Clarifying the Conceptual Situation of Quantum Mechanics
In Light of the Discovery of the Mode of Action
of the Driving Principle of the Universe
Updated on April 12, 2026
Causality as the Point of Contact
The question of causality constitutes an essential passageway between philosophical reflection and theoretical physics. It involves the status of mathematics, the scope of physical concepts, and the possibility of a genuinely objective intelligibility of the world.
“Causality cannot be reduced either to a relation between antecedent and consequent, or to a mere principle of intelligibility. It is that which accounts for the existence of things, their structure, and their behavior. For there to be a real relation between antecedent and consequent, a reality must in fact behave in one way or another.”
Philosophy, Mathematics, and Science
Mathematics is not metaphysics. Yet mathematical reasoning can convey metaphysical ideas and sometimes make them explicit.
1. Foundations of knowledge: each science must specify what aspect of reality it reaches and from which standpoint.
2. Critical examination: this applies at every level, whether in the Shuttle and Missile Objection or in critiques such as those developed by Bas van Fraassen.
3. Practical encounter: philosophy and physics may become complementary when both reach objective knowledge of the same reality.
Such a practical encounter cannot fully take place as long as philosophy has not identified the mode of action of the driving principle of the universe. Once this mode of action is identified, a new stage of knowledge becomes possible.
Quantum Mechanics: Operational Success and Conceptual Confusion
Quantum mechanics is characterized by remarkable operational efficiency, but also by persistent conceptual confusions. Its fundamental notions are often used without clearly distinguishing what pertains to measurement, what belongs to mathematical reasoning, and what concerns the effective ontology of physical reality.
The discovery of the mode of action of the driving principle of the universe provides a decisive point of support for clarifying these distinctions.
Local Events and Global Relations
The usual opposition between locality and non-locality is misleading.
Every actual physical event has a local aspect.
What is non-local is not the event itself, but the global relational condition governing its possibility and coherence. Non-locality should therefore not be understood as action at a distance, but as the expression of reality considered in its relational unity.
Measurement and Effective Reality
Measurement Operations
Quantum mechanics precisely describes the operational conditions under which actualization is observed and measured.
Effective Ontology
The theory does not directly describe the full set of real determinations that exist independently of measurement.
Confusing these two levels leads to projecting operational limitations onto ontology itself.
Quantum Indeterminacy
One must distinguish whether indeterminacy concerns what can be simultaneously reached in measurement, or whether it is being attributed to the relational structure of reality itself. Without this distinction, conclusions drawn at the operational level are improperly transferred to ontology.
Mathematical Formalism and Ontology
Certain mathematical reasonings in quantum mechanics may suggest a particular ontology, but they do not constitute ontology themselves. The formalism describes modalities of the possible and relational structures; it must not be confused with what actually exists in act.
Wave–Particle Duality
Historically formulated in ontological terms, wave–particle duality does not correspond to two distinct realities. It concerns two aspects of a single physical reality. Depending on the conditions of manifestation and experimental treatment, one aspect or the other becomes accessible.
The apparent opposition arises only when these modes of access are mistaken for separate realities.
The discovery of the mode of action of the driving principle does not alter the results of quantum mechanics; it restores their conceptual intelligibility.
Efficient Causality and the Encounter between Philosophy and Physics
Theoretical physics may be defined as the search for coherence in the structure and motion of the physical world through quantitative proportions, mathematical formalism, laws, and predictions.
Yet for these laws to remain intelligible, their primary concepts must already express a certain coherence of reality. A worldview — explicit or implicit — is therefore always present upstream of the formalism.
Philosophy can play a decisive role if it identifies principles that possess not only intelligible value but also real efficient value. The encounter with physics then consists not in imposing an external framework, but in making explicit the ontological conditions without which physical concepts lose their causal scope.
From the Driving Principle to a Coherent System of Thought
Once the mode of action of the driving principle has been identified — through philosophical reflection and physical analysis in complementary ways — its consequences can be examined through thought experiments.
A first coherent system of thought can then be formulated, making a practical return to physics possible through the redefinition of concepts, mathematization, quantification, and measurement.
Efficient Causality and the Constituent
In realist philosophy, efficient causality operates either in relation to matter and form alone, or in relation to another causality that actualizes them. Once the necessity of a non-mechanical cause is established, one must ask how such a principle is present within matter.
The notion of the constituent becomes decisive here. Matter and form cannot be separated within it: a constituent is both material cause and formal cause.
It is material cause through its potential aspect — it is here, but it could be elsewhere — and formal cause insofar as the immanent and interrelational action of the driving principle is exercised according to its own determination.
Without this determination, there would be no autonomy of the physical world as a world of real processes.
The Wave Function and Global Coherence
Formal cause is not limited to the determination of a constituent in isolation. It is also found in the unity of action of the driving principle, which establishes a constant harmony among all modalities of actualization.
At this level, the wave function may be understood as expressing an aspect of this global equilibrium: not as an autonomous ontological reality, but as a formal representation of the coherence of possibilities within the unity of reality.
The consideration of different modalities of actualization does not abolish the freedom of each element; it integrates that freedom into the coherence of the universe (1).
Collapse as Actualization
Within quantum formalism, collapse first appears as a mathematical operation connecting a superposition of states to measurement outcomes. In itself, this does not yet describe what occurs in physical reality.
The question then becomes whether collapse is merely a computational tool or whether it expresses a real process of actualization.
In the perspective developed here, collapse can be understood as the effective actualization of one state among several possibilities, in accordance with the global coherence of the physical system.
The unity of the whole is not realized independently of its parts, but through their effective integration into a coherent network of relations.
Quantum theory could thus be embedded within a genuinely causal framework by linking the formal structure of possibilities to effective actualization governed by global relational conditions.
Gravity and the Need for a Relational Physics
To understand the process of actualization fully, one must clarify the role of physical structures expressing coherence at the scale of the world. Gravity then becomes central because it concerns the global organization of mass and space.
General relativity states that mass curves space, but curvature is described geometrically without specifying the nature of the real action producing it. Motion is modeled with remarkable precision, yet it is not fully understood within an explicitly causal framework.
Conclusion
Only a genuinely relational approach to space and motion can render physics compatible with the real exercise of causes. Such an approach does not challenge the mathematical effectiveness of existing theories; it restores their ontological intelligibility by distinguishing formal description, measurement operations, and the effective action of reality.
Note
Note 1. Any intervention in motion — for example, throwing a stone — modifies the modalities of action of the driving principle of the universe. Human action is not added from outside to an already constituted world; it is inscribed within the interplay of modalities of actualization taken into account by the driving principle.
The question becomes deeper when life is considered. If one admits the existence of the soul, then the action of the driving principle is not merely received by the living body: it is appropriated by the soul as a principle of unity and operation.
This opens a complex articulation between immanent causality, the freedom of the living agent, and the unity of action of the driving principle — an articulation that may later nourish a theological analysis, particularly concerning the role of the Spirit.