Talk: Huw Price (Cambridge)

Title:

Side-stepping the Rhinoceros: Copernican Pragmatism and Quantum Entanglement

Abstract:

In philosophy, as in science, it is often important to pay close attention to the peculiarities of our own standpoint or perspective. This move is particularly congenial to pragmatists, keen to expose what William James called 'the trail of the human serpent'. A century earlier, it was at the heart of Kant’s Copernican Revolution.

This talk, based on joint work with the physicist Ken Wharton, applies this Copernican move to the understanding of quantum entanglement. Entanglement is often regarded as the most puzzling feature of the quantum world. Writing about its mysteries, Roger Penrose puts it like this.

The first mystery is the phenomenon itself. How are we to come to terms with quantum entanglement and to make sense of it in terms of ideas that we can comprehend, so that we can manage to accept it as something that forms an important part of the workings of our actual universe? (Penrose 2004)

We propose an answer to Penrose’s question. It takes the relevant peculiarity of our perspective on the world to be the fact that we can often control it. Once we ‘side-step’ this perspective, and the contingent physical facts on which it depends, entanglement turns out to be explicable using notions familiar from causal modelling: it is a special sort of ‘selection artefact’, or 'collider bias'. The explanation seems to have been missed because the peculiarity of our ordinary standpoint has not previously been taken into account.

The talk is based on joint work with Ken Wharton, accessible here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04571