This document discusses using Richard Feynman's interpretation of quantum mechanics as a way to formally summarize different explanations of quantum mechanics given to hypothetical children. It proposes that each child's understanding could be seen as one "pathway" or explanation, with the total set of explanations forming a distribution. The document then suggests that quantum mechanics itself could provide a meta-explanation that encompasses all the children's perspectives by describing phenomena probabilistically rather than deterministically. Finally, it gives some examples of how this approach could allow defining and experimentally studying the concept of God through quantum mechanics.

1. The formalized hodological
methodology
The instructions of Feynman’s pathways interpretation
of quantum mechanics for philosophy

2. Vasil Penchev
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences:
Institute for the Study of Societies and Knowledge:
Dept. of Logical Systems and Models
vasildinev@gmail.com
“Between the Visible and the Invisible”
Institute for Advanced Studies of Asia at University of Tokyo with
Temple University Japan Campus & Universite libre de Bruxelles
3-4 July 2017, The University of Tokyo

3. Introduction:
Something like a parable

4. The idea of that parable
• We can imagine the following:
o One tries to explain something exceptionally
complicated to somebody who has not either
corresponding experience or knowledge, or even the
relevant ability of cognition
• For example, one attempts to explain quantum
mechanics to a child
o How it should be done?

5. The problem of how to be explained
• It would be meaningless:
 Quantum mechanics to be explained as to a
student of physics for a few semesters in a good
university
 Noting to be explained
• Something should be explained, but how not be
meaningless?

6. Pathways of explanation
• One should use child’s experience
o Meaning that experience, independently of how much and
as far as it is extremely restricted and insufficient, one might
construct a model of quantum mechanics exceptionally on
that quite limited circle of representations
• The feedback would be exceptionally important:
o One must follow child’s questions and commentaries for the
explanation to be directed and fitted in the course of
exhibition
• Child’s attention is too unstable and the “lesson” shall be
ceased too soon…

7. Many “children” …
• The result of that explanation would be rather random
o Further, we can figure a collection of children, to whom
quantum mechanics is explained separately, e.g. in each
child’s own home
• A corresponding collection of explanations would appear
o The difference between the explanations would be huge for
each child’s experience is quite different as well as too, too
insufficient and thus arbitrary to quantum mechanics

8. A conference of the “children”
• At last (as a provocative joke): those children might make a
conference (e.g., such as ours) on quantum mechanics and
thus compare their knowledge and representations of
quantum mechanics
o Of course, they would find those huge differences between
them, reflecting the difficultness for the explanation to be
relatively understable by each child
• They can start a dispute about whose version is true
o Of course, no one and all are true equally and
simultaneously

9. o One can postulate some entity called “God” much more
reasonable than human beings trying to explain to them God’s
knowledge or principles of cognition
• The metaphor of the parable would fit very well to that situation
o Even still one “child”, meaning quantum mechanics properly,
might be added complementarily
• That “child” will obtain the explanation in terms of quantum
mechanics for it would be the most appropriate circle of
representations necessary for the explanation to that “child”
o That “child” might try to explain to others the entire collection of
quite different explanations right in terms of quantum mechanics
therefore transforming it into a meta-explanation
• That “child” might be me

10. My motivation

11. About me …
• Anyway, I am a scientist rather than a theologian and my
viewpoint will be from the science
o However, I hope a dialog with theologians
• I do not belong to that large group of scientists tended to
reject religion initially and fundamentally as wrong, false,
misleading, and primitive
o Nevertheless, I self-determine myself as an atheist

12. Science and religion
• I think both science and religion are two great achievements
of humankind, though
o They might join and unify their efforts and approaches in a
whole much bigger than the sum separately
• To take place that, they should overcome the age-old
hostility and mutual misunderstanding
o I intend my presentation as a quite, quite modest and
humble gesture in that direction

13. My explanation (right in terms of
quantum mechanics)

14. About Feynman’s interpretation
• Quantum mechanics was forced to resolve the problem of
how to describe uniformly both discrete and continuous
motion
o Its mathematical formalism is the separable complex Hilbert
space
• Feynman suggested an equivalent interpretation generalizing
the discrete motion as if in all possible trajectories, each of
which with different probability

15. Generalizing Feynman’s interpretation …
• The talk interprets and generalizes Feynman’s
interpretation “hodologically” as a formalized
methodology for hodology
o After that, the equivalence of the jump-like insight
inherent for religious cognition and the continuous and
causal method of science can be seen in turn as similar
to Feynman’s approach generalized hodologically now

16. Religious and scientific cognition
• Then, the cognition by religious experience can be both
justified by, and decomposed into a fan distribution of
alternative scientific theories or disciplines inconsistent,
irrelevant or contradictory to each other
o Each of them would represent the religious cognition
only probably, in a single “hodos”, pathway, but
achievable by a reliable and causal method repeatable by
many others

17. Religious cognition
• On the contrary, religious cognition is fundamentally
random
o It cannot be linked to any definite method and even to
any certain religion
• The origin of different religions or religious practices
should be searched for in different traditions and societies
representing in turn different religious pathways rather
than in the essence of religious cognition by itself

18. A philosophical idea about theology
as a rigorous science
• One may generalize Husserl’s idea about “philosophy as a
rigorous science” on his “phenomenon” identifying form and
content, to religious cognition defined consistently and linked
to science
o In fact, philosophy would coincide with theology after form
and content are identified to each other
• “Philosophy as a rigorous science” is theology in essence
o Spiritual reality researched by theology is therefore that realm
which may be defined philosophically by the identification of
form and content, or as Husserl’s “phenomenology”

19. A comment to that scientific kind of
explanation as a meta-explanation

20. About the discourse of quantum mechanics: 1
• That explanation is as any other one: one among all the rest
o It cannot claim to be truer than any other “child”’s explanation
(in the sense of the introductory parable)
• However it is rather different from the others for the following
features:
o It is able to serve as a meta-explanation therefore explaining
the complete collection of all explanations as a whole
• It offered a mathematical model
o The same model is interpreted by an experimental science such
as quantum mechanics

21. About the discourse of quantum mechanics: 2
• Here are more extraordinary features of that approach based
on quantum mechanics:
o It includes a possible scientific definition of what that entity
called God is or should be
• It allows of the experimental study of that entity as any other
subject of any experimental science
o Nevertheless, it does not contain any proof for its discourse,
though an experimental and theoretical one, is better than
other discourse properly religious and meaning the same
entity in a different way

22. An example of that scientific discourse to
entity called “God”:
God in terms of Experimental Science

23. Two “dogmas” in the Christian discourse of
God: the first one
• The perception of God generates a specific domain of human
experience: religion
o God being omnipresent is within all spheres of human
activity and cognition, and He is their unity
• Nevertheless, the finiteness and limitedness of all human
beings imposes that area of religion

24. Two “dogmas” in the Christian discourse of
God: the second one
• Science and especially experimental science is inappropriate
for the cognition or study of God as to human beings for
science addresses the repetition, reiteration, recurrence, and
resettability of result as well as the materiality of
phenomena
o Thus, God is fundamentally inaccessible in science for He is
creative and nonmaterial

25. A few comments of those “dogmas”: 1
• Quantum mechanics calls much criticism ostensibly violating
the fundamental principles of science requiring just the
repetition, reiteration, recurrence, and resettability of all
experimental data:
o Indeed, any given result in quantum mechanics is initially
random and thus it cannot be forecast in principle

26. A few comments of those “dogmas”: 2
• What is forecastable is only the probability distribution of
a big enough statistical ensemble of experimental data,
which changes itself gradually and causally in time
o Nevertheless, some rather incredible state of any quantum
system can occur with some nonzero probability and thus as
a given result of measuring

27. A few comments of those “dogmas”: 3
• Quantum mechanics describes the state of any quantum
system as a wave function
o That wave function can be represented as a point in Hilbert
space and interpreted both as a trajectory in space-time (a
“fermion”) and as a coherent mix (i.e. a “superposition”,
using the proper term of quantum mechanics) of possible
states (a “boson”)

28. A few comments of those “dogmas”: 4
• Whether “belonging” to a fermion or a boson, wave function
can be interpreted as a form of generalized information:
quantum information which is furthermore a nonmaterial
generalization of matter
o That is: matter is a particular case of quantum information,
which is nonmaterial in general

29. A few comments of those “dogmas”: 5
• Quantum information is not less another generalization of
the usual concept of information, according to which
information is the quantity of elementary choices such as
bits (an abbreviation of “binary digits”)
o A bit is defined as the choice between two equiprobable
alternatives
• Thus any finite series of choices of an element among any
finite sets can be exactly calculated as a real number of bits,
i.e. as that information containing in the series in question

30. A few comments of those “dogmas”: 6
o Consequently, the nontrivial generalization of information
should refer both to infinite series of choices and to the
choice of an element among any infinite set therefore
requiring the axiom of choice to be involved
o Quantum information is that generalization of “information”
though it is introduced by quantum mechanics as still one
interpretation of wave function in terms of information

31. A few comments of those “dogmas”: 7
• So a qubit (an abbreviation of “quantum bit”) is both
the above equivalence of transfinite series and a choice
among an infinite set and the normed superposition of any
two orthogonal subspaces of Hilbert space in spirit of
quantum mechanics
o Furthermore, quantum information is the quantity of those
“infinite choices”, i.e. qubits
• Any wave function is a given value of quantum information,
and Hilbert space can be interpreted as that variable of
quantum information

32. Conclusions

33. Conclusions
• Feynman’s interpretation of quantum mechanics admits a
hodological generalization:
o The jump-like insight featuring religious cognition can be
described as fundamentally random and thus unrepeatable as
well as decomposable in many pathways simultaneously
• It can serve as a formal and mathematical methodology of
hodology
o Quantum mechanics though being an experimental and
mathematical science can offer a discourse to God
• A shared pathway of reconciliation for science and religion can
be outlined …

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