of the systems of mathematics and the exact sciences of a
> particular epoch.” [42, p. 95]

The crisis produced by Mach’s subversive deconstruction of classical mechanics
had broken physics from its space-time chains. And it was certainly this
liberation which would become essential for the development of both QM and
relativity theory. While Albert Einstein applied Mach’s positivist ideas in
order to critically address the definition of simultaneity in classical
mechanics, both Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg were able to advance new non-
classical mathematical postulates and formalisms which could explicitly escape
—thanks to Mach’s work— the classical space-time representation of physics. In
this context, a reloaded form of positivism, congregated in what was called
the Vienna Circle, attempted to reshape Mach’s main ideas and take them even
further into the new century. The standpoint of their debates and discussions
was of course grounded on Mach’s own scheme:

  1. I.

Naive Empiricism: Observation is a self evident given of “common sense”
(macroscopic) experience.

  2. II.

Physics as an Economy of Experience: Physical theories are algorithmic
mathematical formalisms which, through the addition of rules, produce
predictions about observable measurement outcomes.

  3. III.

Anti-Metaphysics: Metaphysics, understood as an interpretation (or narrative)
about unobservable entities, is not essentially required within empirically
adequate theories.

  4. IV.

Anti-Foundationalism: Physics does not talk about an “external reality” beyond
empirical observation.

The new quantum postulate proposed by Max Planck together with Einstein’s
special relativity gave a new force to the positivist agenda. After all, both
theories had been developed following Mach’s influential ideas. The Danish
physicist Niels Bohr, maybe the most influential figure of the quantum
revolution, would also play an essential role in this drama. Positivists
together with Bohr would embrace the new postmodern Zeitgeist in which the
possibility of a foundation for knowledge already seemed to everyone like a
myth of the past. As Schrödinger world remark: “The modern development
[relativity and quantum mechanics], which those who have brought it to the
fore are yet far from really understanding, has intruded into the relatively
simple scheme of physics which towards the end of the nineteenth century
looked fairly stabilized. This intrusion has, in a way, overthrown what had
been built on the foundations laid in the seventeenth century, mainly by
Galileo, Huygens and Newton. The very foundations were shaken”. In this
context, the construction of the new postmodern scheme implied the essential
addition of some extra points —that went explicitly beyond Mach’s scheme—
which both logical positivists and Bohr would carefully develop:

  1. V.

Intersubjective Justification: The communication between the members of a
scientific community allows to reach a consensus regarding the “objective”
findings of a theory.

  2. VI.

Atomist Metaphysics: Metaphysical atomism is presupposed in anti-realist
narratives as the microscopic (metaphysical) justification of our “common
sense” macroscopic (empirical) experience.

  3. VII.

Foundational Fictionalism: Physics talks about an “external reality” beyond
observability through the addition of interpretations (or narratives) to
empirically adequate theories.

The attentive reader might have already recognized the various inconsistencies
present within this scheme when considered as a whole. For example, III and VI
are obviously in contradiction. While III refuses to talk about reality beyond
observability, V makes reference to an atomist metaphysical picture in which
unobservable particles are responsible not only for our ‘manifest image of the
world’ but also for the ‘clicks’ we observe in detectors. The same happens
with IV and VII. While IV argues against the possibility of a realistic
foundation for science, VII accepts reality as an essential reference for
scientific discourse. These inconsistent aspects might be regarded at first
sight as a flagrant weaknesses of the whole anti-realist program. However,
strange as it might seem, exactly the opposite is true. Inconsistency is, in
fact, the major strength of this postmodern scheme for it has allowed not only
to include realism within a more general anti-realist program, but also to
produce an incredibly efficient form of immunity against critical (realist)
thought. Following Michael Corleone’s strategy: “Keep your friends close, and
your enemies closer”, inconsistency has allowed to retain both realism and
metaphysics within an explicitly anti-realist and anti-metaphysical system
(see [15]). Both realists and metaphysicians have been forced to enter the
gates of the new anti-realist architectonic completely unarmed. They have been
welcomed to re-produce tasks which not only reinforce degraded, weak forms of
realism, but also —more importantly— keep them away from any attempt of
revolt. While metaphysicians have been confined to small prison cells and
reassigned the role of ‘creating interpretations’, realists who fanatically
believe the newly created stories are left free to wonder in a maze with no
exit, preaching these same naive fictions to the few fellow companions willing
to listen. Anti-realists have even encouraged their captives to create more
and more of these fantastic stories. Not only they enjoy watching the battles
between realists, they are also certain that the power of their enemies is
weakened with every new interpretation added to the maze. In a methodological
level, inconsistency makes the whole program immune to scientific criticism
for any critical remark can be easily lost when entering this labyrinth of
contradicting paradoxical statements and undefined notions. Through the
subversion of the main concepts of the realist scheme (i.e., reality,
metaphysics, truth, objectivity, phenomena, measurement, etc.) any consistent
attack is easily translated into a series of inconsistent statements, and
then, immediately reintroduced as part of the anti-realist system itself.
While at the theoretical level, inconsistency has become to be considered even
as a value for science (see also [3, 40, 59]), in the practical individual
level of research, inconsistency is accepted as a reasonable way of behaving
for any member of the philosophical or scientific community. Everyone is free
to argue in favor of A, and immediately after change its mind in favor of not
A. While perspectivalism is encouraged, systematic theoretical consistency is
regarded either as a kind of “weakness” or as a “totalitarian” attempt coming
from fanatic realists who believe in a single truth. But while perspectivalism
allows individuals to change continuously; the problems debated and their
underlying presuppositions remain completely static. In this way, while heated
debates take place in the safe un-grounded realm of “beliefs”,
“interpretations” and “narratives”, the naive basis of “empirical science”
remains unquestioned.

The elasticity of postmodern philosophers and scientists allows them to
continuously escape any solid statement. Apart from observations there is no
true foundation to be found anywhere. As Popper puts it:

> “The empirical basis of objective science has thus nothing ‘absolute’ about
> it. Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its
> theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on
> piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to
> any natural or ‘given’ base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is
> not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are
> satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least
> for the time being.” [47, p. 111]

Moving freely in the swamp, anyone can choose the stance of their preference,
change from one week to the next, or even deny that what was said was actually
relevant. There is no system to be found. In this context, the destruction of
theoretical unity has been accomplished through the replacement of theories by
not necessarily consistent sets of fragmented models. As Nancy Cartwright [8,
p. 11] explains: “In physics it is usual to give alternative theoretical
treatments of the same phenomenon. We construct different models for different
purposes, with different equations to describe them. Which is the right model,
which the ‘true’ set of equations? The question is a mistake. One model brings
out some aspects of the phenomenon; a different model brings out others. Some
equations give a rougher estimate for a quantity of interest, but are easier
to solve. No single model serves all purposes best.” The model-theoretic
approach has provided the required logical framework in order to sustain the
idea that theories are just “sets of models” [12]. An even more explicit
erasure of the Greek notion of theory is also part of the contemporary
research [60].

As a result, physicists do not respect philosophers and philosophers do not
take seriously the philosophical capacity of scientists. In this fragmented
map the realist has no enemy, there are no referents to be found but many
individual researches claiming opposite things. De-centralized, anti-realism
appears as a ghost of many fragmented contradictory faces which can never be
captured in a single standpoint. In the era of post-truth, where there are no
secure foundations left to make any true statement, the anti-realist status
quo is safer than ever. From a pedestal created by themselves, as
“specialists” of a particular sub-sub-discipline that no one can question, the
philosopher and the scientist explain to the layman: “Those are my principles,
and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

##  5 Re-Writing the History of Western Science

In April 1966 Richard Feynman delivered an address to the National Teachers’
Association in which he gave his fellow teachers lessons on how to teach their
students to think like a scientist. Feynman used this opportunity to recall in
a quite poetic manner the way in which his father —a uniform salesman— taught
him the meaning of science by showing him how to derive conclusions from
observations:

> “[…] the result of observation, even if I were unable to come to the
> ultimate conclusion, was a wonderful piece of gold, with a marvelous result.
> It was something marvelous. […] I think it is very important —at least it
> was to me— that if you are going to teach people to make observations, you
> should show that something wonderful can come from them. I learned then what
> science was about. It was patience. If you looked, and you watched, and you
> paid attention, you got a great reward from it (although possibly not every
> time). As a result, when I became a more mature man, I would painstakingly,
> hour after hour, for years, work on problems —some times many years,
> sometimes shorter times— many of them failing, lots of stuff going into the
> wastebasket; but every once in a while there was the gold of a new
> understanding that I had learned to expect when I was a kid, the result of
> observation. For I did not learn that observation was not worth while.” [26,
> p. 182]

Today, the idea that theories are derived from observations is one of the very
few generalized consensus that has been reached between scientists and
philosophers. The widespread naturalization of this idea is certainly the most
important accomplishment of the anti-realist re-foundation of science. An
achievement which exposes the indisputable triumph of anti-realists over
realists. The famous U.S. philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin, explains the
same idea in a more sophisticated fashion:

> “Any empirical science has to start from what the philosopher Wilfred
> Sellars called ‘the manifest image of the world’; that is, the world as it
> presents to me when I open my eyes. And of course we know that some of those
> appearances can be deceptive or misleading —you know, a straw in water looks
> bent but it really isn’t and so on …— but you have nowhere else to begin but
> with the manifest image, and then you try and produce theories that would
> explain it or account for it.” [39]

The uncritical acceptance of this naive empirical standpoint was introduced
within science through a series of procedures involving not only the
replacement of its reference, the carefully subversion of its main concepts
but also the displacement of its historical origin. History is written by the
victors, and the history of western science is no exception. By re-placing the
origin of science from the 6th Century B.C. to the 16th Century A.D., anti-
realists have been able not only to cut the ties of realists with their
history, but also —more importantly— to re-write the history of science in
their own terms as the history of “empirical” or “modern” science. Paying
attention to these facts, one can then begin to understand the reason for the
anti-realist aversion to the ancient Greek tradition as rooted in its
undeniable reference to physis —or, as we translate it today, reality. But
also, maybe more importantly, the history of ancient Greek physics and
philosophy tells us a story of triumphs of realists over sophists. Taking this
into consideration, it is not strange to discover within our contemporary
post-modern Zietgeist the constant attempt of anti-realists to try to forget a
past of defeats. In this respect, it is interesting to notice, as Schrödinger
would emphasize, that it was the father of the second anti-realist re-
foundation of physics, Ernst Mach himself, who begun this offensive against
the realist Greek tradition:

> “Ernst Mach, the physicist colleague of Gomperz at the University of Vienna,
> and eminent historian (!) of physics, had, a few decades earlier, spoken of
> the ‘scarce and poor remnants of ancient science’. He continues thus: ‘Our
> culture has gradually acquired full independence, soaring far above that of
> antiquity. It is following an entirely new trend. It centres around
> mathematical and scientific enlightenment. The traces of ancient ideas,
> still lingering in philosophy, jurisprudence, art and science constitute
> impediments rather than assets, and will come to be untenable in the long
> run in face of the development of our own views’. […] In other passages of
> the same paper he recommends quaint method of getting beyond antiquity,
> namely, to neglect and ignore it. In this, for all I know, he had little
> success —fortunately, for the mistakes of the great, promulgated along with
> the discoveries of their genius, are apt to work serious havoc.” [50, pp.
> 20-21]

As we all know, Schrödinger derived his conclusion far too soon.

During the second half of the 20th century, specially with the rise of
instrumentalism Mach’s narrative would expand itself in order to become the
orthodox view of science. An essential strategy for imposing this narrative
was to attack the Middle Ages, presenting it as a dark irrational period in
which religion and fantasy ruled the minds of disturbed people. Supplemented
by a strong idea of progress and evolution the criticism to the Middle Ages
was also —implicitly— pointing to everything that came before this period
—including the Greeks. As Feynman [26, pp. 205-206] himself would explain:
“During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a
piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. (Another crazy idea o f the
Middle Ages is these hats we have on today-which is too loose in my case.)
Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas-which was to try one to
see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it. This method became
organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are
now in the scientific age.” In this new empiricist narrative, special emphasis
has been given to the figures of Newton and Galileo as the heroes who finally
ended the dark ruling of Aristotelian metaphysics. By simply making no
reference to neo-Platonism its undeniable historical influence was simply
erased. Just to give one example between many, the world famous English
physicist Stephen Hawking writes in his best-seller, A Brief History of Time:

> “Our present ideas about the motion of bodies date back to Galileo and
> Newton. Before them people believed Aristotle, who said that the natural
> state of a body was to be at rest and that it moved only if driven by a
> force or impulse. It followed that a heavy body should fall faster than a
> light one, because it would have a greater pull toward the earth. The
> Aristotelian tradition also held that one could work out all the laws that
> govern the universe by pure thought: it was not necessary to check by
> observation. So no one until Galileo bothered to see whether bodies of
> different weight did in fact fall at different speeds.” [29, p. 15]

The effect of this passage is twofold. Firstly, it places the beginning of our
own scientific tradition in the 16th Century A.D. erasing the importance of
the Ancient Greeks. Secondly, it presents Aristotle as someone who was not
capable of testing experimentally his own —quite naive— theory of motion,
exposing in this way the weakness of a supposedly more primitive tradition.
This dismissive reference to the Greeks is completely widespread in the
present scientific and philosophical literature where the ancient philosophers
are depicted as presenting very primitive ideas, stressing in this way our own
contemporary grandiosity. The U.S. physicist Michio Kaku provides an even more
explicit presentation of the orthodox narrative:

> “The history of physics is the history of modern civilization. Before Isaac
> Newton, before Galileo, we were shrouded with the mysteries of superstition.
> People believed in all sorts of different kinds of spirits and demons. What
> made the planets move? Why do things interact with other things? It was a
> mystery. So back in the Middle Ages, for example, people read the works of
> Aristotle. And Aristotle asked the question, ‘Why do objects move toward the
> earth? And that’s because,’ he said, ‘objects yearn, yearn to be united with
> the earth. And why do objects slow down when you put them in motion? Objects
> in motion slow down because they get tired.’ These are the works of
> Aristotle, which held sway for almost 2000 years until the beginning of
> modern physics with Galileo and Isaac Newton.” [35]

In the same line, Steven Weinberg [61] remarks in an interview from 1988 the
essential discontinuity between the Moderns and everything that came before:
“I think that science has changed the way that we think about ourselves, about
our role in the universe. I think there’s lots of historical evidence for the
tremendous change in Western society that is caused by the scientific
revolution of the 16th and 17th century. You know, we stopped burning witches.
I think the changes are incalculable.” Almost three decades later, in To
Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, he also points out that
“neither the Milesians nor any of the other Greek students of nature were
reasoning in anything like the way scientists reason today.” In the Preface of
his book Weinberg remarks:

> “Before history there was science, of a sort. At any moment nature presents
> us with a variety of puzzling phenomena: fire, thunderstorms, plagues,
> planetary motion, light, tides, and so on. Observation of the world led to
> useful generalizations: fires are hot; thunder presages rain; tides are
> highest when the Moon is full or new, and so on. These became part of the
> common sense of mankind. But here and there, some people wanted more than
> just a collection of facts. They wanted to explain the world. It was not
> easy. It is not only that our predecessors [before Modern Science] did not
> know what we know about the world —more importantly, they did not have
> anything like our ideas of what there was to know about the world, and how
> to learn it.” [63]

Of course, this particular re-writing of the history of science is not only
essential in oder to erase the kernel link of between science and reality, it
is also essential in order to create a narrative in which theories begin with
observations and end with their prediction. As described by Hawking:

> “In order to talk about the nature of the universe and to discuss questions
> such as whether it has a beginning or an end, you have to be clear about
> what a scientific theory is. I shall take the simpleminded view that a
> theory is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a
> set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we
> make. It exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality
> (whatever that might mean). A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two
> requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on
> the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it
> must make definite predictions about the results of future observations. For
> example, Aristotle believed Empedocles’s theory that everything was made out
> of four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. This was simple enough, but
> did not make any definite predictions. On the other hand, Newton’s theory of
> gravity was based on an even simpler model, in which bodies attracted each
> other with a force that was proportional to a quantity called their mass and
> inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Yet it
> predicts the motions of the sun, the moon, and the planets to a high degree
> of accuracy.” [29, p. 10]

Placing themselves as the evolved figures of true Modern progress, in a
tradition that begins with the Enlightenment, contemporary anti-realist
scientists and philosophers of science have attempted systematically to escape
any direct reference to the ancient Greek tradition. According to this
narcissistic narrative, we ourselves have more knowledge and understanding
than any other community in the history of human kind. We are the proud result
of a progressive evolution that begun in 16th Century and has lead us to the
peak of empirical scientific understanding and knowledge. The justification of
what is considered to be a “self evident” fact is twofold. From a quantitative
perspective, the great specialization within science shows that we have “more
knowledge” than ever before. So we are told, we have “so much knowledge” that,
unlike in the past, maybe for the last time with Leonardo and Leibniz, a
single human cannot grasp all the scientific knowledge that we have conquered.
Today, it is accepted that one cannot even gain the complete knowledge of a
single discipline, like physics. From a pragmatic perspective, today’s
fantastic technological capacity, which even allows us to destroy the whole
world by pressing a single button, exposes the true power of our knowledge.
Never before have we been able to compute the quantity of information at the
speed and efficiency we can do today. Both ideas are of course grounded in a
deep confusion between technological power and scientific understanding,
between quantity and quality. While technology implies a ‘know how’, a
practical capacity, it does not provide a representation of reality. While
models might be able to provide an operational solution to very specific
problems, they are certainly unable to provide scientific understanding
through consistent, coherent and unified theoretical representations.

As it is well known, most of the founding fathers of QM —exception made of
Paul Dirac— would have never endorsed this anti-realist narrative of the
history of science. Most of them had been trained in the European Gymnasium
which imposed a deep knowledge of the Greek tradition, not only restricted to
its language but also to its cultural heritage. Heisenberg, Pauli and
Schrödinger —the major figures of the quantum revolution— constantly stressed
the essential reference of their own developments in physics to those of the
first philosophers (see for a detailed analysis [22]). Not without a reason,
many of them have a book called Physics and Philosophy. Werner Heisenberg [32,
p. 57] would argue that: “I saw the achievements of modern times, of Newton
and his successors, as the immediate consequence of the efforts of the Greek
mathematicians and philosophers, and never once did it occur to me to consider
the science and technology of our times as belonging to a world basically
different from that of the philosophy of Pythagoras and Euclid.” Heisenberg
would go back to the Greeks constantly not only as intellectual adventure, but
more importantly to understand the theory of quanta itself, for he believed
that “one could hardly make progress in modern atomic physics without a
knowledge of Greek natural philosophy.” Wolfgang Pauli [42, p. 40] would also
constantly refer to the Greeks: “The critical scientific spirit however
reached its first culmination in classical Hellas. It was there that those
contrasts and paradoxes were formulated which also concern us as problems,
though in altered form: appearance and reality, being and becoming, the one
and the many, sense experience and pure thought, the continuum and the
integer, the rational ratio and the irrational number, necessity and
purposefulness, causality and chance” And the same with Erwin Schrödinger [50,
pp. 17-18] who would stress that: “the thinkers who started to mould modern
science did not begin from scratch. Though they had little to borrow from the
earlier centuries of our era, they very truly revived and continued ancient
science and philosophy.” Seeking for help, he would —just like Heisenberg and
Pauli— return to the Greeks: “By the serious attempt to put ourselves back
into the intellectual situation of the ancient thinkers […] we may regain from
them their freedom of thought.” We might address a passage from Raimundo
Fernández Mouján which clearly addresses the issue at stake:

> “As we revise their quotes, we are made aware of the striking contrast
> between the views of Schrödinger, Pauli and Heisenberg, and the widely
> accepted vision today in scientific contexts, according to which science,
> properly speaking, originated in modern times, in the XVIIth century. These
> physicists from the early XXth century did not see what began in the XVIIth
> century and was developed over the following centuries as the origin of
> science, but rather as the origin of the specific parameters of modern
> science that quantum mechanics, among other developments, was rejecting.
> Illuminism, however admirable, was for them the establishment of a certain
> view of science that had become problematic, and they saw better allies for
> their task among the ancient Greeks. They found Plato, Pythagoras or
> Heraclitus more useful than the modern philosophers and physicists. They
> were insistent critics of the parameters of science established in the
> XVIIth, XVIIIth and XIXth centuries. In their works they frequently make
> this contrast explicit, they distinguish between the aspects of science that
> had their origin in the XVIIth century and that seemed now problematic (the
> separation of the world in res extensa and res cogitans, the limiting of
> natural science to a narrow materialism, the sharp separations among
> disciplines and faculties, etc.) and the ancient Greek model, which could
> help them overcome those obstacles.” [22]

Last but not least, Albert Einstein can be also linked to the Greek tradition
maybe not directly but certainly through his admiration for Baruch Spinoza who
stood close to the unity, consistency and coherency of physical
representation, fighting —also, in almost complete solitude— the Modern attack
to the scientific knowledge about reality —or, in Spinozian terms, about
Nature. In this respect, Spinoza can be considered as a Modern philosopher who
—rejecting the ontological division between res cogitans and res extensa—
stood close to the ancient Greek tradition of the One (i.e., the only one
substance) and the Many (i.e., the infinitely many attributes, namely, what
the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence). As Einstein
[58, p. 373] would explain: “I am fascinated by Spinoza’s Pantheism. I admire
even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of
modern philosophers because he is the first philosopher who deals with the
soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.”

##  6 The Postmodern Physical Attack to Philosophy

Just like sophists —in the 4th Century B.C.—, contemporary anti-realists
—since the second half of the 20th Century— having already conquered not only
physics but the totality of science, engaged in a furious attack against an
already defeated philosophy. The reason might be found in the serious threat
that philosophy would represent for the anti-realists establishment of
“empirical science” if awaken from its comatose state. For it is only
philosophy which can expose the dogmatic-naive basis of the present anti-
realist understanding of science. It is the conceptual (or metaphysical) level
of scientific observation which anti-realists —just like with the historical
reference to the ancient Greeks— constantly forget to address. As Einstein
explains:

> “From Hume Kant had learned that there are concepts (as, for example, that
> of causal connection), which play a dominating role in our thinking, and
> which, nevertheless, can not be deduced by means of a logical process from
> the empirically given (a fact which several empiricists recognize, it is
> true, but seem always again to forget). What justifies the use of such
> concepts? Suppose he had replied in this sense: Thinking is necessary in
> order to understand the empirically given, and concepts and ‘categories’ are
> necessary as indispensable elements of thinking.” [21, p. 678] (emphasis in
> the original)

Exactly this same point was repeatedly stressed by Heisenberg [34, p. 264] in
several of his elder writings during the 1970s: “The history of physics is not
only a sequence of experimental discoveries and observations, followed by
their mathematical description; it is also a history of concepts. For an
understanding of the phenomena the first condition is the introduction of
adequate concepts. Only with the help of correct concepts can we really know
what has been observed.” Wolfgang Pauli [42, p 129] would argue in a more
sarcastic manner: “I hope no one still maintains that theories are deduced by
strict logical conclusions from laboratory-books, a view which was still quite
fashionable in my student days.” Confronting these “philosophical ideas”
Richard Feynman would explicitly attack, during an interview he gave in 1979,
the need of such conceptual (or metaphysical) requirements: “[philosophers]
seize on the possibility that there may not be any ultimate fundamental
particle, and say that you should stop work and ponder with great profundity.
‘You haven’t thought deeply enough, first let me define the world for you.’
Well, I’m going to investigate it without defining it!” Since then, Feynman’s
anti-philosophical viewpoint has become part of orthodoxy. Quite regardless of
the forgotten remarks made by Einstein, Heisenberg, Pauli, Hanson and many
others, the orthodox contemporary consideration of theories as derived from
observation has become not only dogma but also the standpoint of all
contemporary debates.666Maybe the only contemporary physicist who has dare to
go against orthodoxy is David Deutsch [19, pp. 3-4] who in his book, The
Beginning of Infinity, writes: “The fact that the light was emitted very far
away and long ago, and that much more was happening there than just the
emission of light —those are not things that we see. We know them only from
theory. Scientific theories are explanations: assertions about what is out
there and how it behaves. Where do these theories come from? For most of the
history of science, it was mistakenly believed that we ‘derive’ them from the
evidence of our senses —a philosophical doctrine known as empiricism.” Many
decades later, Feynman’s student and biographer, the influential U.S.
cosmologist and popular-science writer Lawrence Krauss [36] is able to claim
with great confidence: “Physics is an empirical science. As a theoretical
physicist I can tell you that I recognize that it’s the experiment that drives
the field, and it’s very rare to have it go the other way; Einstein is of
course the obvious exception, but even he was guided by observation. It’s
usually the universe that’s surprising us, not the other way around.” It is
from this naive empirical standpoint which understands observation as
unproblematic that, since the rise of instrumentalism, contemporary scientists
have continuously and vigorously attacked the “utility” of philosophy.

Empirical scientists are essentially correct. Given you (mis)understand
theories as mathematical schemes capable to predict observations, there is no
role what so ever to be played by philosophy within science. The natural
conclusion which Stephen Hawking [30] has been honest enough to state clearly
during a talk in 2011 is that: “Philosophy is dead. Philosophers have not kept
up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.” During the
1990s the U.S. Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, wrote in his famous book,
Dreams of a Final Theory:

> “The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but
> generally in a negative fashion —by protecting them from the preconceptions
> of other philosophers. I do not want to draw the lesson here that physics is
> best done without preconceptions. At any one moment there are so many things
> that might be done, so many accepted principles that might be challenged,
> that without some guidance from our preconceptions one could do nothing at
> all. It is just that philosophical principles have not generally provided us
> with the right preconceptions. […] Physicists do of course carry around with
> them a working philosophy. For most of us, it is a rough-and-ready realism,
> a belief in the objective reality of the ingredients of our scientific
> theories. But this has been learned through the experience of scientific
> research and rarely from the teachings of philosophers. This is not to deny
> all value to philosophy, much of which has nothing to do with science. I do
> not even mean to deny all value to the philosophy of science, which at its
> best seems to me a pleasing gloss on the history and discoveries of science.
> But we should not expect it to provide today’s scientists with any useful
> guidance about how to go about their work or about what they are likely to
> find.” [62]

In an interview from 2004, Neil deGarsse Tysson, the famous U.S. astro-
physicist and host for the new series, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,777A
follow-up to the 1980s TV series presented by Carl Sagan. also addressed the
futility of philosophy for science:

> “if you are distracted by your questions so that you can’t move forward, you
> are not being a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural
> world. And so the scientist knows when the question ‘What is the sound of
> one hand clapping?’ is a pointless delay in our progress. [Insert
> predictable joke by one interviewer, imitating the clapping of one hand.]
> How do you define ‘clapping’? All of a sudden it devolves into a discussion
> of the definition of words. And I’d rather keep the conversation about
> ideas. And when you do that, don’t derail yourself on questions that you
> think are important because philosophy class tells you this. The scientist
> says [to the philosopher], ‘Look, I got all this world of unknown out there.
> I’m moving on. I’m leaving you behind. You can’t even cross the street
> because you are distracted by what you are sure are deep questions you’ve
> asked yourself. I don’t have the time for that’.” [45]

Continuing the attack, Lawrence Krauss has even argued that:

> “Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody
> Allen joke, ‘those that can’t do, teach, and those that can’t teach, teach
> gym.’ And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the
> only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science
> are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever.
> … they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and
> philosophy doesn’t.” [36]

The truth is that apart from a very small number of scientists interested in
philosophical issues —often confused with the divulgation of science or with
scientific explanations “for dummies”—, the vast majority of contemporary
scientists don’t even bother to take seriously philosophical problems. They
simply do not relate their work —in any way— with philosophy. Period. Unlike
the founding fathers of QM, physicists today have no knowledge about
philosophy what so ever and —even worse— they do not think it would be
important for them to learn the philosophies of Kant, Spinoza, Plato or —even—
Mach in order to better understand their own discipline. Once again, Richard
Feynman is a great example of the widespread attitude of contemporary
physicists towards philosophy:

> “My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at
> something by Spinoza and there was the most childish reasoning! There were
> all these attributes, and Substances, and all this meaningless chewing
> around, and we started to laugh. Now how could we do that? Here’s this great
> Dutch philosopher, and we’re laughing at him. It’s because there’s no excuse
> for it! In the same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the
> circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by
> which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza’s
> propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world and
> you can’t tell which is right. Sure, people were awed because he had the
> courage to take on these great questions, but it doesn’t do any good to have
> the courage if you can’t get anywhere with the question.” [26, p. 195]

Steven Weinberg, certainly one of the most important and influential figures
of contemporary physics, makes reference to Plato and Aristotle in the
following manner: “I confess that I find Aristotle frequently tedious, in a
way that Plato is not, but although often wrong Aristotle is not silly, in the
way that Plato sometimes is.” According to the U.S. Nobel laurate and father
of the Standard Model: “none of the early Greeks from Thales to Plato, in
either Miletus or Abdera or Elea or Athens, ever took it on themselves to
explain in detail how their theories about ultimate reality accounted for the
appearances of things. This was not just intellectual laziness. There was a
strain of intellectual snobbery among the early Greeks that led them to regard
an understanding of appearances as not worth having.” As Weinberg explains,
there is an essential difference between the Greeks and modern science:

> “There is an important feature of modern science that is almost completely
> missing in all the thinkers I have mentioned, from Thales to Plato: none of
> them attempted to verify or even (aside perhaps from Zeno) seriously to
> justify their speculations. In reading their writings, one continually wants
> to ask, “How do you know?’ […] Aristotle called the earlier Greek
> philosophers physiologi, and this is sometimes translated as ‘physicists,’
> but that is misleading. The word physiologi simply means students of nature
> (physis), and the early Greeks had very little in common with today’s
> physicists. Their theories had no bite. Empedocles could speculate about the
> elements, and Democritus about atoms, but their speculations led to no new
> information about nature —and certainly to nothing that would allow their
> theories to be tested. It seems to me that to understand these early Greeks,
> it is better to think of them not as physicists or scientists or even
> philosophers, but as poets.” [63]

It should come with no surprise that since the coming into power of
instrumentalism after the war, professors in physics have systematically
prohibited philosophical thinking of students within classrooms. Quite
recently, not only philosophers of physics who studied physics like David
Albert and Tim Maudlin but also physicists like Lee Smolin and Sean Carroll
have come forward to tell their stories of intellectual oppression and
harassment. In several interviews they have revealed something that every
physicist already knows, namely, that in our times it has become dangerous for
students in physics to engage in philosophical reflections about physics. As
Smolin remembers:

> “When I learned physics in the 1970s, it was almost as if we were being
> taught to look down on people who thought about foundational problems. When
> we asked about the foundational issues in quantum theory, we were told that
> no one fully understood them but that concern with them was no longer part
> of science. The job was to take quantum mechanics as given and apply it to
> new problems. The spirit was pragmatic; ‘Shut up and calculate’ was the
> mantra. People who couldn’t let go of their misgivings over the meaning of
> quantum theory were regarded as losers who couldn’t do the work.” [52, p.
> 312]

In a recent interview by Sean Carroll, David Albert [2] has recalled a very
disturbing anecdote which should be seriously addressed: Sean Carroll And I’m
gonna re-write that anecdote, it’s gonna be no good. And it’s about your
experience as a graduate student at Rockefeller and you made the mistake of
reading a book by David Hume, I understand correctly. And that got you
interested in foundations and what happened?

David Albert Well, that wasn’t received warmly at Rockefeller.

Sean Carroll This was in the Physics department?

David Albert This was in the Physics department at Rockefeller. There were
within fairly short order proceedings instituted to expel me from the PhD
program. This was back in the late, very late 1970s, early 1980s. So this was
in dark old days, but worrying about issues like that was profoundly
unpopular. I got to stay in the program on the condition that I would work on
a thesis topic assigned to me by the department, instead of one that I chose,
and the one that was assigned was clearly one that was thought to be good for
my character.

Sean Carroll Well, it turned out okay. Your character is still good today.

David Albert It was an extremely calculation heavy, it was something about
Borel resummation and flight of the fourth field theories, which people were
playing around with in those days. It was an extremely computation-heavy
thesis topic. I had been in contact at that time already with Yakir Aharonov,
who I had written to while I was a graduate student, telling him some
questions that I was struggling with and didn’t know what to do with. I asked
for his advice. He was wonderful, and I did go to him, I was given a pretty
stark choice at a meeting in the Dean’s office, that either I was gonna do a
thesis topic assigned to me by the department or I was gonna leave the PhD
program. It should be clear that the attempt to expel a student from a PhD
program because he read a book should not be considered as part of the
scientific enterprise. The scientific quest says nothing about “correcting the
character” of young students eager to learn about the mysteries of nature. On
the contrary, scientific training should encourage students to become
revolutionaries, to think beyond what has been thought ever before. The
situation that Albert describes is something quite common within physics
departments and has not yet stooped. As Carroll [7] has recently described:
“Many people are bothered when they are students and they first hear [about
Standard Quantum Mechanics]. And when they ask questions they are told to shut
up. And if they keep asking they are asked to leave the field of physics.” I
myself, as a student in physics during the late 1990s, sharing the same
forbidden inclinations towards philosophical realist thought, experienced and
witnessed the same intellectual harassment to students who would dare to ask
forbidden questions or attempt to produce a more conceptual investigation than
required. And, of course, I was later on also invited to leave the field of
physics.

It is these same group of bullied physicists, some of them transformed into
philosophers —I am myself one of them—, who have attempted to defend
philosophy from their —very well known— aggressors. Unfortunately, their
defense has avoided any direct confrontation with the contemporary anti-
realist and anti-philosophical understanding of “empirical science”. In fact,
all these philosophers and physicists who attempt to defend philosophy take
for granted that science and philosophy are completely different fields of
research which do not intersect at any point. As explained by one of the
defenders, the U.S. philosopher and former scientist Massimo Pigliucci [43]:
“Science, broadly speaking, deals with the study and understanding of natural
phenomena, and is concerned with empirically (i.e., either observationally or
experimentally) testable hypotheses advanced to account for those phenomena.
Philosophy, on the other hand, is much harder to define. Broadly speaking, it
can be thought of as an activity that uses reason to explore issues that
include the nature of reality (metaphysics), the structure of rational
thinking (logic), [etc.]” Sean Carroll [6], a physicist who actively supports
philosophy of physics, explains: “Nobody denies that the vast majority of
physics gets by perfectly well without any input from philosophy at all. (‘We
need to calculate this loop integral! Quick, get me a philosopher!’)” Anyhow,
according to some defenders the problem seems to be that scientists do not
understand what is the role played by philosophy. In fact, this is exactly
what Pigliucci [44] recriminates to Lawrence Krauss: “Krauss does not
understand what the business of philosophy is.” Addressing the attack, Wayne
Myrvold, a philosopher of physics has recently “asked a few physicists [who
have a much more positive attitude towards philosophy] to write a few words
about why they regard talking to philosophers valuable.” Carlo Rovelli [49], a
famous Italian physicist with clear philosophical inclinations, accepting
Myrvold’s challenge has used this opportunity to reply to deGrasse: “Neil
deGrasse Tyson is not the only one to consider philosophy useless for science.
Many of my colleagues in science have the same view, today. But they would be
perhaps surprised to find out that many scientists have the opposite view.
Among these are names like Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Darwin and Newton, just
to name a few. Why do these major scientists, and so many others of lesser
stature, consider and still consider philosophy as an extremely useful
enterprise in our search for knowledge? In my opinion, because they understood
the nature of the scientific enterprise better than Tyson.” Smolin is another
physicist who tried to justify why it might be interesting to talk to talk to
philosophers:

> “The triumph of the pragmatic style in the late 1940s and 1950s marginalized
> the more foundational style, pushing its exponents out of the elite centres
> and into smaller universities. The main venue for philosophical reflection
> in the theoretical physics community became the relativity community, which
> valued breadth and independence of thought, and which thrived through the
> 1980s in perhaps a dozen centres, until its foundational orientation was
> destroyed by the NSF’s pragmatic push to fund support for LIGO and numerical
> relativity. Meanwhile, particle physics developed rapidly in the pragmatic
> mode, with great triumphs until progress came to a halt in the early 1980s
> with the failed searches for proton decay and other signs of unification
> beyond the standard model.
>
> Since then, fundamental physics has been in a crisis, due to the evident
> need for new revolutionary ideas —which becomes more evident with each
> failure of experiment to confirm fashionable theories, and the inability of
> those trained in a pragmatic, anti-philosophical style of research to free
> themselves from fashion and invent those new ideas. To aspire to be a
> revolutionary in physics, I would claim, it is helpful to make contact with
> the tradition of past revolutionaries. But the lessons of that tradition are
> maintained not in the communities of fashionable science, with their narrow
> education and outlook, but in the philosophical community and tradition. And
> that is why I talk with philosophers and encourage my students to do so.”
> [53]

And yet, playing the devils advocate, one could argue that many scientists
have also found inspiration in literature, music and many other fields rather
than philosophy. So it might be also interesting to talk to musicians, artists
and writers. So what is so special about philosophy?

This question takes us back to the most obvious line of argumentation for a
proper defense of philosophy, namely, to argue that there is in fact a deep
relation between philosophy and science grounded on their common subject of
inquiry: reality. This is why it is not strange to find out that the defense
of philosophy has been undertaken only by realists. As Carroll [6] describes:
“Many of the best philosophers of physics were trained as physicists, and
eventually realized that the problems they cared most about weren’t valued in
physics departments, so they switched to philosophy. But those problems —the
basic nature of the ultimate architecture of reality at its deepest levels—
are just physics problems, really. And some amount of rigorous thought is
necessary to make any progress on them. Shutting up and calculating isn’t good
enough.” Smolin [52, p. 7] argues in a similar vein: “Physics should be more
than a set of formulas that predict what we will observe in an experiment; it
should give a picture of what reality is.” Rovelli [49] reinforces the point:
“if we understand science as a technical machine for collecting data and
testing theories, then we do not need much philosophy. But science is not just
that.” As he [48] explains: “Science is a continuous quest for the best way to
think about and look upon the world. It is, above all, an ongoing exploration
of new forms of thinking.” Tim Maudlin [39] illustrates these same ideas in
the context of QM: “There is no doubt and no one is going to dispute that
there’s a mathematical formalism that we know how to derive predictions from,
and those predictions can be accurate to 14 decimal places. But what a theory
is, what a physical theory is, is more than just a mathematical formalism with
some rules. It should specify a physical ontology which means: tell me what
exists in the physical world. Are there particles? Are there fields? Is there
space-time? And tell me about those things and then specify some laws about
how they behave, that tell me how they behave through time.” In order to
address reality philosophers of physics have introduced interpretations within
theories. Interpretations are stories added to empirically adequate theories
which make explicitly clear what these theories are really talking about, to
what entities they refer. As David Albert [1] explains, when attempting to
develop these narratives “the problems that we run into are peculiar
philosophical sorts of problems. What is going to count as a solution to this
problem? What’s the minimum that we need in order to tell a story[?] […] These
are questions of epistemology, questions of our relationship, of our beliefs
to the external world —and so on and so forth— that philosophers have been
dealing with for a log time.” So it might seem, we have finally found the
missing link between empirical science and philosophical research. Well, not
to fast… As Bas van Fraassen [54, p. 10], one of the most prominent anti-
realist contemporary figures, has warned (realist) philosophers and
physicists, “theories need not be true to be good. […] To develop an
empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth
only about the empirical world, about what is actual and observable.” As he
[55, p. 242] concludes: “However we may answer these questions [about
interpretation], believing in the theory being true or false is something of a
different level.” With a gentle reminder van Fraassen has easily collapsed the
house of cards that realists were so carefully attempting to construct. Van
Fraassen is absolutely right, the realist program has never been able to
produce an objective set of rules that would allow anyone to choose —beyond
subjective preferences— between the many interpretations, the one which is
actually true (see for a detailed discussion [15]). This kernel problem is
even acknowledged by Maudlin [39] who recognizes that: “different approaches
would give you different answers [to the question of physical reality in QM].
My preference, my aesthetic sense is that the pilot wave seems more natural to
me and the objective collapse seems to me more unnatural but I wouldn’t —you
know—give a lot of attention to my aesthetic preferences here.” Given that
there is no way to choose an interpretation and that it is not even clear what
would be the gain of adding these fictional stories, the conclusion reached by
Arthur Fine [27, p. 149] seems to us quite reasonable: “Try to take science on
its own terms, and try not to read things into science. If one adopts this
attitude, then the global interpretations, the ‘isms’ of scientific
philosophies, appear as idle overlays to science: not necessary, not warranted
and, in the end, probably not even intelligible.” It is at this point, that
realists run back to their pragmatic shelter from which they should have never
attempt to escape and recognize, like Carroll [5], that: “reality is a useful
way of talking about the actual world” and —in the end— “our description of
reality is contingent on utility”.

##  7 The Dogmatic-Naive “Understanding” of Quantum Mechanics

The anti-realist re-foundation of physics that took place in the 20th Century
finds its most clear exposition in the process of “standardization” of QM that
took place during the second and third decades. The result of this operation
ended in an inconsistent textbook formulation —including collapses,
measurements and outcomes— which has been taught ever since in Universities
all around the world. As Arthur Fine has described with a triumphant tone:

> “These instrumentalist moves, away from a realist construal of the emerging
> quantum theory, were given particular force by Bohr’s so-called ‘philosophy
> of complementarity’; and this nonrealist position was consolidated at the
> time of the famous Solvay conference, in October of 1927, and is firmly in
> place today. Such quantum nonrealism is part of what every graduate
> physicist learns and practices. It is the conceptual backdrop to all the
> brilliant success in atomic, nuclear, and particle physics over the past
> fifty years. Physicists have learned to think about their theory in a highly
> nonrealist way, and doing just that has brought about the most marvelous
> predictive success in the history of science.” [11, p. 1195]

Indeed, the Standard version of QM, sometimes also referred to by physicists
as the “Copenhagen interpretation”, was imposed by an anti-realist program
through a series of “instrumentalist moves” which had the essential purpose to
replace the need of a consistent representation by the reference to
measurements, outcomes and —even— strange collapses. Bohr’s introduction of
his irrepresentable “quantum jumps” in his famous inconsistent model of the
hydrogen atom, Born’s probabilistic reference to measurement outcomes in
Schrödinger’s wave mechanics, Bohr’s creation of the principles of
complementarity and correspondence as well as their application to
Heisenberg’s renamed “uncertainty” relations are just some of these moves. We
could also mention Dirac’s and von Neumann’s explicit introduction of the
famous “measurement rule” within the axiomatic formulation of the theory
which, in turn, lead most philosophical investigations into endless debates
about the infamous “measurement problem” as well as Bohr’s famous reply to the
EPR paper which crowned him as the champion of the still ongoing anti-realist
era (for a detailed analysis see [13, 14]). However, as we have already
stressed, the success of the anti-realist program is intrinsically related to
its tolerance to the (realist) metaphysical discourse about a microscopic
realm constituted by elementary particles. The uncritical acceptance that
‘clicks’ in detectors are good enough evidence for the existence of ‘quantum
particles’ has played an essential role in the anti-realist strategy of
control. It can hardly be overestimated that, as a matter of fact, the
reference to a microscopic (quantum) realm as well as the ‘clicks’ in
detectors has become a contemporary dogma followed by both realists and anti-
realists, physicists and philosophers. All interpretations of QM share exactly
this same underlying atomist metaphysics supplemented by a naive understanding
of experience.

It is this completely unjustified but widespread idea according to which QM
talks about measurement outcomes which are the consequence of our interaction
with elementary particles which combines the worst of both realist and anti-
realist worlds, namely, metaphysical dogmatism and naive empiricism. While
metaphysical dogmatism imposes the idea that the theory must obviously talk
about microscopic ‘particles’, naive empiricism dictates that what we
evidently observe in the lab are single measurement outcomes —i.e., clicks’ in
detectors or ‘spots’ in photographic plates instead of intensive patterns of
spectrum lines (see for a detailed analysis [14, Sect. 4]). This dogmatic-
naive restriction to the definitions of both physical reality and experience
is responsible for having replaced Heisenberg’s operationally consistent
matrix formulation of QM —which made reference to the intensive values of
observed spectral lines— with Dirac’s inconsistent axiomatic vectorial
formulation —in which the ad hoc introduction of single ‘clicks’ and
‘measurements’ within the theory has, in turn, also imposed the artificial
distinction between ‘pure states’ and ‘mixtures’ [18]. It was in fact Dirac
who, through his reference to (binary) ‘certain measurements’, introduced the
essential confusion between a naive empiricist understanding of ‘actuality’ as
hic et nunc experience and a dogmatic metaphysical understanding of
‘actuality’ as characterizing systems, states and properties. As we have
discussed in a recent work [13], the so called “measurement problem” created
in this process is nothing but the inconsistent conjunction of these two very
harmful and oppressive perspectives of analysis. It was Dirac’s imposition of
single measurement outcomes which forced him to introduce the “collapse” of
quantum superpositions, but it was his need to retain a (realist) physical
discourse which also obliged him to —anyhow— make reference to “particles”.

> “When we make the photon meet a tourmaline crystal, we are subjecting it to
> an observation. We are observing wether it is polarized parallel or
> perpendicular to the optic axis. The effect of making this observation is to
> force the photon entirely into the state of parallel or entirely into the
> state of perpendicular polarization. It has to make a sudden jump from being
> partly in each of these two states to being entirely in one or the other of
> them. Which of the two states it will jump cannot be predicted, but is
> governed only by probability laws.” [20, p. 9]

Reinforcing classical metaphysical dogmatism, the rest of “philosophical
problems” discussed in the literature have been grounded on the prejudice that
the mathematical formalism of the theory of quanta should be explained in
terms of the classical notions of locality, individuality, separability,
distributivity, etc. In turn, this hypothesis has created a set of “no-
problems” named after the failures of QM to describe classical systems. Thus,
we have been left with the problems of quantum non-locality, quantum non-
individuality, quantum non-separability, quantum non-distributivity, etc. The
effect of these problems in the literature is twofold, not only they reinforce
the reference to classical metaphysics —which we already know is inadequate to
describe the theory— but —more importantly— they also prevent the development
of a new (non-classical) conceptual scheme that would provide a deeper
understanding about what the theory of quanta is really talking about. Exactly
the same consequence is reached by the presupposition of a quantum to
classical limit. Instead of concentrating the efforts in finding a consistent
and coherent metaphysical scheme for understanding QM, the literature has
focused in attempting to “bridge the gap” between the quantum mathematical
formalism and our “manifest image of the world”. The fact that no consistent
representation has been reached has not stopped both physicists and
philosophers from claiming that the phenomena is real —at least, of course,
“For All Practical Purposes” (FAPP).

Analyzing things from a distance, it is quite paradoxical to observe that the
same departure of QM from the classical representation of physics —essentially
described in terms of an Actual State of Affairs (see footnote 4) — created
the perfect environment for anti-realists not only to produce the most radical
subversion of (realist) concepts but also to re-impose the same classical
metaphysical scheme they had rightly criticized. It is, following Corleone’s
Strategy, that anti-realists were able to disguise their own debates with
realist masks. The procedure followed by anti-realist has been to retain all
the words applied in the realist system —such as, ‘reality’, ‘objectivity’,
‘phenomena’, ‘individual’, ‘particle’, etc.— but detach them from their
specific meaning, reference and content. Thus, while ‘reality’ has become to
signify ‘observation’ or ‘fiction’, ‘metaphysics’ is understood today as
‘interpretation’ or ‘narrative’ (see [15]). In this process of disguising the
meaning of words ‘objectivity’ has been translated as ‘inter-subjectivity’ and
‘measurement’ —depending on the need— sometimes as the conscious act of
observing a ‘click’ and sometimes as the ‘physical interaction’ of quantum and
classical systems (see [13]). Finally, the notion of ‘particle’ —detached from
its metaphysical definition— has been equated with a ‘click’, an ‘event’ or a
‘measurement outcome’ (see [14]). It is through this radical re-signification
of terms that anti-realists were able to create a monstrous labyrinth with no
exit. Realists from all over the world have been welcomed to enter its gates
at the reasonable price of repeating the following mantra: “Empirical science
is grounded in observations in the lab.” Once inside the anti-realist
facilities, realists are allowed to wonder freely creating and preaching their
made-up stories to the few fellow companions willing to listen. Outside the
gates, realists have been pictured —depending on the needs— either as “naive
believers” in fictional stories created by themselves or as a “dangerous
fanatics” who in their search for a single true story about reality could
transform the perspectival nature of empirical science into a totalitarian
regime. Most physicists, trained in an instrumentalist anti-philosophical
fashion to “shut up and calculate!”, do not even know about the existence of
these facilities.888As Maximilian Schlosshauer [51, p. 59] has recently
described: “It is no secret that a shut-up-and-calculate mentality pervades
classrooms everywhere. How many physics students will ever hear their
professor mention that there’s such a queer thing as different interpretations
of the very theory they’re learning about? I have no representative data to
answer this question, but I suspect the percentage of such students would
hardly exceed the single-digit range.” And why should they care? As they
repeat to every open microphone: “Physics has never been so successful!”999Lee
Smoilin [52] points to the existence of an unspoken major crisis which since
the 1980s counts too many failures unrecognized to the rest of society: “The
current crisis in particle physics springs from the fact that the theories
that have gone beyond the standard model in the last thirty years fall into
two categories. Some were falsifiable, and they were falsified. The rest are
untested —either because they make no clean predictions or because the
predictions they do make are not testable with current technology.” Inside the
walls, realists have been denied the possibility to choose a leader —a single
interpretation— that would finally unite them and allow them to fight back.
Anti-realists know very well their game: Divide et impera. Every realist is
not only allowed but also encouraged by their captors to have her own
preferences about which story to fight for. Fragmented and dispersed, realists
wonder, sometimes alone, sometimes in small groups, through a map of madness
fighting against each other in a hopeless search for their lost reality. In a
field where words have lost their meaning, even anti-realists tour the
facilities and sometimes have even fun creating their own interpretations —of
course— detached from reality.

##  8 Understanding Quantum Theory

The first step to understand the theory of quanta is to abandon the anti-
realist reference to “empirical science” which is grounded on a harmful
combination of dogmatic metaphysics and naive empiricism. We have to stop
taking for granted not only the observations of ‘clicks’ as unproblematic
givens of experience but also the idea that the metaphysics of particles is a
necessary ingredient for QM. In this respect, the essential requirement to
begin to discuss the physical meaning of QM is to revisit —right from the
start— the meaning of physical theory itself and recognize the essential unity
between physics and philosophy. As remarked by Schrödinger [50, p. 12] already
during the 1950s —even before the rise of instrumentalism— the separation
between scientific and philosophical research “produces the grotesque
phenomenon of scientifically trained, highly competent minds with an
unbelievably childlike –undeveloped or atrophied— philosophical outlook.” In
this respect, the defense of philosophy from empirical scientists must be also
regarded as the defense of physics from instrumentalism and anti-realism in
general. We certainly agree with Tim Maudlin [39] when he warns the
instrumentalist about Standard Quantum Theory: “No! You don’t have a theory,
you have a predictive recipe. And what we want, as a physicists what you
should want is a theory […]” But in order to acknowledge this point it is also
essential to admit that theories —and in this point we disagree with Maudlin—
are not constructed from observations. Theories are developed from the attempt
to produce representational formal-conceptual unified, consistent and coherent
schemes of thought which are able to express experience adequately without any
explicit reference to subjects. This is the true realist quest which takes us
—once again— back to the Greeks. As Heisenberg remarks:

> “What always distinguished Greek thought from that of all other peoples was
> its ability to change the questions it asked into questions of principle and
> thus to arrive at new points of view, bringing order into the colourful
> kaleidoscope of experience and making it accessible to human thought. […]
> Whoever delves into the philosophy of the Greeks will encounter at every
> step this ability to pose questions of principle, and thus by reading the
> Greeks he can become practised in the use of the strongest mental tool
> produced by western thought.” [32, pp. 52-53]

Sometimes the construction of theories, like in the case of classical
mechanics, begins with physical concepts (e.g., space, time, continuum,
particle, etc.) and requires the development of a mathematical formalism
(e.g., infinitesimal calculus). But sometimes it is the other way around, like
in the case of QM where we do possess a consistent mathematical formalism
(i.e., Heisenberg’s matrix formulation) but we still lack the concepts
required in order to make sense of what is really going on. Whatever path is
required, the definition of concepts is always essential to scientific
understanding. Theories are not only composed of formal mathematical schemes,
they are also constituted in an essential manner by conceptual schemes. And
this is the main reason why we need to return to the original realist Greek
tradition of scientific understanding. It is this tradition which has taught
us that it is only theories which allow us to produce understanding of
objective experience through unified, consistent and coherent representations.
The question which guides the realist program has been always the same: What
is the relation between the One and the Many? What is the same within
difference? In Modern times this question was rephrased in a more specific
technical terms: How can we produce objective-invariant representations which
explain experience as detached from subjects and reference frames? This, and
not the creation of narratives, is the praxis which must unite realists under
a common goal. For like in all matters of life, it is never so important what
you actually belief or what you —even— choose to say in public, what is truly
important is what you actually do.

## Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Raimundo Fernández Mouján, Matías Graffigna, Axel Eljatib and
Sergio Tonkonoff for discussions on subjects related to this paper. This work
was partially supported by the following grants: the Project PIO CONICET-UNAJ
(15520150100008CO) “Quantum Superpositions in Quantum Information Processing”,
UNAJ INVESTIGA 80020170100058UJ.

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