La Bohume
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La Bohume Neil Dewar1
Received: 9 March 2016 / Accepted: 30 April 2018 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract This paper critically assesses whether quantum entanglement can be made compatible with Humean supervenience. After reviewing the prima facie tension between entanglement and Humeanism, I outline a recently-proposed Humean response, and argue that it is subject to two problems: one concerning the determinacy of quantities, and one concerning its relationship to scientific practice. Keywords Humean supervenience · Quantum entanglement · Quantum mechanics
1 Introduction David Lewis, famously, suggested a certain kind of picture of what the world is like. He called that picture Humean supervenience, and described it as follows: Humean Supervenience […] says that in a world like ours, the fundamental relations are exactly the spatiotemporal relations: distance relations, both spacelike and timelike, and perhaps also occupancy relations between point-sized things and spacetime points. And it says that in a world like ours, the fundamental properties are local qualities: perfectly natural intrinsic properties of points, or of point-sized occupants of points. Therefore it says that all else supervenes on the spatiotemporal arrangement of local qualities throughout all of history, past and present and future.1
1 Lewis (1994, p. 474).
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Neil Dewar [email protected] Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Munich, Germany
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Synthese
However, there is a concern that Humean Supervenience is inconsistent with our best physical theories.2 More specifically, there is a concern that the kind of world described by Lewis above—one which is fully and exhaustively characterised by the assignment of intrinsic qualities to points of spacetime—could not be a world described by quantum mechanics.3 More specifically still, the concern is that the characteristic quantum-mechanical phenomenon of entanglement rules out the possibility of giving an exhaustive description of the world by describing it point-by-point. So (according to these arguments), insofar as we take quantum mechanics to be true (i.e., insofar as we take the actual world to be accurately described by quantum mechanics), we should not take Humean Supervenience to be true either. More recently, however, there has been a fightback on behalf of Humean Supervenience: it has been argued that, at least if one is a Bohmian about quantum mechanics,4 then Humean Supervenience remains a consistent option after all. This paper seeks to resist this most recent defence of Humean Supervenience. First, I introduce the relevant pieces of Bohmian mechanics, and indicate the prima facie tension between entanglement and Humean Supervenience. Second, I discuss the argument that Bohmian Humeans (from here on out, “Bohumeans”) make to render their ontology compatible with Humean Supervenience. I then raise two problems for this argument: a problem concerning determinacy of quantities, and and a problem concerning scientifi
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