• bunchberry@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        Diamat is compatible with quantum theory but which way you interpret it ultimately depends upon where you stand on the issue of the thing-in-itself. As diamat denies that things can be considered in isolation but only in their interconnections with other things, it calls into question the physical reality of things-in-themselves, which led to a heated disagreement between Bogdanov and Lenin over this topic, where Bogdanov believed we should throw out the concept of the thing-in-itself whereas Lenin believed it was still a meaningful concept.

        If you side with Lenin then Einstein’s ensemble interpretation would be most compatible with that worldview. This is because quantum mechanics does not allow you to always break things up into individual “things,” such as in entangled systems. This is not a feature unique to quantum mechanics but to any statistical theory, including classical statistical mechanics, and so you have to conclude that the inability to divide things up into separable things must be due to the theory “missing” something, it must therefore not be complete. Models that propose what the missing thing is, such as de Broglie-Bohm theory or Hooft’s cellular automata models, would also be compatible with such a worldview.

        If you side with Bogdanov then Rovelli’s relational interpretation (which is also similar to the Benoit-Pris contextual reality interpretation) would be most compatible with that worldview as this interpretation drops the postulate from the get-go that the universe can be considered in terms of discrete objects and instead views it in terms of discrete events which can only be understood within a particular context, in relation to everything else. Unlike the ensemble interpretation, relational quantum mechanics is compatible with the view that quantum mechanics is complete and isn’t missing something.

        I would recommend you read the book Helgoland by the physicist Carlo Rovelli where he discusses interpretations of quantum theory as well as the Bogdanov-Lenin dispute. That book is of course in favor of relational quantum mechanics. You can check out the writings of the physicists Einstein, Bohm, Hooft, Anthony Rizzi, Leslie Ballentine, etc, if you want something more along the lines of the other direction.