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Perspectival Objectivity Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Observer-Dependent Reality

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Perspectival Objectivity Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Observer-Dependent Reality Perspectival Objectivity or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Observer-Dependent Reality Peter W. Evans∗ School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland Abstract Brukner(2018) proposes a no-go theorem for observer-independent facts. A possible consequence of the theorem is that there can be no absolute facts about the world, only facts relative to an observer. However, admitting such observer dependency runs the risk of licensing pernicious anthropocentrism in our account of reality, thereby precluding the possibility of objectivity in scientific inquiry, which would surely count as a mark against taking Brukner’s result too seriously at face value. In this paper I argue that, properly understood, observer-dependent reality does not preclude objectivity, and I claim that this idea has philosophical pedigree, too. Working through the examples of colour perception and causality, I identify a perfectly reasonable notion of ‘perspectival objectivity’. I argue that such a view would not be out of place in Bohr’s philosophy of quantum theory, and claim that this notion of perspectival objectivity can be appropriated as part of an understanding of quantum phenomena to take the sting out of the possibility of observer- dependent reality, and permitting the objectivity required for scientific inquiry. 1 Introduction Employing a pair of Wigner’s friend scenarios that share an entangled bipartite quantum sys- tem, Brukner(2018) constructs a Bell-style no-go theorem for observer-independent facts by deriving a formal inequality from basic assumptions that is violated by the quantum mechanical formalism. More precisely, the no-go theorem demonstrates that the following assumptions are incompatible: quantum theory is universal, in the sense that quantum predictions hold at any scale; the choice of the measurement settings of one observer has no influence on the outcomes of the other distant observers (‘locality’); the choice of measurement settings is statistically in- dependent from the rest of the experiment (sometimes known as ‘free choice’); one can jointly assign truth values to the propositions about observed outcomes of different observers (the truth values form a Boolean algebra) (Brukner, 2018, p.5). Thus if one accepts the universality of ∗email: [email protected] 1 quantum mechanics (which excludes the class of quantum models known as ‘collapse models’), and also accepts locality and free choice (arguments against which can be motivated by other more famous no-go theorems (Bell, 1964, 1966)), then the violation of Brukner’s Bell-type in- equality by observed quantum systems (which has already been demonstrated (Proietti et al., 2019)) implies that Brukner’s no-go theorem rules out the possibility of jointly assigning truth values to the propositions about observed outcomes of different observers; that is, the theorem rules out observer-independent “facts”. A possible consequence of this theorem is that there can be no absolute facts about the world – that is, no absolute third-person description of reality – only facts relative to each observer. However, admitting such observer dependency runs the risk of licensing pernicious anthropocentrism in our account of reality: observer dependency might preclude the possibility that observers agree about any facts of reality, thereby precluding the possibility of objective scientific inquiry. This sort of observer dependency would surely count as a mark against taking Brukner’s result too seriously at face value. As Brukner(2018, p.7) points out, the result that facts of reality are observer dependent has precedent in relational quantum mechanics, quantum Bayesianism, and the (neo)-Copenhagen interpretation(s). What is less commonly known is that, properly understood, the notion that worldly facts are observer dependent has philosophical pedigree also. In particular, one can find examples wherein some feature of the world is in part a function of the agent perspective while at the same time, given such a perspective that is inescapably shared between similar agents, there is an objective fact of the matter concerning that feature. I call this position perspectival objectivity. I argue that this notion is precisely the notion required to make sense of the consequences of Brukner’s no-go theorem and, moreover, that such a view would not be out of place in Bohr’s philosophy of quantum theory. This notion of perspectival objectivity is not out of place amongst a cluster of views in the philosophy of science concerned with scientific perspectivism, in particular perspectival realism (Giere, 2006; Massimi, 2012, 2018a). Such views set out to carve a middle path between considerations of the historical and cultural situatedness of scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and a commitment to the existence of a mind-independent, or context-free, reality, on the other. The perspectival notion I espouse in this work is not so concerned with the existence of a mind-independent reality—although this is an obvious task for future research on this theme. The perspectival notion for which I argue here is purely directed towards the objectivity of scientific knowledge, bracketing to one side considerations for the nature of reality. To this end, I take the situatedness at the heart of this perspectival notion to be an inescapable condition of worldly-directed human agency. The paper proceeds as follows. In §2 I consider two examples that motivate the idea of perspectival objectivity: first, in §2.1, the relatively straightforward case of colour perception; and secondly, in §2.2, the more nuanced case of causal perspectivalism. In §3, I consider Bohr’s quantum picture and claim that perspectival objectivity, when understood in the sense espoused in §2, is not out of place as an interpretation of his approach. In §4 I briefly explore a hierarchy of different types of perspectivalism, in order of increasing inescapability to human agents, to argue that the perspectivalism that is best for understanding observer dependency in quantum 2 mechanics is indeed inescapable to human agents, and thus a shared perspective across human agents ensures the objectivity of scientific inquiry. In this way, the notion of perspectival objectivity in quantum mechanics takes the sting out of observer-dependent reality, and thus Brukner’s no-go theorem. 2 Two case studies Let us now consider two case studies that will help motivate the notion of perspectival objec- tivity. We begin with the objectivity of colour perception. 2.1 Is there colour when nobody looks? Imagine you are standing on a deserted beach looking westward on a warm Summer’s evening. As the sun descends towards the horizon, the sky and clouds above you begin to glow with vibrant oranges, pinks, and reds. Now imagine a similar westward facing beach on a warm Summer’s evening with a similar sunset in process, but this time the beach is properly deserted, in the sense that there is no embodied human agent that is the subject of any experience of the aforementioned sunset—perhaps this moment exists somewhere on Earth 500 million years ago. Do the sky and clouds in this moment glow with the same vibrant oranges, pinks, and reds? Are the colours really there? This is a well-known example, so I will not labour the point. But the answer to whether the colours are really there depends on what we mean by ‘really there’. A quick detour through the human optical system and colour perception will illuminate the issue. The human optical system consists of three different types of specialised retinal cells at the back of the eye, called cones, that are sensitive to three different spectral ranges, which gives rise to trichromatic vision in humans. When stimulated by incoming light to the eye, the cones, through a chain of chemical events, emit an electrical signal that is sent to the visual cortex via the optic nerve, and (to cut the long story short) this is then processed by the brain as a visual experience. The combination of the three cones provides a response to the stimulus that is dependent upon the frequency profile of the light, but this dependence is not one-to-one, rather it is many-to-one. That is, many quite different frequency profiles can produce the same signal in the optic nerve that is then processed in the brain to a single colour experience. Thus two ordinary objects that are an identical shade of yellow to the human eye—say, a banana and a tea cup—might very well have completely different surface spectral reflectance profiles, despite being identified as identical shades according to the human optical system. In fact, the frequency profiles that arise from the surface spectral reflectance properties of all the identically shaded yellow objects that can be observed might only have in common that the human optical system identifies them as the same shade of yellow (Hubel, 1988, p.165). We can see then that the answer to the question concerning the reality of the colours of the prehistoric sunset. What is really there at some point on the beach where we would imagine ourselves to be standing is a frequency profile that is a function of, say, the surface spectral reflectance of the clouds. But that this is orange or red is purely a function of the human optical response to that particular frequency profile. So in part we would like to say that 3 there is some objective feature of the world ‘out there’, the particular frequency profile, but in part the ascription of colour to that profile is a subjective feature of human agents. It is certainly not the case that this subjectivity is of the sort that a human agent might in some sense decide the nature of the colour experience in response to the stimulus. There is a fact of the matter in the world that, given a human optical system and some particular frequency profile, some particular colour experience will be had.
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