Everyday Quantum Reality

Introduction

1 Introduction Most people have heard about quantum physics and its remarkable, well-nigh bizarre claims. One effect of these claims is to suggest that quantum reality is a world apart from everyday experience, that the two realities are discontinuous. In this book I dispute this outlook by showing that variations of quantum puzzles have long been part of everyday experience. If one is inclined to puzzle over familiar concepts and experiences, puzzles inevitably emerge, and some deepen toward the kinds of issues now touted as unique to quantum physics. I hold that there is no uniqueness: one can find quantum puzzles, or variations thereof, in the backyard of everyday experience. One often reads that quantum physics is an abrupt departure from the commonsensical understandings of classical (pre-quantum ) physics. While that may be true in certain instances, the foundational principles of classical physics, by positing a deterministic world filled with lifeless objects, directly contradict the stubborn everyday sense that we are something more than lifeless objects. Classical physics only makes sense because we implicitly exempt ourselves from its determination that everything issues up from the mechanistic interplay of material particles. And by freely exempting ourselves from this metaphysical postulate, we throw its limitations into relief. The postulate does not apply to us in every way; if it did, we would never be the wiser. To adapt one of Epicurus’s insights, if we were lifeless entities we could never know it, for we would be 2 Everyday Quantum Reality dead even to death and, of course, to the question of whether we are lifeless automatons or beings whose fundamental nature transcends mechanical necessity.1 My point is that classical physics makes sense only if we overlook its assumption of mechanistic lifelessness, and often we do overlook that assumption. But quantum physics, by challenging the claim of a deterministic cosmos, gives us reason to reconsider the metaphysical foundations of classical physics, for the assumption of determinism interlocks tightly with that of mechanistic lifelessness. I hope to show that quantum physics opens space for ideas that are at once new and old: new in the sense that they run contrary to those of classical physics and old in the sense that they coincide with everyday experience—what some thinkers have called pre-conceptual or pre-theoretical experience. In the quantum tradition, theorists have long proposed that ordinary objects—tables, chairs, and so on—come under the sway of quantum reality, just as electrons, photons, and atoms do. They also are generally quick to add, however, that the extreme minuteness of quantum effects keeps them from playing into everyday experience, at least to a significant degree. As George Greenstein and Arthur Zajonc put it: Hidden behind the discrete and independent objects of the sense world is an entangled world, in which the simple notions of identity and locality no longer apply. We may not notice the intimate relationship common to that level of existence, but, regardless of our blindness to them, they persist. Events that appear to us as random may, in fact, be correlated with other events occurring elsewhere.2 On this account, while quantum effects operate subtly and ubiquitously , they do not, in any obvious way, play into everyday experience . Hence we are blind to them. I believe this is only partly true. Granted, quantum effects are minute when measured against, say, the stapler on my desk, but why should that fact keep them from figuring into the way I experience the stapler? Shouldn’t those effects , owing to their elemental ubiquity, figure not only into the microscopic structure of physical objects but also into the small-scale structure of our perceptual faculties and consequently into the ways we experience the world? 3 Introduction If this is the case, then our blindness to quantum effects might have a twofold origin. First, they are too small to register at the macroworld level, at least if we expect them to show up as phenomena fully removed from us; second and more fundamentally, they have long been iterated out of sight by their deep familiarity. That is, they are not fully removed from us but rather intimately tissued into our being. They thus pattern the way we know things, the way we can know things, even as we do know them. Put differently, they take their place as things to be perceived and known even as they shape our perceptual and...