Aristotle and Quantum Mechanics: Potentiality and Actuality, Spontaneous Events and Final Causes
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Aristotle and Quantum Mechanics: Potentiality and Actuality, Spontaneous Events and Final Causes Boris Kožnjak1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Aristotelian ideas have in the past been applied with mixed fortunes to quantum mechanics. One of the most persistent criticisms is that Aristotle’s notions of potentiality and actuality are burdened with a teleological character long ago abandoned in the natural sciences. Recently this criticism has been met with a model of the actualization of quantum potentialities in light of Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘spontaneous events’. This presumably restores the nowadays acceptable idea of efficient causation in place of Aristotle’s original doctrine of the ‘four causes’. In this article I challenge the model by arguing that when properly scrutinized Aristotle’s final cause poses no problems for an Aristotelian reading of quantum mechanics. Final causes in fact provide a better ontology for quantum mechanics than spontaneous causation. The idea of ‘spontaneity’ is unanalyzable and therefore of little use in quantum mechanics. In addition, it is ontologically sterile in the context of quantum measurement, as shown by a historical and conceptual review of the role of efficient causation in experimental physics. Keywords Quantum mechanics · Aristotle · Potentiality · Actuality · Spontaneous causation · Four causes · Teleology · Efficient causation
1 Introduction In this article, I critically address the most recent physically and philosophically compelling rehabilitation of Aristotle’s doctrine of dunamis and energeia in the interpretative context of non-relativistic quantum mechanics (Jaeger 2017). Its author (Jaeger, hereafter) set himself the task of demonstrating that “previous consideration of potentia has failed to consider fully the relationship of quantum potentiality to dunamis and so prematurely dismissed the significance of Heisenberg’s explicit references to it” (Jaeger 2017, 5). In particular, Jaeger aimed at demonstrating how “potentiality can be more fully articulated in the quantum context by further consideration of Aristotle’s original notion” (Jaeger 2017, 5). His main motivation was to challenge perhaps the most serious past criticism of the possibility of an Aristotelian interpretation of quantum mechanics, put forward most * Boris Kožnjak [email protected] 1
Institute of Philosophy, Ulica grada Vukovara 54, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
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prominently by Abner Shimony. Namely, according to Shimony, Heisenberg’s proposals that the quantum mechanical state function Ψ should be taken as no less than a “quantitative formulation of the concept of dunamis or, in later Latin version, potentia, in Aristotle’s philosophy” (Heisenberg 1961, 9), and that quantum measurement represents “the transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘actual’” (Heisenberg 1958, 54), necessarily fail since the very doctrine of potentiality and actuality bears a strong teleological character long ago abandoned in the natural sciences. To challenge this criticism
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