QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

Even if, at first sight, chance appears to be the very negation of determinism, it should be noted
that chance also has its laws, and accidents emerge from pre-existing conditions. Games of
chance do not follow the Newtonian type of law but follow statistical laws instead: they are
statistically determined. On such a basis, it can even be argued that chance is not alien to
determinism. Chance may in fact be a peculiar type of determination, because the principle of
lawfulness does not require that every individual phenomenon should always occur in exactly the
same way. Universal lawfulness is not committed to a specific form of determinism such as
causal determinism or mechanical determinism. It is consistent with individual exceptions, with
occurrences in a given low percentage of cases. 564 Bohr highlighted the fact that the determinism
of classical physics was only an idealisation suitable for addressing situations at the macroscopic
level whereas Wolfgang Pauli was fond of saying that quantum theory is indeterministic and that
individual events "slip through" the net of physics.
While predictability is often taken to be a symptom of causality, or causation is even defined in
terms of predictability, this may be unwarranted. Predictability is an epistemological category
dependent on our knowledge, whereas causation is a mode of behaviour of things in the real
world, an ontological category. 565 The common equating of causality with predictability is linked
to the problem concerning measurements in quantum physics. In classical physics, the process of
measurement could be described objectively from an external viewpoint by comparing the result
yielded by measurement to a space-time portrayal or a model created by theory. Quantum theory,
on the other hand, does not generate a model for the process of measurement. When the theory is
applied to both the measuring apparati and to microscopic objects, the final state of the system
will be a superposition of state vectors. This does not, however, represent a definite observable
state. The final state should be a so called mixed state, but no transformations map initial pure
states into final mixed states. The theory is thus not able to describe how it is possible to proceed
from the uncertain and non-classical quantum realm to the stable and separable world of
everyday experience. 566
564
Bunge 1959, 13-14, 23. If chance has a place in the framework of determinism in the general sense, quantum
theory does not lead to the bankrupty of determinism. Bunge sees as a widespread misconception that causality is
regarded as necessarily mechanistic and that, conversely, mechanism necessarily entails causality. The mere
existence of the Platonic and Aristotelian systems shows that causality need not be mechanistic. Mechanistic
philosophy from Galileo to the Newtonians restricted causes to forces contrary to the richer but chimerical forms of
causation imagined by Aristotle and his innumerable commentators. In actual fact, contrary to the causal system of
Aristotle in which every motion requires a cause, Newton´s principle of inertia is openly non-causal and can be seen
as a restricted version of the principle of self-movement. Bunge 1959, 107-110, 116.
565
Bunge 1959, 326-327.
566
Murdoch 1987, 113.
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