QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

The fundamental starting point when questioning the nature of reality does not concern
interaction between matter and mind, or their parallel existence, as much as it concerns the
possibility of obtaining knowledge about its structure. Questions which illuminate the nature of
reality are not soluble on the basis of ontology, more important is a comprehensive physical
portrayal or theory which we can then strive to interpret. Bohr rejected the traditional
ontologising and objectivising methods of approach, and stressed that quantum theory is an
extreme theory of reality created by humans. It is beyond the thinking that touches both mind
and matter and it can assist in defining both of them. To Bohr, talk about mind and matter was
nothing more than ways of dividing and identifying the multiplicity of reality in a way we can
understand. Even though the ontological description of reality has traditionally employed
concepts of matter and spirit, these concepts do not necessarily target the depths plumbed by the
mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics in a particularly informative way. In the light of
Formalism, reality appears much more as if it should be portrayed as one single whole, quantum
reality, part of which we can perceive as the external world of matter, part perceived via
introspection as our inner reality.
The strict division of the world into objective and subjective parts carried out by Descartes is
linked to the schematic view of primary and secondary qualities adopted at the turn of the
modern era. Galilei embraced this thinking of the antique Atomists, as did Locke and many other
philosophers. All the primary qualities were assumed to be within the objects themselves, while
the secondary qualities were born in the human sense organs. In modern-day research, this
separation forms a generally-accepted starting point. It leads to the thought of how objectivelyexisting
brain states give birth to subjective phenomena. When modelling the world through the
state-functions of quantum mechanics it is however possible to think that the most primary
causes or qualities are never directly manifested in the ever-changing sense-world and, on the
other hand, that the structure of people’s internal world cannot necessarily be reduced to
secondary phenomena born in our senses as a result of influences from the external world.
The question of the precise relationship between mental and material phenomena, or rather of
how humans can, through their internal states, control their actions and affect the formation of
the material world is perhaps thrown into clearer relief when it is liberated from the Cartesian
context, i.e. the concept of reality formed at the beginning of the modern era. Throughout
antiquity and the whole of the Middle Ages, it was presumed that humans possessed both a
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