Two difficulties for wavefunction realism

According to wavefunction realism, we should think of the wavefunction of the universe—considered as a square-integrable function on R³ⁿ where n is the number of particles—as a kind of fundamental physical field.

Here are two interesting consequences of wavefunction realism. First, it seems like it should be logically possible for the fundamental physical field to take any logically coherent combination of values on R³ⁿ. But now imagine that the initial conditions of the wavefunction “field” are have it take a combination of values that is not a square-integrable function, either because it is nonmeasurable or because it is measurable but non-square-integrable. Then the Schroedinger equation “wouldn’t know” what to do with the wavefunction. In other words, for quantum physics to work, given wavefunction realism, we need a very special initial combination of values of the “wavefunction field”. This is not a knockdown argument, but it does suggest an underexplored need for fine-tuning of initial conditions.

Second, the solutions to the Schroedinger equation, understood distributionally, are only defined up to sets of measure zero. In other words, even though the Schroedinger equation is generally considered to be deterministic (any indeterminism in quantum mechanics comes in elsewhere, say in collapse), nonetheless the solutions to the equation are underdetermined when they are considered as square-integrable fields on R³ⁿ—if ψ(⋅,t) is a solution for a given set of initial conditions, so is any function that differs from ψ(⋅,t) only on a set of measure zero. Granted, any two candidates for the wavefunction that differ only on a set of measure zero provide the exact same empirical predictions. However, it is still troubling to think that so much of physical reality would be ungoverned by the laws. (There might be a solution using the lifting theorem mentioned in footnote 6 here, though.)

Non-measurable sets and intuition

Here’s an interesting reason to accept the existence of non-measurable sets (and hence of whatever weak version of the Axiom of Choice that it depends on). A basic family of mathematical results in analysis says that most measurable real-valued functions on the real line are “close to” being continuous, i.e., that they can be approximated by continuous functions in some appropriate sense. But it is intuitive to think that there “should” be real-valued functions on the real line that are not close to being continuous—there “should” be functions that are very, very messy. So, intuitively, there should be non-measurable functions, and hence non-measurable sets.

Little lemma on nonmeasurable functions

Let f be a nonmeasurable function ("non-measurable random variable") on a probability space. Then there are measurable functions f^L and f^U such that f^L≤f≤g^U everywhere, and such that for every pair of measurable functions a and b such that a≤f≤b we have a≤f^L and g^U≤b almost surely.

I.e., the function f^L is the unique-up-to-null-sets largest measurable function less than or equal to f, and f^U is the unique-up-to-null-sets smallest measurable function greater than or equal to g. Basically, f^L and f^U encode all the probabilistic information available about f.