F27 - L'interpretazione concettualistica della fisica quantistica

Hello everyone, the title of this presentation is the conceptual turning point in quantum physics It should be understood here as the possibility of a turning point in our way of understanding or really starting to understand quantum mechanics which over the years has maintained the reputation of being the darkest theory, the least intelligible theory The reason why this turning point is of a conceptual nature is what I will try to explain to you during this presentation which is the translation in Italian of a conference I had the pleasure of holding quite recently with Diederik Harz in the context of a workshop whose central theme was that of quantum ontology and metaphysics Among other things, there is also a French version of this video and I will put all the links in the description Well, but before starting I would also like to point out that the 24th issue of the open access magazine Autoricerca has just been published and that this 24th volume is entirely dedicated to physics and contains three articles that address fundamental aspects not only of quantum physics but also of relativity and all three of these articles, one in particular, touch in a more or less direct way the conceptual interpretation of quantum theory which I will now talk about This interpretation was initially proposed by Diederik Harz in 2009 and is currently being investigated by some members of the so-called Bruxelles group at the Leo Apostel or CLEA center of which I have the pleasure and honor to be part Enjoy! Let's start with some quotes Feynman, for example, is famous for saying that no one understands quantum mechanics Bohr, on the other hand, has stated that if we have not been shocked by quantum mechanics then we cannot have understood it and more recently, Carroll has observed that surprisingly most physicists seem to have no problems with the fact of not understanding their most important theory more fundamental Now, we could argue that if we go deep enough At this point, every physical theory at some point presents a challenge in terms of understanding its most fundamental aspects Think of Newton's famous non-inventory hypothesis in relation to the mystery of gravity, of his ghostly action at a distance which Einstein solved by eliminating the gravitational force as such but then, as a joke of fate, he found himself confronted with another ghostly action at a distance apparently inexplicable the one associated with the famous quantum entanglement phenomenon Having said that, when we talk about understanding a theory we must distinguish at least two aspects The first is its technical understanding and we all know more or less what this means so I don't need to explain it The second aspect is that of the interpretation of the theory According to Tim Maudlin, the interpretation is what transforms a formalism into a physical theory in all respects But what is an interpretation? In essence, it is the specification of an ontology and a metaphysics Among other things, Christian de Ronda recently underlined that a theory without an ontology and a metaphysics what he calls the conceptual component of the theory well, it can't even be considered a real physical theory Very briefly, what is an ontology? It is the specification of the inventory of the entities that exist outside while a metaphysics is a specification of what are the entities outside that is, of their nature And then we can also mention, it is important to do, the epistemology which is the specification of how we know that something exists and has a certain nature Now, there are some notions that are somehow inevitable if we want to describe reality from a scientific point of view Without going into details, I will limit myself here to remember them There is the notion of entity, which is that aspect of reality that we want to study, sometimes it is simply called the system to which we can attribute properties and states Then there is the notion of state, which is what an entity is at a given moment including what it could become in terms of availability in a subsequent moment Then there is the notion of property, which is simply a predictive state usually associated with an experimental question Finally, there is the notion of context, which describes the external reality to an entity responsible for producing its changes of state With this minimum baggage of notions, undoubtedly compatible both with the vision of operationalism and realism we now examine some of the fundamental characteristics of quantum theory and we will also try to explain briefly why these remain so mysterious to this day We have the quantum superposition, the quantum measurement the quantum entanglement, the quantum indetermination and the quantum indiscernibility Let's start with the quantum superposition It is known that a state of superposition describes a way of being potential Now, the notion of potentiality was already introduced by Aristotle to conceptualize the processes of change So why would this be a problem? Where is the mystery? Well, the mystery of quantum superposition lies in the fact that these ways of being potential can also be expressed in relation to mutually exclusive spatial properties But what does it mean to be in a non-spatial state? That is, in a state of non-updated spatial properties This is the real question What about the quantum measurement? Its mystery is certainly not that of describing a situation in which what is current breaks the symmetry of the potential because the idea of breaking symmetry is well known and certainly not problematic Think of the theory of bifurcations, for example Take a pencil placed vertically on its tip on a table in unstable equilibrium When its contact surface decreases environmental fluctuations will break the rotational symmetry and a specific orientation will be updated which was only potential before the pencil collapsed And if we repeat the experiment then other directions will be updated from time to time Therefore, the state before the collapse can be described as a true state of superposition But then why is a quantum measurement not simply seen as a process similar to a pencil that falls on the table? Once again, the problem is that most physicists are still very attached to the idea of ​​spatiality and think that non-spatiality rhymes with non-reality In a certain sense, we could say they think that only pencils on the table can really exist Now let's consider the quantum entanglement Diederik Harz was the first to demonstrate with his famous example of water containers that macroscopic systems can easily violate the inequalities of Bell when they are connected and correlations are created from these connections Why then is the entanglement not simply seen as a connective element of reality similar to the tube that connects the two water containers in the famous model of Harz? Well, I think that our spatial prejudice is once again the main obstacle What would be the nature of such a connective element of reality that can remain perfectly unnoticeable in the space between the two entities? And then there is the further problem to understand why quantum entities tend to get involved to enter the entanglement spontaneously every time they are allowed to interact Moving on to Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy what is the mystery? Certainly not the fact that it is not possible to make certain measurements together In fact, in his thesis, Harz presented a famous example of a physical entity, a simple wooden cube that can both float on water and burn which are, however, two properties associated with incompatible tests So how do you test these two properties together? Well, there is a way. Constantin Pirot has shown that it is enough to select one of the two tests and then perform it This is what he called a test-product So experimental incompatibility is not a problem Quantum indeterminacy is, in fact, something much deeper And again, this tells us that a quantum entity is something very different from a body or a corpuscle which is something non-spatial And a good quantum interpretation must also explain why a state vector cannot be well centered together that is, little dispersed in position and in the amount of motion And it must also explain the existence of inverse relationships of indeterminacy that tell us that we cannot have states that are together too dispersed that is, too indeterminate both in the variable position and in the variable amount of motion Finally, there is the mystery of quantist indistinguibility the impossibility of differentiating quantum entities that are identical to each other How can identical quantum entities be truly, authentically, genuinely indistinguishable indistinguishable and yet remain individuals as happens, for example, in a so-called Bose-Einstein condensate Well, after explaining some of the key aspects of the main quantum mysteries let's now talk about the new ontology and metaphysics of conceptual interpretation which we believe can validly address these mysteries and transform quantum mechanics into a truly intelligible theory It is not a top-down interpretation that is, from the top down that is, derived mainly from first principles but rather a bottom-up interpretation that is, from the bottom up which derives from a careful observation of the behavior of the different physical entities and from trying to answer the following question What nature would be able to produce such a behavior? And it must be said that this interpretation the conceptual interpretation emerged only after a long process of investigation started almost half a century ago with quantum sciomatics and, after many steps culminated more recently with that field of study known today as quantum cognition Quantum cognition is a field of research in full development which was initiated by the pioneering works of Arz and other researchers such as Krennikoff and Atman Spacher and many others who have achieved really significant results in the modeling of numerous human cognitive situations using the mathematical formalism of quantum theory and treating conceptual and cognitive entities as if they were real quantum entities Now, this unexpected discovery that quantum mechanics works extremely well to build a theory of human concepts of their combinations and their interactions with human minds well, this led Arz to formulate a few years ago a hypothesis that we could call very bold initially formulated in the form of the following question If quantum mechanics, as formalism models human concepts so well should this perhaps indicate that quantum entities are in turn conceptual entities? From this question the conceptualist interpretation was born with its surprising metaphysical ontology which obviously does not go wrong with the philosophical theory of conceptualism which is quite another thing The conceptualist interpretation postulates that the entities of microphysics are of conceptual nature and the entities made of ordinary matter the macroscopic bodies are of cognitive nature It also postulates that the duality mind-language of the human cultural kingdom reflects the duality fermions-bosons of the physical domain in the sense that bosons and fermions would be entities belonging to a much older cultural kingdom with the bosons that constitute the constitutive natural bricks of languages and the fermions the constitutive natural bricks of cognitive structures So our universe would be fundamentally pan-cognitivist in the sense that everything in it would participate in cognition since human cognition is only a very recent episode expressed at an organizational level very specific Well, but let's go back to the mysteries we mentioned this time adopting the conceptualist interpretation and its metaphysics What about the quantum superposition? We said that its main mystery is non-spatiality Well, the mystery disappears immediately because a conceptual entity is certainly not a spatial entity Think about the example of the Italian language There is no mystery in observing that it is a non-spatial entity The meaning it conveys can, however, leave traces on different types of spacetime supports such as printed or electronic documents etc. etc. Now, when we think of the quantum superposition we also think of the famous phenomena or effects of interference So, if the conceptualist interpretation is correct, we would expect to observe effects of interference even in the human cultural domain Let's take, for example, the Hampton study of 1988 in which participants in this study were exposed to 24 different examples of food, typically food like fruit, vegetables and similar things They were initially invited to choose that specimen belonging to the set of proposed specimens that they considered to be a good example of fruit In the same way the participants were then asked to choose a specimen that they considered to be a good example of vegetables Finally, they were asked to choose a specimen belonging to the set of proposed specimens that they considered to be a good example of fruit or vegetables i.e. the logical disjunction of the two concepts of fruit and vegetables In these three different situations that we can consider as three different experimental contexts it is possible to calculate the relative frequencies with which different specimens are chosen and these relative frequencies correspond to the so-called experimental probabilities of choosing the different specimens in the three different situations Without going into details here we can then observe that these probabilities are impossible to understand i.e. to model using a purely classical reasoning for example in relation to the meaning of a logical disjunction On the other hand they can be modeled using Born's probabilistic rule of quantum mechanics and the principle of superposition More precisely, it is possible to consider fruit, vegetables and fruit or vegetables as three different states of the same conceptual entity for example the conceptual entity food The fruit or vegetable combination can then be described as a superposition of the fruit state and the vegetable state i.e. of the state where the food is the fruit and of the state where the food is a vegetable If we proceed in this way we find ourselves then in a situation equivalent to that of the famous double slit experiment in relation to the concept of fruit this corresponds to the case in which only the first conceptual slit that of the fruit concept is open and, as I said, the probabilities of different possible results can be described using Born's rule and represented, for example, on a two-dimensional sample screen It is then possible to observe such impacts on the screen when only the slit the fruit slit is open and corpuscular type Of course, we can do the same thing considering only the samples selected in relation to the concept of vegetables, which corresponds to the case in which only the second conceptual slit that of the vegetable concept is open and also in this case we get the probability distribution on the sample screen corpuscular type Finally, we have the third situation the most interesting one where both slits of the fruit and the vegetable are jointly open that is, the situation where the choices of the participants in relation to the conceptual combination fruit or vegetable This is a situation that, as I said, can be modeled by an appropriate normalized superposition of the two wave functions previous. It is then that, surprisingly, appears on the sample screen a complex interference scheme that is very similar to that obtained in birefringence phenomena. Well, the next mystery on our list is that of the quantum measurement. This is a process of broken symmetry of weighted symmetry. This is perfectly compatible with the idea that must be interpreted as an interrogative process and that can therefore be explained by referring to what typically happens during a cognitive process of this type. Here, of course, we must distinguish the human interrogative process of the experimenter from the non-human interrogative process of the measuring instrument as such. In fact, the questions posed to the instrument and the answers that the latter gives, for example, leaving traces on a screen, cannot be formulated in our human language. That is, we cannot understand, for example, a communication between a photon and a sampling screen, but we can understand that a communication is a communication. Why can we do it? Well, this is the central issue that is at the base of conceptual interpretation. Quantum formalism is a formalism that we human beings have developed precisely to model, although without knowing it, meaningful entities. And that is why such formalism has proven to be so effective in modeling human cognitive processes. In other words, quantistic and conceptual or conceptualistic would be two terms that designate a reality of the same cognitive nature or similar cognitive. Well, the measuring instrument is therefore seen as a cognitive, mental entity that is somehow forced to ask a question and in its answer two logical passages can certainly be distinguished. In the first passage, the meaning of the situation, expressed by the initial state of the system, interpreted as a conceptual entity, well, this meaning is brought as close as possible to the meaning of the different available answers. And so we come to create a state of mental equilibrium of maximum instability, a tension state formed by the different connections of meaning with the different answers in competition between them. And in the second passage, the smallest fluctuation in the evaluation process will break the equilibrium in question in favor of one of the connections in competition, producing a result Why would all this be relevant to explain what happens behind the scenes of a quantum measurement? Well, it is relevant because quantum probabilities can be explained precisely in terms of fluctuations between the measuring instrument and the measured entities, called hidden measurement interactions. And it is relevant because in the so-called representation of blocks of quantum mechanics, specific geometric structures appear, which naturally describe these regions of potentiality at the origin of fluctuations and responsible for the reductions of the state vectors, that is, the collapse of the wave functions. So we can explain a quantum measurement as a process in two phases, as I have just described, and even deduce Born's probabilistic rule, that is, derive it in a non-circular way. What about the entanglement? Well, even in this case, the conceptual interpretation offers us an extremely simple answer to solve its mystery. The connecting element at the origin of the correlations would be the very substance of the meaning. In fact, if it is true that quantum entities are conceptual entities, then it is fair to expect that they can share meaning, that is, that they can connect through meaning, and that a cognitive entity that interacts with them is then sensitive to the presence of these connections of meaning, when it is faced, for example, with an interrogative context. This would also explain why the quantum entanglement is then the default state, because when two conceptual entities are united and interact in the same cognitive situation, well, if they share a meaning, then a connection of meaning will be automatically present. To give an example, let's consider a recent cognitive psychology experiment that was conducted and analyzed in our research group. Participants to the experiment were asked to select pairs of spatial directions that they considered to be the best examples of two different wind directions. In the end, they were given specific examples of pairs of wind directions, among which they had to choose the one they considered best representative of the state corresponding to two different wind directions. And to analyze the results, as is done in the typical experiments where Bell's inequality is tested, in the so-called CHSH-Clauser-Horn-Shimony-Holt version of inequality, well, four different cognitive measures were carried out using different combinations of the eight cardinal and ordinal directions of a wind rose. It was then possible to show that the probabilities obtained relative to the different results in the different measuring contexts violated Bell's inequality, or CHSH-Clauser-Horn-Shimony-Holt in this case, with the same order of magnitude of the typical experiments conducted on micro-entities. In other words, two wind directions, when they are in the conceptual state of being different, must be considered as two entangled entities. But there is more. It is not very well known, but in the tests conducted by Bell in the laboratory, even the so-called marginal laws, also called conditions of non-signaling, are often violated. Now, the standard quantum formalism, with its particular prescription, which is to describe the joint measures by means of a single tensorial decomposition of the space of states, well, this prescription implies that automatically the marginal laws must always be respected. It is therefore believed that these violations experimentally are due only to experimental errors. On the other hand, conceptual interpretation provides the possibility of these violations, which could therefore not only be experimental errors but the result of cognitive mechanisms involved in the creation of correlations. In other words, a surprising confirmation of the validity of conceptual interpretation. And let me underline here, because it is important, that the violation of marginal laws does not imply that superluminal communication can automatically take place. It is a necessary condition, but certainly not enough for this to be verified. Let's move on to the mystery of quantum indetermination, or, if you prefer, of quantum complementarity. Why can't micro-entities be found in states in which position and amount of motion, for example, are jointly determined in a precise way? Or, alternatively, can't they be found in states in which they are jointly maximally indeterminate? Because, as I mentioned before, there are also relations of inverse indetermination. The answer, in the field of conceptual interpretation, is, in fact, extremely simple. If it is true that micro-entities are of a conceptual nature, then they cannot be found in states that are jointly maximally abstract and maximally concrete. There is a compromise, a trade-off, as the English say, between the concrete and the abstract. And the maximally concrete states describe situations of maximum localization in space, while the maximally abstract states describe situations of maximum despatialization. So, Heisman's principle is really an integral part of conceptual interpretation and is a consequence of the conceptual nature of quantum entities. Now, speaking of abstract compared to concrete, in conceptual interpretation the most abstract concepts are those that can be expressed with a single word. And their degree of concreteness increases with the increase of the number of conceptual combinations. This means that the most concrete concepts would be those described by very broad aggregations of concepts formed by a single word, all connected to each other through meaning, which in our human conceptual domain we will indicate using the term of stories. Well, at this point a small warning is necessary. When we approach conceptual interpretation it is easy to promote an undue confusion. Between what? Between the human cognitive domain and the physical world as such, it also participates in the cognition but in a different domain Look, for example, at this image. There are two stories that come into contact here and that should not be absolutely confused. There is the story that man tells, that of the dog Alfie, and then there is the body of Alfie which also has a story, but not the story that man tells. The body of Alfie is the story formed by all those atomic and molecular conceptual entities that make up the structure and it is a story that a human mind is certainly unable to understand being too far away in terms of meaning from our human culture. Very well. Last but not least, quantum indistinguishability. How can quantum entities be truly indistinguishable while remaining individuals? Now, if this seems to be completely impossible for objects, we expect it to be the case for concepts. In fact, when a message does not transmit any element of distinction between two conceptual entities, then, for the senders of the message, they are truly authentically indistinguishable. To give an example, consider the concept animal. Imagine 11 of these concepts of animal. Put them in the state described by the conceptual combination 11 animals. Obviously, all animal concepts in the state of 11 animals are all authentically indistinguishable. And the fact that 11 animals are a concept and not a time-space entity is obviously crucial for its ability to possess the quantum characteristic of being many and at the same time being authentically indistinguishable. Therefore, quantum indistinguishability becomes perfectly obvious in the conceptual interpretation. That said, it is well known that in the field of physical systems, indistinguishability has profound consequences on the statistical behavior of sets of identical entities, as it gives rise to non-classical statistics, such as those of Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac, instead of the classical statistics of Maxwell-Boltzmann. Therefore, a prediction of conceptual interpretation is that we expect to find a non-classical statistical behavior even in the human conceptual domain. And in fact, after some preliminary results, this prediction has recently been fully confirmed in an analysis of the structure of human language conducted by Diederik Hartz and Lester Beltran. Let's take the example of the story of Winnie the Pooh, from the title In Which Piglet Meets the Heffalump. The story can be analyzed as a combination of cognitons, in analogy with a gas of bosons, where by cognitons we mean here concepts formed by a single word. This means that the words that are repeated in the story correspond to cognitons that are in the same state, therefore belonging to the same energy level. The most repeated words will then populate the fundamental energy of the gas, while the less repeated will be associated to the most energetic states. Once this analysis is done, it becomes possible to test the distributions, for example of Maxwell-Boltzmann and Bose-Einstein, to see which of these two best adapts to the data. The result is that the distribution of Maxwell-Boltzmann allows to model the data, while the distribution of Bose-Einstein offers a decisively remarkable modeling of the data. And this has now been verified on a series of tests of different lengths. And these confirmations are even more significant if we consider that they offer what is probably the first fundamental explanation of the so-called Zipf law, the fact that in a body of natural language the most frequent word appears about twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, and so on. In short, this behavior would be the result of the fact that human concepts, such as bosonic physical entities, behave as indistinguishable entities in the same state, as evidenced by the fact that identical words in a story can be exchanged without altering the meaning in any way. And if we find this behavior also in the physical world, this would be due to the fact that quantum entities are essentially of conceptual nature. Very well, I have come to the end of what I wanted to present. I leave you with one last warning. It is certainly not possible to explain the richness and scope of conceptual interpretation in such a short time. The purpose of this presentation is only to interest you and stimulate you to deepen this fascinating perspective. There are many other quantum mysteries that must and can be addressed and explained through this interpretation, but these are the ones that I have briefly mentioned here and I refer you to the articles mentioned in the description of the video. For example, for a discussion of other experimental situations, such as the experiments of Jung's double slit, or of the quantum cancellation of the delayed choice, or to appreciate the fecundity of conceptual interpretation to also approach the mysteries of relativity. There are also strong implications for our vision of evolution, as it offers a pan-cognitivist picture that can be very useful to try to reveal the mystery of how complex forms of life appeared on the surface of our planet. But once again, and on this I conclude, it is essential to avoid too easy anthropomorphizations and also to cultivate subjective interpretations that are probably wrong. Conceptual interpretation is a realistic interpretation and the fact that physical entities are of a conceptual nature, this is its assumption, does not mean at all that they are assimilable to human concepts, they are absolutely not. If you think of an electromagnetic wave and an acoustic wave, they are both entities of the same undulating nature, but they are obviously very, very different entities from each other. The same goes for human concepts and conceptual entities of the physical world. They are entities that participate in the same conceptual nature, but that are obviously very different from each other, so absolutely not to be confused. Thank you for listening.