No, it’s the lack of agreement that is the problem. Interpreting classical mechanics is philosophical as well, but there is generally agreement on how to think about it. You rarely see deep philosophical debates around Newtonian mechanics on how to “properly” interpret it. Even when we get into Einsteinian mechanics, there are some disagreements on how to interpret it but nothing too significant. The thing is that something like Newtonian mechanics is largely inline with our basic intuitions, so it is rather easy to get people on board with it, but QM requires you to give up a basic intuition, and which one you choose to give up on gives you an entirely different picture of what’s physically going on.
Philosophy has never been empirical, of course any philosophical interpretation of the meaning of the mathematics gives you the same empirical results. The empirical results only change if you change the mathematics. The difficulty is precisely that it is more difficult to get everyone on the same page on QM. There are technically, again, some disagreements in classical mechanics, like whether or not the curvature of spacetime really constitutes a substance that is warping or if it is just a convenient way to describe the dispositions of how systems move. Einstein for example criticized the notion of reifying the equations too much. You also cannot distinguish which interpretation is correct here as it’s, again, philosophical.
If we just all decided to agree on a particular way to interpret QM then there wouldn’t be an issue. The problem is that, while you can mostly get everyone on board with classical theories, with QM, you can interpret it in a time-symmetric way, a relational way, a way with a multiverse, etc, and they all give you drastically different pictures of physical reality. If we did just all pick one and agreed to it, then QM would be in the same boat as classical mechanics: some minor disagreements here and there but most people generally agree with the overall picture.
What value does such an agreement have? Why is it a problem that there’s a plurality of equivalent understandings? Does that plurality add to or subtract from our understanding of reality?
You say the different interpretations give drastically different pictures of physical reality, but not in an empirical sense. But can we really talk of an empirically unavailable physical reality? If pilot waves, multiverses and wave function collapses all lead to the same empirical reality, does it make any difference to physical reality which one you think about?
No, it’s the lack of agreement that is the problem. Interpreting classical mechanics is philosophical as well, but there is generally agreement on how to think about it. You rarely see deep philosophical debates around Newtonian mechanics on how to “properly” interpret it. Even when we get into Einsteinian mechanics, there are some disagreements on how to interpret it but nothing too significant. The thing is that something like Newtonian mechanics is largely inline with our basic intuitions, so it is rather easy to get people on board with it, but QM requires you to give up a basic intuition, and which one you choose to give up on gives you an entirely different picture of what’s physically going on.
Philosophy has never been empirical, of course any philosophical interpretation of the meaning of the mathematics gives you the same empirical results. The empirical results only change if you change the mathematics. The difficulty is precisely that it is more difficult to get everyone on the same page on QM. There are technically, again, some disagreements in classical mechanics, like whether or not the curvature of spacetime really constitutes a substance that is warping or if it is just a convenient way to describe the dispositions of how systems move. Einstein for example criticized the notion of reifying the equations too much. You also cannot distinguish which interpretation is correct here as it’s, again, philosophical.
If we just all decided to agree on a particular way to interpret QM then there wouldn’t be an issue. The problem is that, while you can mostly get everyone on board with classical theories, with QM, you can interpret it in a time-symmetric way, a relational way, a way with a multiverse, etc, and they all give you drastically different pictures of physical reality. If we did just all pick one and agreed to it, then QM would be in the same boat as classical mechanics: some minor disagreements here and there but most people generally agree with the overall picture.
What value does such an agreement have? Why is it a problem that there’s a plurality of equivalent understandings? Does that plurality add to or subtract from our understanding of reality?
You say the different interpretations give drastically different pictures of physical reality, but not in an empirical sense. But can we really talk of an empirically unavailable physical reality? If pilot waves, multiverses and wave function collapses all lead to the same empirical reality, does it make any difference to physical reality which one you think about?