Identity and indistinguishability in a quantum ontology of properties

OLIMPIA LOMBARDI

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Leibniz's Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles in Physics and Mathematics; 2019

Universidad Paris Diderot

The purpose of thistalk is to delineate an ontology for quantum mechanics that results adequateto the formalism of the theory. We will restrict our aim to the search of anontology that expresses the conceptual content of the recently proposed modal-Hamiltonianinterpretation, according to which the domain referred to by non-relativistic quantummechanics is an ontology of properties. The usual strategy in the literaturehas been to focus on only one of the interpretive problems of the theory and todesign an interpretation to solve it, leaving aside the remaining difficulties.On the contrary, our aim in the present work is to formulate a "global"solution, according to which different problems can be adequately tackled interms of a single ontology populated of properties, in which systems arebundles of properties. In particular, we will conceive indistinguishabilitybetween bundles as a relation derived from indistinguishability betweenproperties, and we will show that states, when operating on combinations ofindistinguishable bundles, act as if they were symmetric with no need of asymmetrization postulate.