The 2nd edition of my 2012 book The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Cambridge University Press) will be coming out in June, 2022. Below is an excerpt from Chapter 8, on the emergence of spacetime in the transactional picture. Comments welcome!
Sneak Peek at Chapter 8 of my forthcoming 2nd Edition
Published
Transactional Interpretation 
The irreflexivity condition on page 3 did not render correctly in my PDF
Thank you. I’ll see if I can fix this.
In the new chapter 8 it is stated that the quantum state remains in “quantumland” after transactions, and what makes the fabric of space-time are “events”. The quantumstate indeed must live on, if further transactions should be possible, but isn’t there an update, or collapse by a transaction, which makes a physical system manifest in space-time? I am missing this point in the new description.
Andreas Schlatter
Hi Andreas. Regarding rest-mass systems (emitters and absorbers): there is indeed an update in the system’s state, as indicated in Figure 2 and the discussion above it. But as shown in Figure 2, the system itself remains in the quantum substratum. The ‘spacetime fabric’ consists only of transferred real photons and their endpoints–emissions and absorptions– which can be tagged as spacetime events. This of course is a radical departure from the usual idea that all physical systems are in spacetime as a sort of background or container. According to RTI, spacetime is an emergent construct, and actually that is consistent with the fact that the gravitational field (as the metrical structure of spacetime) is sourced by matter. A field is always outside its source; field sources are not ‘inside’ the fields they create, even though of course they are affected by them. See the Conclusion in which I discuss this point.
Hi! Any update on when the 2nd edition will be released? Eagerly anticipating it!
Thanks Robert! There were some delays in getting it into production, but things are moving now. I’m hoping it will be out late this fall, but it’s possible it might slip to next year. Will update this site as soon as I get an estimated date!
Chapter 8 and the idea that spacetime is emergent is a huge step in the right direction, IMHO. The true underlying reality–which I would argue is fundamentally relational and primordial–is the Quantum Substratum. Spacetime and its contents, things and events, are productions of the species-specific human interface (each different species has evolved its own specific interface in response to its environmental conditions) that has evolved over the course of biological evolution–as has been suggested and shown to be a viable suggestion by Donald D Hoffman, in his work on distinguishing what is real from what is the actuality that is ‘produced’ by this interface. The key issue that Hoffman emphasizes is that this interface and its associated ‘instrument panel’ composed from sensory inputs from our evolved ‘transducers’ is NONveridical–it has evolved to optimally allow us to survive as embodied creatures in the context of the human ‘Umwelt’–not to show us the reality as it is. As a result, it ‘hides’ this true underlying relational reality of the quantum substratum from us. It is like flying a plane through zero visibility fog on instruments alone. You cannot directly see the world as it is ‘out there’, so all you have available are the readings on your instrument panel that tell you about the ‘physical actuality’ as it is being detected, and the hope that they are accurate. The real world behind the fog is the quantum substratum. What we see on the instrument panel–physical ‘actuality’ as we detect it– is a product of our interface with that reality. The challenge is to ‘reverse-engineer’ the spacetime interface to get some idea of what is really ‘out there’ and I think that RTI is giving us a nice ‘look under the hood’…and I think that one thing that comes out of this is that reality is fundamentally relational given that that is how a ‘trans-action’ really is constituted–as a relational interaction–ie. a ‘mediated communication’, between the ’emitter’ and the ‘absorber’. The idea that reality is fundamentally relational has huge, broad-ranging implications, I think. I personally think the work and ideas of Donald Hoffman are relevant here. And also the relational ontology of Robert Rosen and Nicolas Rashevsky, proposed as an alternative to an ‘ontology of states’ that derives from the mechanistic formalism and its assumptions. If this is true, then quantum physics is not a ‘mechanics’. It is based on relationality–not on formalization.