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QM is a complete and fully self consistent theoretical system. The 'difficulties' with QM - e.g. the various measurement paradoxes - arise when one tries to 'interface' QM with a different and incompatible set of classical variables.

Alamo Girl posted a link to a .pdf a while back from a physicist with an oriental name working in Germany, where he discussed approaches of trying to include the classical observer in the quantum mechanical system by means of entanglement. (The paper had all sorts of other flaws, but the overall approach was quite intriguing). That's an ongoing problem at the philosophy/physics interface. But if you're asking can we described QM purely in terms that mirror everyday reality, the answer is, no we can't. But QM is by no means unique. When I was a kid, I used to look at science books in which the atoms were color-coded, and I thought for that reason that oxygen atoms were red (and hard and shiny looking!). Of course, even to talk about the color of an atom is specious. But yet everything we see in our everyday world has a color, so it's difficult to accept that to talk about the color of an atom makes no sense.

I would argue the laws that circumscribe what we consider everyday reality are naturalistic constructs, which work to do the things we want to do, but it aren't any more correct than the laws that govern the evolution of a wavefunction. QM is certainly explanatory with respect to the objects with which it deals; the measurement paradoxes are extraneous to QM.

When I was a kid, I used to look at science books in which the atoms were color-coded, and I thought for that reason that oxygen atoms were red (and hard and shiny looking!). Of course, even to talk about the color of an atom is specious. But yet everything we see in our everyday world has a color, so it's difficult to accept that to talk about the color of an atom makes no sense.

There are people with a very strong sense of synesthesia. They attach a color to everything in their minds eye. I can still see the molecular models from 7th grade (dutch system) chemistry, but I don't remember any of the color assignments.

QM is certainly explanatory with respect to the objects with which it deals; the measurement paradoxes are extraneous to QM.

Thanks RWP, nice post. I guess I differ with respect to whether the measurement paradoxes are "extraneous" to QM. I imagine that they apparently exist because we try to reconcile the quantum world with what we know about the classical world. And I take your point about physical laws being "naturalistic constructs," or abstractions from reality.

What would be really interesting, from my point of view, would be to try to imagine the quantum world on the logic of its own terms. For instance, what does "action at a distance" really imply about the fundamental nature of the quantum vacuum? Do classical categories of space and time, "renormalized" for Einsteinian relativity, hold at the quantum level? There does not appear to be any kind of identifiable "break" between the quantum and classical worlds -- the latter appears to be seamlessly built up out of the former. Therefore it seems to me both must obey the same fundamental laws, which perhaps are yet unknown to us; and yet the two "worlds" look so very different. Is this an epistemological problem, a problem of constraints occasioned by human mental conditioning (back to your "constructs" observation again....)? If so, is there a way to get around those constraints -- perhaps by reimagining the structure of reality in a different way, hypothetically?

And so on. Maybe I'm obsessing on these problems 'way too much, Professor. Do you know, I even dream about these things? QM really is the most amazing problem I have ever encountered.

Thanks for writing, Prof.