Why the quantum state only exists in our mind
Seeing | Foundations of Physics | 2025-06-06
Hans Busstra, MA
Lidia del Rio, PhD
David Schmid, PhD
Dr. David Schmid, Dr. Lídia Del Rio and Hans Busstra explore a metaphysical shift that’s happening in the foundations of physics: the wave function is no longer regarded as something real, but just as a description of what we know about the world. In philosophical terms: the wave function is not ontic, but epistemic. And in more popular terms: the multiverse is science fiction, resting on a too-literal interpretation of a piece of mathematics called the Schrödinger equation.
Our previous video with Dr. Del Rio on the Frauchiger-Renner thought experiment:
Three other ‘epistemicists’, who’ve just been awarded a prestigious prize in the foundations of physics:
Chapters marks:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:30 — When did it dawn on you that QM is weird?
00:05:54 — The quantum phenomena that still scare David
00:07:53 — How to account for non-locality
00:12:19 — “What are the symbols representing?”
00:15:34 — What is the wavefunction really?
00:17:00 — “The standard view we are taught in the classroom…”
00:19:23 — Classically explaining quantum
00:20:23 — On Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment
00:28:38 — How to interpret the delayed choice experiment
00:32:56 — How can a single particle ‘know’ what’s going on at both paths?
00:36:41 — Quantum phenomena that remain weird: contextuality
00:44:38 — What are the viable ontological explanations we have?
00:48:26 — Is there evidence for an epistemic interpretation?
00:52:56 — Understanding epistemic interpretations
00:57:28 — Are we in a new era of physics?
01:00:43 — Lídia on what constitutes measurement
01:04:36 — How relevant are these recent theoretical findings?
01:07:36 — Experiments with AI as an observer?
01:08:36 — David and Lídia on what consciousness is
01:13:51 — Closing thoughts
Relevant scientific work of Schmid and Del Rio:
Why interference phenomena do not capture the essence of quantum theory
L Catani, M Leifer, D Schmid, RW Spekkens
Quantum 7, 1119
A review and analysis of six extended Wigner’s friend arguments
D Schmid, Y Yīng, M Leifer
arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.16220
Guiding our interpretation of quantum theory by principles of causation and inference
D Schmid, Thesis, University of Waterloo
https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/items/7aed8173-684a-40af-bff5-e625f29fe810
Thought experiments in a quantum computer,
Nuriya Nurgalieva, Simon Mathis, Lídia del Rio, Renato Renner:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06236
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Dr. David Schmid, Dr. Lídia Del Rio and Hans Busstra explore a metaphysical shift that’s happening in the foundations of physics: the wave function is no longer regarded as something real, but just as a description of what we know about the world. In philosophical terms: the wave function is not ontic, but epistemic. And in more popular terms: the multiverse is science fiction, resting on a too-literal interpretation of a piece of mathematics called the Schrödinger equation.
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Physicist Dr. Lídia Del Rio, Essentia Foundation’s Research Fellow for Quantum Information Theory at the University of Zürich, explains to Hans Busstra one of the strangest quantum conundra confronting the foundations of physics: the Frauchiger-Renner (FR) thought experiment.
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