arkajad said:
You want to know the truth, don't you? But first ask what is TRUTH? Those searching for truth deep enough meet paradoxes. In "Saving truth from paradoxes" Hartry Field suggests that, perhaps, we need to weaken the classical logic. Is some kind of quantum logic a solution? Perhaps...
Your comment that QM relates to reality via its construction is indeed the right way to think about it. It is a model that generates predictions/measurements. And these in turn confirm the model. So there is "truth" in the process.
People who study modelling as a process - epistemology/modelling relations - will also say that paradoxes are a feature of models because "good models" are closed systems of logical entailment. Once their axioms are granted, they have deductive certainty. But being closed, they also have by necessity crisp limits. Where they become self-referential, they will appear paradoxical.
So do we need a quantum logic to replace classical logic?
Again, those who have been wrestling with modelling theory in other areas of science - mind science and theoretical biology - would say good modelling is good modelling. If it works, it ain't broke. Agonising about truth and completeness is a false path. There is not some greater model that will come along and invalidate existing models in a simplistic way because paradoxes are evidence of something good in a model - causal closure.
However, there is indeed a "larger" way of modelling than the mechanical or computational paradigm that is "classical logic". And that would be a systems logic, or a holistic logic.
This would also be a "quantum" logic potentially in my view.
But again, the reaction needs to be balanced. There is already quite a literature on the nature of modelling, the reasons why self-reference leads to paradoxes, and why this is really a symptom of success more than failure.
The more contentious issue is whether a larger model of reality will come from "deeper" - that is from the smaller-scale substrate - or instead from the other direction, from a more holistic viewpoint.
Most people in physics talk as if they expect the next level of modelling to be sub-planckian. So they want to reduce GR to "QM scale". They want to reduce reality to the fine-grain substances like strings or loops.
Yet at the same time, a lot of the modelling is also holistic. LQG is meant to be background independent (and so able to weave its own metric). Condensed matter physics thinking is becoming increasingly important. Event horizons are again a way of thinking about the whole determines its parts.
I don't know if this is a proper analogy but it seems like that those who see QM as an impenetrable mystery are like those old flat Earth maps where the seas just drop off an edge into nothing. The fact that classical physics has boundaries is treated as a rupture, a catastrophe, when really the world is round and, likewise, good models have causal closure.
QM clearly seems an open model in key regards. The collapse by an "observer" still has to be inserted informally by hand and is not part of the model. But it is a closed model if you push that collapse issue to the margins - as with MWI and other "no collapse" interpretations for example.
So yes, a larger model seems possible - one that includes the very self-referential issue of the collapse. And decoherence seems the way to go on answering this - a holistic systems approach. But QM itself seems closed in its own terms, just as classical models are also closed in their own terms.
So nothing seems fundamentally broke about our modelling of reality, and the future direction for progress also seems pretty clear.
