Everyday Quantum Reality

Book Preface

Most people have heard about quantum physics and its remarkable, well-nigh bizarre claims. One effect of these claims is to suggest that quantum reality is a world apart from everyday experience, that the two realities are discontinuous. In this book I dispute this outlook by showing that variations of quantum puzzles have long been part of everyday experience. If one is inclined to puzzle over familiar concepts and experiences, puzzles inevitably emerge, and some deepen toward the kinds of issues now touted as unique to quantum physics. I hold that there is no uniqueness: one can find quantum puzzles, or variations thereof, in the backyard of everyday experience.

One often reads that quantum physics is an abrupt departure from the commonsensical understandings of classical (pre-quantum) physics. While that may be true in certain instances, the foundational principles of classical physics, by positing a deterministic world filled with lifeless objects, directly contradict the stubborn everyday sense that we are something more than lifeless objects. Classical physics only makes sense because we implicitly exempt ourselves from its determination that everything issues up from the mechanistic interplay of material particles. And by freely exempting ourselves from this metaphysical postulate, we throw its limitations into relief. The postulate does not apply to us in every way; if it did, we would never be the wiser. To adapt one of Epicurus’s insights, if we were lifeless entities we could never know it, for we would be dead even to death and, of course, to the question of whether we are lifeless automatons or beings whose fundamental nature transcends mechanical necessity.1

My point is that classical physics makes sense only if we overlook its assumption of mechanistic lifelessness, and often we do overlook that assumption. But quantum physics, by challenging the claim of a deterministic cosmos, gives us reason to reconsider the metaphysical foundations of classical physics, for the assumption of determinism interlocks tightly with that of mechanistic lifelessness. I hope to show that quantum physics opens space for ideas that are at once new and old: new in the sense that they run contrary to those of classical physics and old in the sense that they coincide with everyday experience—what some thinkers have called pre-conceptual or pre-theoretical experience.