Ian Bogost meets the black box radiators

Good news: I'm writing my very first essay on OOO, for the journal Qui Parle...it boldly tests OOO against theories of physical matter, notably quantum theory. Here's a little teaser. (Please forgive the lack of references. I'm away from my work.)

Antirealism has been known to pit quantum theory against its opponents, since quantum theory supposedly shows reality is fuzzy or deeply correlated with perception etc.

Wrong! Quantum theory is the only existing theory to establish on a firm basis the fact that things really do exist beyond our mind (or any mind). Quantum theory positively guarantees that real objects exist! Not only that--these objects exist beyond one another, let alone (our) mind.

Quantum theory does this by viewing phenomena as quanta, that is as discrete unit operations. If you haven't yet had the pleasure of reading Ian Bogost's book Unit Operations, get thee to a bookseller. For more online about units as Bogost describes them, see Levi Bryant's many excellent posts. For now, realize that thinking in terms of units counteracts some problematic features of thinking in terms of systems. And that "unit" strongly resembles Harman's and Bryant's "objects." They are so elegantly described, you should just read Bogost's description directly.

It turns out that a kind of systems thinking avant la lettre posed big problems for nineteenth-century physicists. Only consider the so-called black body radiation problem (uncanny name, no?). Classical thermodynamics is essentially a systems approach that combines the energy of different waves to figure out the total energy of a system. The black box in question is a kind of oven. As the temperature in the oven increases, results given by summing the wave states according to classical theory become absurd, tending to infinity.

By seeing the energy in the black box as discrete quanta, the correct result is obtained. Max Planck's discovery of this approach gave birth to quantum theory.

Now consider perception, for the sake of which which antirealism usually cites quantum theory. What does quantum theory show about our mental interactions with things? Perceptual, sensual phenomena such as hardness and brilliance are at bottom quantum mechanical effects. I can't put my hand through this table because it is statistically beyond unlikely that the quanta at the tip of my finger could bust through the resistance wells in the quanta on the table's surface. That's what solidity IS. It's an averagely correct experience of an aggregate of discrete quanta. This statistical quality is not a problem--far from being a problem, in fact, it's the first time we have been able to formalize supposedly experiential phenomena such as solidity. What some people find disturbing about quantum theory (once in a gajillion times I can put my finger through the table) is precisely evidence for the reality of things.

But wait--there's more. Quantum theory specifies that quanta withdraw from one another, including the quanta with which we measure them (thus opening a door to the idealist misinterpretation of the theory). In other words quanta really are discrete, and one mark of this discreteness is the constant (mis)translation of one quantum by another. Thus when you set up quanta to measure the position of a quantum, its momentum withdraws, and vice versa. More generally, complementarity ensures that no quantum has total access to any other quantum.

OOO is deeply congruent with the most profound, accurate and testable theory of matter we have.