Alexander Pruss's Blog

Suppose I want to figure out a good approximation to the eigenvalues of a certain Hamiltonian involving a moderately large number of Coulomb...

A common-sense response to Eddington’s two table problem is that a table just is composed of molecules. This leads to difficult questions o...

I’ve been naively thinking about what a reductive physicalist quantum ontology that matches the Hilbert-space formalism in the Schroedinger ...

For a while I’ve speculated that making ontological sense of quantum mechanics requires introducing a global entity into our ontology to gro...

I think there is a sense in which it is correct to say that: Bohmian quantum mechanics is only known to work empirically if we suppose tha...

Unless something like the Bohmian interpretation or a spatial collapse theory is right, quantum mechanics gives us good reason to think that...

I will give a really, really wacky version of quantum mechanics as a proof of concept that if one wants, one can have all of the following: ...

I’ve been thinking about some odd parallels between the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and open future views. On both sets...

In my previous post, I noted that a branching view of possibility, when continued into an infinite past, leads to the counterintuitive conse...

Suppose Alice gives Bob a gift of five lottery tickets, and Bob buys himelf a sixth one. Bob then wins the lottery. Intuitively, if one of t...

Panteleology holds that teleology is ubiquitous. Every substance aims at some end. The main objection to panteleology is the same as that ...

Quantum collapse is often said to “violate unitarity”. Either I’m confused or this phrasing is misleading or both. A bounded linear operat...

According to wavefunction realism, we should think of the wavefunction of the universe—considered as a square-integrable function on R 3 n ...

Imagine this unfortunate sequence of events will certainly befall you in a classical universe: You will be made to fall asleep. Upon waki...

One can think of Everettian multiverse quantum mechanics as beginning by proposing two theses: The global wavefunction evolves according t...

Virtue ethics is committed to this claim: A choice of A is wrong if and only if a person who had the relevant virtues explanatorily prior...

Somehow it hasn’t occurred to me until yesterday that quantum multiverse theories (without the traveling minds tweak) undercut half of ethi...

We often talk as if quantum mechanics were philosophically much more puzzling than classical mechanics. But there is also a deep philosophic...

Consider a possible world w 1 which is just like the actual world, except in one respect. In w 1 , in exactly a minute, I jump up with all ...

Much (but not all) contemporary philosophy of mind is written as if microphysics were fundamental physics. But as far as I know, only on tho...