Can We Quarantine the Quantum Blight?

Abstract

In the science fiction novel Quarantine, Greg Egan imagines a universe where interactions with human observers collapse quantum wavefunctions. Aliens, unable to collapse wavefunctions, tire of being slaughtered by these collapses. In response they erect an impenetrable shield around the solar system, protecting the rest of the universe from human interference and locking humanity into a starless Bubble. When confronting scientific realism and the quantum, many philosophers try to do the theoretical counterpart of this fictional practical strategy. Quantum mechanics is beset with many hard-to-resolve interpretational challenges. Philosophers—appealing to decoherence and coarse-graining—try to put these in a Bubble and hope that they can go about their philosophizing as before. Chapter 4 aims to burst this Bubble, and then explores ways of eliminating quantum underdetermination, showing that such attempts lead to philosophical gridlock.