Wave Function Realism and the Mathematization of Nature. A Phenomenological Perspective

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06618v1
• Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2026 16:50:06 GMT
• Title: Wave Function Realism and the Mathematization of Nature. A Phenomenological Perspective
• Authors: Philipp Berghofer, Harald A. Wiltsche,
• Abstract summary: This chapter reexamines wave function realism (WFR) through the lens of phenomenology.<n>We develop this idea by reconfiguring the notion of realism itself: not as objectivist, but as correlational and transcendental.<n>The resulting picture suggests that quantum mechanics, rather than depicting a world "minus observers," mathematically articulates the very correlation through which a world becomes manifest at all.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: This chapter reexamines wave function realism (WFR) through the lens of phenomenology. We begin by situating WFR within the broader debate about the ontology of the quantum state and the temptation to "read off" metaphysics from mathematical formalism. Against this background, we turn to the London-Bauer interpretation (LBI), the most explicit attempt to interpret quantum mechanics through phenomenological categories. On this view, the measurement transition is not a physical discontinuity but a reflective articulation of objectivity, and the wave function formally encodes the horizonal structure of world-givenness. We develop this idea by reconfiguring the notion of realism itself: not as objectivist, but as correlational and transcendental. The resulting picture suggests that quantum mechanics, rather than depicting a world "minus observers," mathematically articulates the very correlation through which a world becomes manifest at all.

Related papers

• Realism and Ontology in Quantum Mechanics and String Theory [0.0]
  Dualities in physics have challenged traditional forms of scientific realism.<n>We argue that ontological commitment should be treated as tied to specific empirical contexts.<n>We show how our view accommodates ontological pluralism while preserving a robust form of structural realism.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-18T23:31:13Z)
• WoW: Towards a World omniscient World model Through Embodied Interaction [83.43543124512719]
  Authentic physical intuition of the world model must be grounded in extensive, causally rich interactions with the real world.<n>We present WoW, a generative world model trained on 2 million robot interaction trajectories.<n>We establish WoWBench, a new benchmark focused on physical consistency and causal reasoning in video.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-09-26T17:59:07Z)
• Mimicking the Physicist's Eye:A VLM-centric Approach for Physics Formula Discovery [98.58830663687911]
  VIPERR-aq1 is a multimodal model that performs Visual Induction for Equation Reasoning.<n>It integrates visual perception, trajectory data, and symbolic reasoning to emulate the scientific discovery process.<n>It consistently outperforms state-of-the-art VLM baselines in accuracy and interpretability.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-08-24T14:34:21Z)
• Antirealism in sheep's clothing: Wave function realism and scientific realism [0.0]
  Wave function realism holds that the wave function, as described by quantum mechanics, corresponds to a real physical entity.<n>We argue that this view raises tensions for the purported realism of wave function realism and its compatibility with scientific realism more broadly.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-07-29T09:15:46Z)
• Towards a Generalized Theory of Observers [41.94295877935867]
  We argue that observers serve as indispensable reference points for measurement, reference frames, and the emergence of meaning.<n>We show how this formalism sheds new light on debates related to consciousness, quantum measurement, and computational boundaries.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-22T19:35:55Z)
• Quantum Perspectivism vs Nietzschean Perspectivism [0.0]
  Quantum Perspectivism is shown to function as both an interpretation of quantum mechanics and a physical model for understanding Nietzsche's perspectivism.<n>This framework combines quantum logic, the principle of complementarity, and contextuality to examine how perspectives construct reality.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-01-05T23:26:37Z)
• Intrinsic Physical Concepts Discovery with Object-Centric Predictive Models [86.25460882547581]
  We introduce the PHYsical Concepts Inference NEtwork (PHYCINE), a system that infers physical concepts in different abstract levels without supervision. We show that object representations containing the discovered physical concepts variables could help achieve better performance in causal reasoning tasks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-03-03T11:52:21Z)
• Bell's theorem: A bridge between the measurement and the mind/body problems [0.0]
  This essay is a quantum-dualistic, perspectival and synchronistic interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is termed the Nietzsche-Jung-Pauli interpretation and is a re-imagining of the Wigner-von Neumann interpretation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-10-13T12:16:07Z)
• Quantum realism: axiomatization and quantification [77.34726150561087]
  We build an axiomatization for quantum realism -- a notion of realism compatible with quantum theory. We explicitly construct some classes of entropic quantifiers that are shown to satisfy almost all of the proposed axioms.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-10-10T18:08:42Z)
• The Real Meaning of Quantum Mechanics [0.0]
  We suggest a contextual realist interpretation of relational quantum mechanics. The principal point is a correct understanding of the concept of reality. Within our interpretation, consciousness of the observer does not play any metaphysical role.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-07-20T19:44:50Z)
• Resource theory of imaginarity: Quantification and state conversion [48.7576911714538]
  Resource theory of imaginarity has been introduced, allowing for a systematic study of complex numbers in quantum mechanics and quantum information theory. We investigate imaginarity quantification, focusing on the geometric imaginarity and the robustness of imaginarity, and apply these tools to the state conversion problem in imaginarity theory. Our study reveals the significance of complex numbers in quantum physics, and proves that imaginarity is a resource in optical experiments.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-03-02T15:30:27Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.