QUANTUM ONTOLOGY

The Founders of Quantum Physics were both mechanics and philosophers, more exactly ontologists. Unsurprisingly, as ontologists, they disagreed with each other [1].

Among the consequences of Quantum Ontology: The traditional proof of the “Ontological” Existence of God is deconstructed by Quantum And Differential Topology… Ontology is the logic of… what is. No less. It’s an obscure word that philosophers love to brandish. But the concept has been at the core of the hardest problems in physics… for centuries… And progress has been made… Unbeknownst to most philosophers. Let’s try to correct that.

My argument against ontology as philosophical traditional views it is this: a necessary part of describing reality, what things are… is Quantum Physics, where local becomes global, and Differential Topology, where local constructs global. However traditional ontology assumes that bigger is not different from smaller. But a reminder is in order:

The compound concept ontology (‘study of being’) combines onto- (Greek: ὄν, on; gen. ὄντος, ontos, ‘being’ or ‘that which is’) and logia (-λογία, ‘logical discourse’). While the etymology is Greek, the oldest extant records of the word itself is a Neo-Latin form ontologia, which appeared thanks to Swiss based Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) in 1606.

Quantum Physics was unknown to the Tadjik Ibn Sina (Avicenna, Xth century), author of the first ontological argument on the existence of God and (parrot and Saint) Anselm (XIth century), who gave a simpler version. 

Avicenna distinguishes between a thing that needs an external cause in order to exist – a contingent thing – and a thing by its intrinsic nature – a necessary existent. Contingency seemed to lead to an infinite regress, cosmological arguments… So Avicenna concluded that some necessary cause (namely God) is needed to end the infinite chain. However this argument assumes that the information space is flat, so that what is global is just small written large. Advances in physics and mathematics show that this is not correct.

One can demolish the existence of indefinitely large numbers using the combination of Quantum Physics with Black Holes Physics. The argument generalizes to any infinity.

Independently, arguing that Quantum contingency must have a finite exponential radius… in direct consequence of differential topology, one must introduce a finite radius for Quantum Entanglement (SQPR)… The second argument seems similar to Avicenna’s desire to kill the infinite chain… Although SQPR was actually derived from the most logical granular analysis of topology we have: non flat differential topology always comes with a finite exponential radius…  

Demolishing the ontological proof of the existence of “God” using physics couldn’t be imagined before a century ago because Quantum Physics and its existence complex-waves mechanics was completely unimaginable.

Quantum Physics computes secretly with partial elements of known reality. The adjective “partial” is crucial (they are known as “eigenstates”, a Germano-English noun qualifying the basis vectors of reality considered). 

Many academia proclaimed “philosophers” don’t know much about Quantum Physics… so they don’t realize that Quantum Ontology is part of the reality which has been scientifically demonstrated to exist.

Cartesian materialism argues that it is possible to find the content of conscious experience moment by moment in the mind. Materialism argues that matter is the fundamental ‘substance‘. It is traditionally a point of view in ontology.

However, Quantum Physics throws out through the mind’s window what “matter” is, what “substance” is, or even what “fundamental processes” are. One can check Feynman’s “Theory Of Fundamental Processes” 

The concepts uncovered by Quantum Physics are so fundamental that they impacted mathematics, and should impact all branches of logic and wisdom. Concepts such as “Renormalization” where the act of observation changes the… ontology… Should be crucial in Twentieth-First Century philosophy.

Independently of Quantum Physics, geometry, which had been stuck in a trance caused by Euclid, finally rediscovered non-Euclidean geometry.,,, Starting with the rediscovery of elliptic geometry by the Hungarian genius Bolyai… What does differential geometry say? That on a general surface, distance and parallelism can only be defined LOCALLY. 

Special Relativity applies this localization to space-time; what Henri Poincaré called “Local Time”. So  it should have been obvious by the Nineteenth Century that Ontology had to be localized too. Then the rise of Quantum Physics should made obvious that Ontology had to be QUANTUM, or was not. Physics Nobel Niels Bohr tried to help ontology with his theory of complementarity. However, Quantum Field Theory, if nothing else, made complementarity irrelevant. In QFT, matter is created from apparently nothing, disappears before being directly offered, but makes its ephemeral existence felt.   

The preceding has a drastic impact on the Theory Of Knowledge (TOK). TOK must determine what knowledge is made of, the atoms of knowledge, so to speak. However, both differential geometry and Quantum Physics says that one can say more, have a more complex logic by making a more granular analysis! 

These advances in understanding in the last two centuries have a direct impact on ontology.  What there is must be analyzed differentially (in the mathematical sense) and through Quantum Physics (which uses non commutative differential topology, no less!)... Thus the old ontological arguments are not correct. Indeed, what do these old arguments do? They analyze the whole… As if it were the same in its totality as it is granularly… precisely what we now know, logically and experimentally, is impossible! 

All the old notions have vanished upon closer inspection: what is reductionism, when reduction brings delocalization? What is materialism when materials are made from exclusion principles and fields which are only virtual? What is mind-body dualism, supposedly when mind and body are different substances, when matter seems to have a mind of its own when dissolved at the level of fundamental processes?

Artificial Consciousness, what truly Quantum Computers are, will help us understand all this.

Ontology is more alive than ever, simply it has become Quantum and Differential.

Patrice Ayme

Quantum Physics all over, held together by delocalization and entanglement.

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[1] Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Plato are famous theoreticians of what existence was… Planck, main promoter of Einstein, disagreed with him on the nature of light, yet the latter got the Nobel precisely for that. De Broglie disagreed with the Copenhagen School, which owed him all. Heisenberg disagreed with Einstein while pointing out to Einstein he used Einstein’s own methodology against him… Dirac took everybody by surprise by generalizing what space was, rediscovering pure math of Cartan developed 15 years earlier… And so on… Ontology has become the most practical thing…