Critique of Adlam and Rovelli (2022)

One thought on “Critique of Adlam and Rovelli (2022)”

1. I love the ‘cheekiness’ of this paper. It really raises the question for me regarding the storied history of the ‘Absorber Theory’ of Wheeler and Feynman and its quantum version as the TI and the relativistic version as RTI. And it is interesting that the so-called ‘Relational Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’ seems not to fully understand what ‘relational ontology’ requires when it comes to a process of ‘exchange’ or ‘Trans-action’ which is a fundamental bi-directionality. Both the potential ‘giver’ and the potential ‘receiver’ must ‘agree’ to the proposed transaction. I would argue that this is the reason why quantum physics requires imaginary/complex numbers for its mathematical expression. There is a ‘built-in’ inherent infinite circularity which one cannot pretend is not there–for example, by pretending that the requirement for imaginary numbers is some kind of a ‘mistake’ that can be circumvented with some carefully planned, but ultimately illegitimate, ‘fudging’. What I am wondering about is how this relates to what is really involved in a true ‘relational ontology’ that the RQM purports to incorporate and how the RQM somehow gets this wrong, and thus has to do some additional fudging and hand-waving to try and get it ‘back in line’ with what was the, by now wholly obscured, original intent. I think that there is a need to recognize the centrality of a relational grounding of the ontological which should not get lost in all of this. The problem is, as I think it may be, how relationality is understood in the context of real ‘communication’ (when what is exchanged is ‘information’), or, more generally, ‘Trans-action’… it is NOT a one-way ‘push’. It involves both a conferring ‘push’ and an active ‘reception’ for it to work.

   Reply