Abstract
An important part of the influential Humean doctrine in philosophy is the supervenience principle (sometimes referred to as the principle of separability). This principle asserts that the complete state of the world supervenes on the intrinsic properties of its most fundamental components and their spatiotemporal relations (the so-called Humean mosaic). There are well-known arguments in the literature purporting to show that in quantum mechanics the Humean supervenience principle is violated, due to the existence of entangled states. Recently, however, arguments have been presented to the effect that the supervenience principle can be defended in Bohmian mechanics. The key element of this strategy lies in the observation that according to Bohmian mechanics the fundamental facts about particles are facts about their spatial locations, and moreover, for any proper subsystem of the world its state may non-trivially depend on the spatial configuration of the rest of the universe. Thus quantum-mechanical states of subsystems do not represent their intrinsic properties but rather characterize their relations with the environment. In this paper we point out the worry that this Bohmian strategy—known as Bohumianism—saves the letter but not the spirit of the Humean doctrine of supervenience, since it prima facie violates another seemingly important Humean principle, which we call Strong Supervenience and whose denial implies the existence of necessary connections among distinct individuals. We argue that the best defense for Bohumians is to question the fundamental existence of complex physical systems and their states by treating any reference to them as a convenient description of the underlying collection of Bohmian particles. We consider several pros and cons of this strategy.
Highlights
The main purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate the latest attempts to reconcile modern developments in quantum physics with the broad philosophical doctrine of Humeanism
While we side with Miller, Esfeld, Bhogal, and Perry in claiming, pace Maudlin, that quantum mechanics does not put the reductionist core of the Humean doctrine in serious jeopardy, we submit that the literature on the subject has so far glossed over a serious consequence that salvaging Humeanism in a Bohmian framework implies
The point, is to decide how much of the Humean doctrine rests upon the assumption of such a structure, that is, how much of the strong supervenience principle is dispensable without perverting the nature of Humean supervenience thesis
Summary
One recent episode in an ongoing battle between various philosophical approaches to quantum mechanics started out with a vigorous attack on Humeanism at the hands of Tim Maudlin in his provocatively titled piece “Why be Humean?” [21] It didn’t take long before defenders of the “greatest denier of necessary connections” responded to this challenge in various ways. Supervenience ensures the lack of necessary connections between fundamental objects, but does not exclude the possibility that these connections may emerge at higher levels of complexity To clarify this further, we spell out the conditions of Strong Supervenience and Binary Separability that in our opinion should constitute parts of the broader Humean doctrine, and we argue that Bohmian mechanics refutes them. We end the article with a suggestion for Bohmians to bite the bullet and go “Democritean”, i.e. accept that only fundamental particles (“atoms”) exist in the most literal sense of the word
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