It doesn’t really have much to do with particles vs. fields. We talk about measurements because measurements are the thing we actually observe. It seems strange to say you can model the world as a causal network if the causal network doesn’t include your actual observations. If you want to choose a particular frame of reference and write down the wavefunction time evolution in that frame (while ignoring space) then you can say it’s a causal network (which is just a linear chain, and deterministic at that) but IMO that’s not very informative. It also loses the property of having things made of parts, which AFAIU was one of your objectives here.
The wavefunction does have plenty of internal structure, that structure just doesn’t line up neatly with space. It won’t just be a linear chain, and it will be made of “parts”, but those parts won’t necessarily line up neatly with macroscopic observations/objects.
And that’s fine—figuring out how to do ontology mapping between the low-level “parts” and the high-level “parts” is a central piece of the problem. Not being able to directly observe variables in the low-level causal diagram is part of that. If we want e.g. a theory of abstraction, then these issues are perfect use-cases.
It doesn’t really have much to do with particles vs. fields. We talk about measurements because measurements are the thing we actually observe. It seems strange to say you can model the world as a causal network if the causal network doesn’t include your actual observations. If you want to choose a particular frame of reference and write down the wavefunction time evolution in that frame (while ignoring space) then you can say it’s a causal network (which is just a linear chain, and deterministic at that) but IMO that’s not very informative. It also loses the property of having things made of parts, which AFAIU was one of your objectives here.
The wavefunction does have plenty of internal structure, that structure just doesn’t line up neatly with space. It won’t just be a linear chain, and it will be made of “parts”, but those parts won’t necessarily line up neatly with macroscopic observations/objects.
And that’s fine—figuring out how to do ontology mapping between the low-level “parts” and the high-level “parts” is a central piece of the problem. Not being able to directly observe variables in the low-level causal diagram is part of that. If we want e.g. a theory of abstraction, then these issues are perfect use-cases.
I know this was 3 years ago, but was this disagreement resolved, maybe offline?
I don’t think we’ve talked about it since then.