Sean Carroll

You know, the image of the world that we have just from our everyday life, or as Judea Pearl said, you know, when we were babies in the crib, we're sort of causally mapping the world around us.

And as Alison Kopnik also said, you know, and that causal map involves three-dimensional space, even if we don't call it that when we're babies, and things with locations in space.

And what I'm saying is let's abandon all that.

Let's take seriously the idea that we're talking about a bare bones, super austere, fundamental version of reality.

And our job is to not impose our folk wisdom on it, but rather seeing how the manifest image of the world emerges from that deep down austere image.

That is the puzzle.

That's the job.

That's the assignment we're being given by the theory, okay?

And if you take that attitude, if you say, all right, I'm just gonna be as bare bones as possible.

I'm not gonna bring the baggage

that I have from my classical everyday experience and force it into boxes where it doesn't fit, what are we left with?

What is quantum mechanics actually saying?

So my claim is that the wave function, which you think of as a function of position or momentum or whatever,

This is just what we call in math a representation of the quantum mechanical state.

The quantum mechanical state is a vector in Hilbert space, or sometimes it's an operator in Hilbert space.

There's details there we're not going to get into.

But that sounds a little circular because Hilbert space is the space of all quantum mechanical states.

And what I'm saying is that the quantum state is a vector in Hilbert space.

What all this means is that we are positing that there is a mathematical formalism

that represents reality perfectly faithfully.