Abstract
The notion of causation seems especially apt for being a crossroad between physics and metaphysics, in view of a revived interest both for causal notions in general philosophical analysis in general and causal views of quantum mechanics. As far as the latter is concerned, interesting sort of questions naturally arise when the relation between nonlocality and causation is taken into account. Also on the basis of recent classifications of theories of causation, in the paper I first will draw some general remarks mainly of a methodological character, and I will then review the conditions under which nonlocality can be shown to seriously challenge the no-action-at-a-distance requirement that special-relativistic theories are usually thought to embody. In this connection I will turn then to recent work on causal models of EPR. Over and above the specific merits of these models – mainly concerning the refutation of ‘impossibility claims’ about causal models of quantum correlations – a question arises: what sort of conceptual advantage do we obtain in producing causal models for such correlations in absence of a deeper understanding of the overall structure of the theory? I will argue that the only way toward such an understanding may be to cast in advance the problems in a clear and well-defined interpretational framework – which means primarily to specify the ontology that quantum theory is supposed to be about – and after to wonder whether problems that seemed worth pursuing still are so in the framework.
As a consequence, in the last two sections I will refer to GRW and Bohmian formulations and
quantum mechanics, in order to emphasize essentially two points: (i) the discussion on causality in quantum mechanics should be cast by using the conceptual resources allowed by ontologically unambiguous interpretations of quantum mechanics and not on the background of its ‘orthodox’ – hence vague – formulation; (ii) the interpretation-dependence of causal reasoning in quantum mechanics implies different approaches to causality in (the different versions of) GRW and Bohmian formulations.
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Notes
- 1.
See for instance Hitchcock (2007).
- 2.
See for instance Williamson (2007).
- 3.
For a recent survey on this issue see Suarez (2007).
- 4.
It is worth emphasizing that I refer here to hidden variables models, and not to hidden variables theories, for a simple reason. In the history of the hidden variables’ issue, the ‘theories’ in which more and more general locality conditions were assumed – and whose predictions have been shown to be inconsistent with those of quantum mechanics – were in fact theories only as a façon de parler; whereas the only full-fledged formal construction deserving the title of theory, namely Bohmian mechanics, is explicitly nonlocal.
- 5.
In his 1996 paper, Dickson has questioned the adequacy of locality conditions based on probabilistic independence when Bohmian mechanics is taken into account, and he argued that Bohmian mechanics may be shown to satisfy or violate that kind of locality depending on how a specific model of the theory is constructed (Dickson, 1996). This indicates, according to Dickson, that probabilistic independence is not adequate to capture the meaning of locality. It is worth recalling that the Dickson argument concerning the status of locality as probabilistic independence in Bohmian mechanics has been challenged in Maudlin (2000).
- 6.
For the sake of the present discussion, I assume such notions as property or emergence as uncontroversial. Of course they are not, but in my opinion it is anyway doubtful that a purely philosophical analysis of such notions could substantially contribute to a better understanding of the main issues in the foundations of quantum mechanics.
- 7.
As should be clear from the above account, the stochastic nature of the measurement process makes the instance of superluminal dependence even more perspicuous. On the difficulties of making sense of locality – and of the superluminal dependence that its violation would imply – in a strictly deterministic theory, see Dickson (1996) and Maudlin (2000).
- 8.
The fact that the ordinary wave function takes on different values at a given spacetime point according to which space-like hyperplane is considered, following from the generalization of the state as represented by a functional on the set of space-like hyperplanes, has analogies with the Fleming hyperplane dependence approach to quantum states (Fleming, 1989, 1996). It seems to me that the status of causation in the Fleming approach would be similar to that in the Aharonov-Albert approach, but this point deserves further investigations.
- 9.
- 10.
For a very sharp discussion of these ontologies and their implications, see Tumulka (2007).
- 11.
For a thorough discussion of the implications of the two GRW ontologies and their relation to Bohmian mechanics see Allori et al. (2006).
- 12.
As Tumulka aptly stresses, the problem itself of a possible relativistic extension of dynamical reduction models crucially depends on the clarification of the primitive ontology underlying the models (Tumulka, 2007, 3260).
- 13.
The problems with other proposals of relativistic extensions of Bohmian mechanics are briefly discussed in Tumulka (2007, 3257–3259).
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Laudisa, F. (2011). From Metaphysics to Physics and Back: the Example of Causation. In: Suárez, M. (eds) Probabilities, Causes and Propensities in Physics. Synthese Library, vol 347. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9904-5_5
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