One of my favourite 'philosophical' papers about QM is an elegant paper of Von Neumann's, which really inaugurated Quantum Logic. A good starting point is to think about how propositional logic is linked to phase spaces in classical mechanics.

the legendre transform (between lagrangian and hamiltonian mechanics) seems analogous to the church-turing thesis: both map global functional optimisation/ reductions to state-state transitions. is there a duality here bridging continuous and discrete domains i am missing?.

Einstein and Von Neumann mogging the noisecels:

Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue, in which he laments the brain rot that the new-fangled technology of writing will cause:

'Schrödinger's cat' is just his more theatrical rendition of 'Einstein's Kegg'. Einstein proposed the Gedankenexperiment, except with a powder kegg instead of a cat, in a letter to Schrödinger on 8th August 1935. Schrödinger wrote back on the 19th reporting his version.

Poincaré taxonomising wordcels and shape rotators:

the heat equation in imaginary time = schrödinger equation. the heat equation in reversed time = black-scholes equation.

from basalla's 'the evolution of technology'

'we, pencils'

i have old soviet textbooks which dream about the bright socialist future promised by input-output tables and computers. but when they discuss the actually-existing 'material balancing' method: “this method has become increasingly cumbersome to handle”

the incredible thing to me, though, is that the USSR economy functioned *at all* without even any linear programming.

the nobel laureate economist paul samuelson also kept predicting his textbooks that the USSR would overtake the US economy . i'm told that his book with dorfman and solow on linear programming in economics was carefully studied by reformists in the USSR.

the hubris was not confined to the USSR. Here is G M Heal proposing in 1973 that planners could construct a central utility function to optimise by ranking 1728 goods preferences. “There is unfortunately, a slight complication…” is a recurring motif of that literature.

following the work of leontieff and kantorovich, there was a cybernetics craze in the USSR to try to optimise economic planning. spearheaded by kitov and glushkov, this formed the impetus behind plans for an early forerunner to the internet, which faltered

just noticed that the forecasting site @metaculus seems to be inspired by a character in a coen brothers film: he is an unemployed schizoid sleeping on his brother’s couch who gets arrested for sodomy, and is obsessed with the “mentaculus” - the “probability map of the universe”

Although there are some good ideas, but I will wrap up here. Thank you for attending my lecture! I have elided important details, but I hope to have conveyed some of the charm of these ideas.

My interest is more mathematical. The phase space/ boolean lattice correspondence is a consequence of the Stone duality between categories of topological spaces and posets. What dualities account for the hilbert space/orthomod lat correspondence is less clear (especially to me).

The philosophers have excitedly spilled much ink over quantum logics, most of it rightly abandoned. For a while Putnam thought that they could, à la Quine, provide a realist interpretation of QM. But Dummett argued that non-distributivity kills bivalence, and hence realism.