Since the question of how quantum mechanics came up at this Monday's meeting, I thought that some people here might be interested in stuff that I have written on this issue in the past for various e-lists.

I got into some aspects of the debate between the Copenhagen Interpretation (which was formulated by Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) and the proponents of the Causal Interpretation (also known as the Pilot Wave Interpretation and hidden-variables theory) in this post, well as in this one. The Causal Interpretation was largely developed by the physicist, David Bohm, who was an American but had to leave the US during the McCarthy period, eventually carrying on his work in the UK.

Besides the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Causal Interpretation, there exists several other interpretations of quantum mechanics including the Everett Interpretation or Multiple Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which quantum wave functions do not collapse as they are said to do in the Copenhagen Interpretation. I made mention of this here. Wikipedia has an article on it.

I believe that I also made mention of the Australian-British philosopher and logician, Graham Priest, who seems to think that his paraconsistent logic can help to resolve some of the issues concerning the interpretation of quantum mechanics. I once wrote about him in this post. You can see his web page here
, where he is apparently practicing karate kicks to be used against philosophical opponents.

I wasn't at the discussion, but I will hazard a guess that QM came up as an attempt to counter determinism. I wanted to mention that Brian Greene, in The Fabric of the Cosmos says that should the Schroedinger equation turn out to be all there is to QM, that would make QM deterministic at its heart.

-steve

The issue of interpretations of quantum mechanics came up within the context of a discussion by Tom of Gary Drescher's book, Good and Real,. Drescher is supposed to speak at this month's Saloon Salon.

In terms of interpretations of quantum mechanics, he is an adherent of the Everett Interpretation (also known as the Multiple Worlds Interpretation). He seems to believe that this interpretation of quantum mechanics is the one that is most compatible with a mechanistic worldview, since it makes quantum indeterminism a matter of appearance. This interpretation of quantum mechanics was originally developed by Hugh Everett, has been long championed by David Deutsch, supported by Steven Weinberg, and, I believe, also by Stephen Hawking. For these people, the Everett Interpretation is favored because it is seen as offering an interpretation of QM that is consistent with an ontological realism.

To some extent, the motivations behind support for the Everett Interpretation are not unlike the original interpretations behind the Causal Interpretation. David Bohm was very uncomfortable with the Copenhagen Interpretation because he saw its fundamental indeterminism as giving aid and comfort to reactionary worldviews, and as a Marxist and occasional CP member, he sought an alternative understanding of quantum mechanics, which would portray the universe at all levels of organization from the subatomic level up to such macroscopic levels as the biological and social levels, as all being law-governed, and hence upderstandable and modifiable by human beings. (I discussed some of this in slightly more detail here.