Abstract
https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/philosophy/events/quantumphenomenology.php
Amid the wide variety of interpretations of quantum mechanics, the notion of a fully coherent ontological interpretation has seen a promising evolution over the past few decades. Despite this progress, however, the old dualistic strictures of subjectivity and objectivity have remained largely in place—a reflection of the broader, persistent inheritance of these comfortable strictures throughout the evolution of modern science. If one traces this inheritance back to its ancient roots in Plato and Aristotle, it is clear that the coherence, scientific utility, and historical durability of the various natural philosophies that followed have been directly proportional to their commitment, tacit or explicit, to object-oriented realism. Quantum mechanics has challenged this commitment like no other theory in the history of science. It is at once the most empirically sound fundamental physical theory ever conceived, and the most paradoxical; the theory’s objectively demonstrable empirical application is produced only by way of a fundamentally subjective, context-dependent mechanism of measurement. More troubling still, by this mechanism, reality is no longer merely the object of measurement, but also its product. Thus, any coherent, ontological interpretation of quantum theory must include a conceptual framework that relieves this paradox—a framework by which objectivity and subjectivity are no longer understood as mutually exclusive aspects of an already extant, closed reality, but rather as mutually implicative aspects of an ontogenetic, open, reality-in-process.