Source
Faye & Jaksland (2021), LIT-1672, §5; read in NOTE-1220.
What was actually shown
Barad (2007, 348): “we should not conclude from the fact that the entanglement is not made explicit by this measurement that the entanglement has become ontologically ‘disentangled’”. Relational quantum mechanics has no collapse because it treats the wave function as a bookkeeping device; agential realism has intra-actions that produce determinate values while the systems “become (ontologically) entangled”. That the system “appears as a mixture if the degrees of freedom of the instruments are bracketed” (2007, 346) “does not explain why a measurement finds one rather than another value associated with the eigenstates of the (improper) mixture”. Taking Rovelli’s solution “would compromise the ontological relational holism that drives many of the other alleged consequences of agential realism”.
What this does not say
- That agential realism is incoherent. The authors allow that subtler answers may exist, and conclude that saying it is consistent with quantum mechanics “involves a leap of faith”.
- That relational quantum mechanics’ answer is satisfactory; a note cites Laudisa (2019) that treating the evolution as brute is not explanatory.