# Relational interpretation of quantum mechanics and Alexander Bogdanov's worldview

Carlo Rovelli

► To cite this version:

Carlo Rovelli. Relational interpretation of quantum mechanics and Alexander Bogdanov's worldview. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 2023, 40 (2), pp.312-319. 10.1002/sres.2931. hal-04389569

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# Relational interpretation of quantum mechanics and
Alexander Bogdanov's worldview

Carlo Rovelli

Centre de Physique Theorique de Luminy, Marseille, France

Rotman Institute of Philosophy and Department of Philosophy, Western University, 1151

Richmond Street North, London, Ontario, N6A 5B7 Canada

Perimeter Institute, Caroline Street, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

**Correspondence**

Carlo Rovelli, Centre de Physique Theorique de Luminy, Marseille, France.

Email: rovelli.carlo@gmail.com

**Abstract**

There is a surprising parallel between the conceptual step taken by the theoretical physicists who discovered quantum mechanics in the 1920s and the philosophical work of Alexander Bogdanov. Both were under the direct cultural influence of the ideas of Ernst Mach. Even more surprisingly, there are aspects of the current debate on the physical interpretation of the quantum formalism that closely mirror the Lenin-Bogdanov debate, in particular on the confusion between subjectivity and relationality. It seems to me that the ideas of Alexander Bogdanov can still bring clarity and be fertile today when applied to open issues in the foundations of physics.

**INTRODUCTION**

I am honoured by this opportunity, and also a bit intimidated. I am a theoretical physicist. I am in my own water when I talk about quantum mechanics, and this will be one of the main topics of what I'm going to say. But I am definitely not a philosopher, and I don't have competence in the history of ideas of thinkers of the early 20th century in Russia. I know very little about systems science and systems thinking. I am curious, but it's not my competence. In spite of my incompetence, I will say something on this topic. I'm going to tell the story, essentially, of my discovery, with great surprise, of a knot of relations between theoretical physics, philosophical ideas, political ideas, and, I would say, system thinking. So, I am going to talk a bit outside my own field in this presentation.

**THE BOOK: HELGOLAND**

A few months ago, I published a book, *Helgoland* (Rovelli, 2021). In the United Kingdom, it has been out for a few months, but in the United States, it just came out last week. It's a
book about quantum mechanics. The subtitle is *Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution*. So, it is about physics, my own world. It is my attempt to describe what is quantum mechanics, and its mysteries: what is not yet clear about the quantum world, and the perspective that I think is useful for understanding quantum physics.

Now, at the end of the book, there are special acknowledgments to two persons: Werner and Alexander. Werner is Werner Heisenberg, the physicist who opened the door towards quantum theory, in the island of Helgoland. Helgoland, which gives the title to the book, is the island in the North Sea, between the United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark, where a 23-year-old Heisenberg went alone, in isolation, and had the main idea of what became what we today call quantum mechanics — perhaps the greatest scientific revolution ever.

The second person I thank, Alexander, is Alexander Bogdanov. Not a physicist, without any doubt. Physicists will be surprised to find the name of Bogdanov in this context, but it is there in the table of contents of the book. Indeed, you can find a chapter called ‘Alexander Bogdanov and Vladimir Lenin’.

What I am going to do here is to talk about quantum mechanics, say where the current open problems are, and then tell you why I think that the ideas of Bogdanov are relevant in this context.

I did not know anything about Alexander Bogdanov before encountering him a few years ago. I arrived at his work through Lenin, because I went back to Lenin's book, *Materialism and Empiriocriticism*, which I read in my youth, and which I believe is relevant for the discussion about interpreting quantum mechanics. You will see why. In reading about that, I stumbled upon the name of Bogdanov, which was not familiar to me. I realized that there is a connection between the discussions around the work of Bogdanov and quantum mechanics. A strict connection, actually.

I ended up being fascinated by the ideas of Bogdanov. He is an incredible thinker. I read everything by him I could find, and he has had a strong effect on my worldview.

## QUANTUM THEORY

Let me start by talking about quantum mechanics. I'm not going to be technical. I assume you people in the audience are not experts in quantum mechanics, so pardon me if among you there are experts: I am going to leave out a lot of details. I want to zoom in on the main point, the core of the current discussion about quantum mechanics.

Quantum theory is almost a hundred years old. The trip of Heisenberg to Helgoland was in 1925, so 97 years ago to be precise. Quantum theory was not developed by Heisenberg alone. He had the main idea, but it was a group of people developing it, especially Max Born, Pascual Jordan and Paul Dirac. It's a theory which has worked perfectly since. Not
only has it worked perfectly, but it has also become the base of physics, replacing
Newton's theory.

It is used today by engineers to build computers, by astrophysicists, by chemists, and by
biologists. It is used in a wide variety of contexts. It is completely reliable. It has predicted
spectacular phenomena, like quantum entanglement at a distance. It has allowed us to
invent new technology, like the laser. It allows us to understand how the sun works. Also,
the very structure of chemistry; the reason that there are 90 or so elements in that
particular form in Mendeleev's table. It is the basis of fundamental physics today. One
could say that it's the most successful theory ever, so far, because it is the only theory that
not only has never been found wrong, but we do not have any direct hint of its limitations.

And yet the theory remains mysterious. Any good student learning it at university remains
deeply perplexed. The theory does not seem to make much sense, because the way it is
formulated is strange and peculiar. It is not formulated like classical theory, in the sense
that it does not state what a physical system is, its variables, and how they change
continuously in time. It does not give a description of what is going on, how things are, what
are the variables describing a system at every moment. That is not the way it is formulated,
and that's not the way it is used.

It is formulated in another way. It treats the system discussed as a sort of black box. It tells
you: if you look after a while, that is what you are going to see, with such and such
probability, without telling you what happened *in between*. For instance, here is the actual
problem that Heisenberg was struggling with at the beginning; the sort of prototypical
problem of quantum mechanics. When you study atoms, we know that the electrons sort of
orbit around the nucleus, and they emit light in some way. Quantum theory says: if you
throw light on an atom, the electron is somehow affected, and then it emits light; the theory
tells us what lights are emitted, and how, when, and where; it gives us information about
that. But it does not tell us what actually is the motion of the electron.

When Heisenberg came back from Helgoland, he wrote to his best friend and collaborator, Wolfgang Pauli, 'Well, nothing is very clear yet but it seems that electrons are not going to move on orbits anymore'.

In his new way of calculating what happens in atoms, there is no indication of how,
actually, the electron moves down there. And yet, the mathematical theory allows us to
predict exactly what one is going to see: the light that is coming out. This is strange.

People have been wondering about that since the very beginning. We are in the peculiar
situation of having a spectacularly good basis for physics, which gives perfect predictions
without telling us what happens when we do not look. You can close your eyes, just use the
theory and not ask questions; but if you do ask questions, it is all mysterious because the
theory is not telling you what happens when you are not looking.
Let me give you another description, a bit more in detail, of the strangeness of the way the theory is formulated. A typical phenomenon, in atomic physics, is radioactivity. Some kinds of atoms are radioactive, which means that after a while they emit radiation. If you have detectors nearby, like Geiger counters, after a while one of these is going to click, as it detects a bit of radiation. The classical Newtonian picture of what is going on is that out of the atoms, at some point, a particle—a little electron or a little something—comes out, moves towards the detector, hits the detector, and the detector detects it. That's how we think classically. But this is not how we do computations in quantum mechanics. What we do in quantum mechanics is to imagine that the particle that comes out from the atom is actually a wave all over space, and goes to all of the detectors, not just to one. This wave is a 'probability wave'.

If you're not a physicist and you say, 'what the heck are you talking about?', you are right. This is a really funny way of thinking. A student who has not thought deeply says, 'OK, this is completely clear', and this is what I thought when I was a student. But the more you think about it, the more you say 'No, this is not clear at all.' Because in the moment in which one of the detectors clicks, suddenly this wave disappears. All the other detectors sort of know that this single detector has clicked, so they don't do anything. It is like the electrons behave differently when we look at them, and when we do not look at them. If we look, they are particles; if not, they are waves. This is the mystery. There are several ways of thinking about this mystery, none of which is really satisfying.

## THE RELATIONAL INTERPRETATION

Let me zoom to one of these ways of viewing, which is called the relational interpretation. It seems to me to be the best way of thinking about this mystery (although not everybody will agree with my perspective on it).

Niels Bohr is one of the fathers of quantum mechanics. Before going to Helgoland, young Heisenberg went to Denmark, to Copenhagen, to work with Niels Bohr, the great master of the quantum phenomena of the time, in the first two decades of the 20th century. He was the person who was collecting all the brilliant young scientists constructing the theory, and he taught them the mysteries of what was known so far. Niels Bohr remained a sort of fatherly figure for quantum mechanics. He was an enormously influential scientist, and one of the deepest thinkers about quantum theory. His long discussion with Einstein on quantum theory has become a legend in physics and in philosophy. It is still read and discussed amongst physicists and philosophers, who split themselves among those who think that Einstein was right and Bohr was wrong, and those who think that Bohr was right and Einstein was wrong. There is a phrase by Bohr which, in my opinion, is a good synthesis of Bohr's take on quantum mechanics. I think that Bohr here is exactly right, but, at the same time, he is misleading. Here is the phrase:
‘In classical physics the interactions between an object and the measuring apparatus can be overlooked. In quantum physics, this interaction is an inseparable part of the phenomenon. The unambiguous description of a quantum phenomenon is required in principle to include all the relevant aspects of the experimental arrangement.’

Think about the electron and the detector. You cannot talk about the electron alone. You have to include the Geiger detector, you have to include what is it that is detecting the electron. This is called *contextuality*: namely, you cannot look at a thing in itself, you look at it in context. I think it is the right idea at the core of quantum mechanics. Niels Bohr's core understanding of quantum theory is right. And yet, it is a bit misleading. When Bohr wrote this, the large majority of the actual quantum phenomena that were observed were in a laboratory, in a physics laboratory. So, he talks about measuring apparatus and experimental arrangements. But quantum mechanics, now a century later, is not just something to see in your physics laboratory: it is a theory about what is happening on the sun, since the formation of galaxies in the early universe.

We use quantum mechanics and we rely on quantum theory also for situations where there is no laboratory, no measuring apparatus. We must not think that it is our measuring apparatus that affects what is going on in the sun. So, quantum mechanics must not just be about an experimental apparatus or a laboratory. Most importantly, the theory is not about us, as being human observers. There should be a way to rephrase Neil Bohr's key insight in the above sentence; a way that does not refer to the experimental arrangement, does not refer to measuring apparatus, does not refer to us, and yet captures the main idea. The way is the following one. It is sufficient to translate what Bohr was saying into language that is a bit more general, as follows:

‘In classical physics, the properties of an object are determined irrespective of the interactions between this object and others. Quantum physics is the discovery that interactions are inseparable aspects of the properties.’

This means that the context, whatever is around, cannot be separated from the phenomenon—not because it is an apparatus, but because there is an interaction between the system and whatever it is interacting with. Here is the point:

‘The unambiguous description of any object requires the inclusion of all the objects involved in the interactions in which the object manifests itself.’

Which means, and this is key, that we should not think of *objects* always having properties. Rather, we should think that objects have properties that only make sense when the object is in interaction with something else.
Properties are not something pertaining to a single system. They pertain to the way systems interact with one another.

The emphasis on observation and observables, which is in standard quantum textbooks, captures the main point, but is misleading because it suggests that it takes ‘observers’ to bring out properties. This is wrong: the theory has nothing to do with observations, observables, physicists, people with a PhD, measuring apparata, or anything like that. It has to do with the fact that we have to think about the world in terms of its interactions, and in terms of the relations between systems, not in terms of systems in isolation. This is the core idea of relational quantum mechanics.

Do not think about measurement, think about interaction. Do not think about observation, think about any system playing the role of ‘observing’.

The idea of relational quantum mechanics is to forget the apparatus and forget the observer: these are just arbitrary physical systems. Properties are realized when systems interact with one another. Quantum mechanics describes how systems manifest themselves in interaction, and it describes the phenomena—the phenomena being what happens when one system manifests itself to another. The physical variables—for example, this pen has a position, colour, density, energy, whatever—do not describe properties of the pen itself. Rather, they describe how the pen manifests itself to whatever it is interacting with.

I am not going into the actual details of all the mysteries in quantum mechanics and how they get clarified if you accept this conceptual jump. I only state that, if you accept this idea, you can make sense of entanglement, quantum interference, and all the other strange things that happen in quantum mechanics. All this becomes clear, provided that you do not try to attribute properties to a system independently from others. Or you don't assume that properties of a system with respect to one object are directly relevant to the properties of a system with respect to another object. This way of thinking makes the properties only defined at interaction time. In a precise sense, an electron has no position, except when it is hitting something else. An electron has a position with respect to the screen, which has been hit, not by itself. This relational aspect allows us to make sense of quantum theory.

## RELATIVE DOES NOT MEAN SUBJECTIVE

Now, where was the confusion? Why has this been hard to digest? Because there is a subtle distinction, but a crucial one, between *relational* (or, if you want, *relative*) and *subjective*. The confusion is between these two notions, which are profoundly different. Relationality and relativity are about how things are with respect to one another. Subjectivism is about how things are with respect to a mind, or a human. Subjectivism brings the subject into the story as something special—and, in this sense, to put it strongly,
it jumps away from naturalism. Naturalism is the idea that the subject and the mind are part of nature, just one of the pieces of nature, and not special in any sense.

Physicists are used to the notion of things being relational, or relative. Here is an example. An object A has velocity V relative to an object B. We use a subjective language in physics. We say, 'the velocity in relation to an observer'. If I am on a train, I see a person walking at a certain speed with respect to me as the observer on the train. The same person moves at a different speed with respect to a different observer who stands on the Earth outside the train. I use the story in my book of a mother on a train who says to the little kid, 'stop, do not move'. She does not mean that the little kid should jump out of the window and not move with respect to the Earth. She means don't move with respect to the train. So, when we say movement, we implicitly or explicitly talk about motion with respect to something else. Motion is a relative notion: it is relative to something, and velocities are relative. But it is not related to an observer, who has eyes and mind: it is just the fact that velocity is something that pertains to two objects. You think about the star, the sun, the moon, the Earth, and the other things in the sky. The Moon has a velocity with respect to the Earth, and a velocity with respect to the sun. Not because the sun is an observer, and has a mind; just because the velocity is relative. That's the point. The conflation between subjective and relational is what confuses the story of quantum mechanics. We use a subjective language, but this is misleading: we should not interpret this language as referring to a subject. We should interpret it as just pointing out the fact that the variables in physics are relative.

Quantum mechanics, as in its relational interpretation, is not about the knowledge of a subject. It is about the relational structure of the phenomena.

Now, this confusion between relational, on the one hand, and subjective, on the other, is exactly at the core of the dispute between Alexander Bogdanov and Vladimir Lenin. This dispute took place in the early 20th century, in one of the great moments of the political and also intellectual histories of Europe.

It is surprising how the same misunderstanding and the same subtle point is playing a role here.

I try to elucidate the connection between these two intellectual developments. Let me start with the context. We are in the years before, during, and immediately after the October Revolution in Russia. Lenin, of course, is the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Revolutionary Social Democratic Party before the revolution, and then becomes the dominant figure in post-revolutionary Russia. Bogdanov is perhaps the number two leader of the Bolsheviks before the Revolution. He is a scientist, and has wide intellectual interests. He helps publish Marx's *Capital* in Russia. He writes books on economics for the workers. He does political work. He finds himself in trouble with the Tsar's police, goes into exile, comes back. He meets Lenin, and starts working with him. He is more philosophically
oriented than Lenin. He writes an extraordinary book, in fact a collection of three books, called *Tektology* (Bogdanov, 1989, 1996). He tries to offer a general philosophical ground to the revolutionary forces that were gaining ground in Russia and, in fact, later succeeded in getting into power.

I am not an expert on that period, but I understand that there is a tension between Lenin and Bogdanov. Lenin is a politician of far superior capacities than Bogdanov, perhaps one of the greatest politicians ever, in terms of his effectiveness, whatever you think about his politics. At some point, Lenin reacts against Bogdanov and attacks him politically and philosophically. He writes this book, *Materialism and Empiriocriticism* (Lenin, 1909), which turns out to be enormously influential. The book will become the philosophical basis of the Soviet Union, and a reference point for a large intellectual world outside the Soviet Union. I read it as a young man. It argues for materialism. I remember reading it and liking its solid materialist foundations: it was against any idealism. The book, actually, is not a great philosophy book. It is full of insults, and is very violent. It is directed against a number of general ideas that were spreading among the Marxists in pre-revolutionary Russia. Bogdanov was a main speaker on these ideas. The title is *Materialism and Empiriocriticism*, and empiriocriticism is denounced as a wrong philosophy. Empiriocriticism is one of the names related to the kind of ideas to which Bogdanov was referring.

## ESSENTIAL CULTURAL INFLUENCE

Here are the main cultural connections (see Figure 1). The key person here is Ernst Mach. He was a physicist and philosopher who had a spectacular influence. I think this influence is not fully recognized in contemporary culture. He was certainly immensely influential on the development of physics. He had very strong direct influence on Einstein, which Einstein repeatedly recognized. He had a direct influence on Heisenberg. The paper that Heisenberg wrote coming out from Helgoland, the paper that founded quantum theory, opens up with a declaration of intent which is almost a quotation from Mach. Heisenberg is conscious that he is changing the basis of science, so to say, when he declares that *only observable quantities* play a role, and these are the ideas of Mach. Bogdanov's Empiriomonism, the term he was using for his own ideas, is a way of merging Mach's ideas with those from Marx and Engels. I will tell you, in a moment, how these things are connected.
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>**FIGURE 1** Essential cultural influences</figcaption></figure>

Mach is a physicist with a deep philosophical and historical perspective. His main polemical target is 18th century materialism, and the scientific idea that we can describe the world in terms of little particles moving in space. Mach argues that the history of science shows that any final idea of what is out there is provisional only. He calls it 'metaphysical,' in a negative sense. Use of the word 'metaphysics' with a strongly-negative connotation, which was widespread until recently (following the influence of the Vienna Circle in analytical philosophy), comes from Mach. Indeed, the Vienna Circle, which is one of the founding columns of modern analytical philosophy, called itself the Mach Circle. Now this negative understanding of metaphysics has changed.

Mach argues that, if you take for granted a simple-minded version of materialism (matter moving in space), you are betraying science, because you are being metaphysical. You are assuming that you know what is out there, and that's not something that you can deduce from the phenomena. For Mach, science is a process. It's not something like a fixed body of knowledge. Science is a process where the knower is not an abstract subject, or the Hegelian spirit; it is the actual, concrete humankind as part of nature, that interacts with the rest of nature. Science is about phenomena, which he calls sensations—a misleading term, because sensations, for him, are not just the senses that we humans have. They are not the manifestation of things with respect to us, but the manifestation of things with respect to one another. The other, better name he uses is elements. His idea is to break from the philosophical distinction between object and subject, and throw away the notion of the object of knowledge along with the old notion of the subject. He refers to experience, going back to the empiricism of Hume and Locke, but in a radical way in which you do not assume that there is a subject of the experience. You just have the ensemble of phenomena, and you describe it.
Science is then the organization that we do of phenomena, to better navigate them. Not an
organization we do in the abstract, but rather the organization that we actually put together
as an organized society of humans, working together historically, in its natural interactions
with nature.

POLITICAL CRITICISM: BOGDANOV AND LENIN

This perspective on science comes very close to that of Marx and Engels. Knowledge is
embedded in history. It is the historical evolution of society that produces knowledge.
Mach is a scientist; for him, knowledge is scientific knowledge (as in physics, physiology,
and biology), but the closeness to Marx and Engels is obvious. Bogdanov plays on this
closeness, takes the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, and mixes it with the
phenomenalism of Mach, to develop a fundamental understanding of knowledge, science,
society, and history, in which knowledge is the organization of our experience; and society
itself is the organization of our labour together. He develops these structural ideas (in fact,
an early systems science) as a new fundamental way of thinking, which becomes a basic
philosophy he offers as a theoretical ground for a revolutionary movement in Russia.

Lenin attacks these ideas violently. He writes his book in the years before the October
Revolution in 1917, but after the earlier, failed 1905 revolution. His book becomes widely
read from 1917 onward. Lenin says that Bogdanov's ideas are wrong and bad, because they
are idealism. Idealism, for Lenin, is the ideology of the bourgeoisie, so it is necessarily bad.
Lenin was a very knowledgeable person. We wish politicians of today were as
knowledgeable and effective as Lenin. But he was not a deep thinker: his reading of the
history of philosophy is really about separating the good from the bad. The 'good' are
materialists and the 'bad' are idealists.

Lenin interprets the Machian and Bogdanovian phenomenalism as saying that there is no
reality out there. If we are not assuming there is a reality out there, we are assuming,
deduces Lenin, that everything is in the mind. You can see Lenin's basic mistake. He is
misreading the subtle point, which is understanding that relational does not mean
subjective.

This is exactly the mistake at the core of the confusion in quantum theory. We could think
that it is us, us as minds, as special subjects, who play a part in quantum theory, because
we do not realize that we are just pieces of nature, and what is relevant here is how things
affect one another—one of these things being us. Not because this is about the mind, or
this is about subjectivism; rather, because it is about structure and relation. And that is
exactly the mistake that Lenin makes. He blames Mach very strongly for reducing
everything to the mind, which is not at all what Mach does.

Lenin starts by giving a definition of materialism, as the belief that there are things outside
the mind. This is a very wide definition of materialism. With this definition, we are all
materialists (except maybe Berkeley, but whatever}. I mean, everybody thinks that there are
things outside the mind. Then Lenin immediately shifts to the idea that, if you believe there
is something outside the mind, the world must be just space with matter. But this is what a
19th century mechanist would say. This is the only possible materialism for Lenin. If you
think in terms of phenomena, of relational properties, Lenin interprets this as phenomena
with respect to us: things that are in our mind. So, for Lenin, this is idealism: it is all
Berkeley. That's what he says in the book. He cuts in a brutal way. The book, *Materialism
and Empiriocriticism*, is learned but brutal, full of insults against the Machians. It is also
clearly against Bogdanov. Lenin, in brief, accuses Bogdanov and Mach of being idealists: of
negating the existence of a real world behind the mind, and reducing reality to the content
of consciousness.

Bogdanov, instead, correctly reads Mach as not taking matter out there as a metaphysical
assumption, as something of which we are sure, so we don't want to doubt anymore. Not
because we only have access to our knowledge, but because the world of phenomena and
our knowledge is of the organization of phenomena. The material description of
phenomena is part of this organization. It has worked so well in Newtonian physics, but it
might be just a step in the history of knowledge. Mach is seriously rooted in the so-called
dialectical aspect of Marx and Engels' view of the world: history is a process, and
knowledge is a process. This is spectacular, because Bogdanov writes explicitly that the
notion of matter, which is proper to the science of his time, may turn out to be an
intermediate stage in the path to knowledge.

A few years later, Heisenberg discovers quantum mechanics and shows that the naive
materialism of the 18th century, in spite of being so successful, is not sufficient for
describing reality. The quantum world is not made up of little particles moving around.

It is not surprising to find this liberating influence of Mach on both the writings of Bogdanov
and Heisenberg. The main idea is simply not to take anything for granted. This is the core of
science: question your beliefs constantly. Not because science is not cumulative—science
is cumulative—but because, in growing, sometimes you have to re-arrange things from the
basis. The same core idea is in Marx and Engels, if you read them the way Bogdanov does.

The political criticism, if I may jump outside my field here, of Bogdanov against Lenin is
even more interesting.

The politics of Bogdanov against Lenin diverged strongly from the early years before the
Revolution. The idea of Leninist theory is that the role of the intelligentsia, guardians of the
Party, is to lead the revolution. Bogdanov goes in the opposite direction: he tries to organize
the proletariat. In post-revolutionary Russia, he puts together *Proletkult*, which is this vast
network of circles gathering together workers and technicians, trying to develop a new
culture.
Bogdanov points out that Marxism was born in Germany *before* the Revolution, and the key idea of Marxism is that ideology, in analytical-philosophical terms, is subordinate to structure. This implies that, once the structure of the economy changes, ideas too change. Therefore, Bogdanov argues that, after the Revolution, Marxism itself is meant to change. This is exactly the opposite of what Lenin argues in *Materialism and Empiriocriticism*; namely, that there are fixed elements of knowledge acquired forever, and Marxism and our understanding of matter are among these. We know that matter is matter, and that is forever, argues Lenin; we know the bases of Marxism are right and correct, so we should not question those any longer, and we have to build on them, argues Lenin.

That is exactly the opposite of Bogdanov's arguments, which say, 'no, these are steps along an evolution'. This criticism is prophetical and shows the vast depth of Bogdanov's thinking. I think Bogdanov is one of the greatest thinkers of the early 20th century. He writes that, if Lenin's vision of revolution becomes dominant, it will block evolution, which must be a dialectical evolution of both history and ideas. This is going to freeze Soviet Russia into something that will no longer be able to change. And that will be the end, the death sentence for the post-revolutionary Russia. A century later, it is quite impressive to read these considerations, written in the early years of the revolution.

## SYNTHESIS

Please pardon me if I say superficial and naive things. Remember that I am a scientist. But I have been impressed by this discussion and the way it parallels the discussion on science and the nature of science. Science is a process involving evolution; it is not a body of acquired knowledge. It is the evolving organization of what we know, what we see of the phenomena around us—the social organization of what we see around us. For this reason, it is reliable and strong. It keeps growing because it keeps questioning itself.

Bogdanov's political criticism of Lenin can be synthesized as follows. The revolutionary change in the economic system should lead to a change of ideology. Marxism was conceived before the revolution, so it must evolve. Lenin's idea of leadership, of the Party, was, of course, super effective. But, as Bogdanov realized, the risk was that it would lead to dogmatism and suffocate the revolution.

I am Italian, and Gramsci is an enormous influence on the Italian left, in his reflection on the role of culture in the political arena. I understand that recently there has been more clarity on the relationship between Gramsci and Bogdanov. Gramsci was in early revolutionary Russia, and Bogdanov was in Italy organizing Party schools for workers before the revolution. Bogdanov sees social life as the organization of collective work. Knowledge is embedded in the physical history of reality. It is not the knowledge of the 19th century: knowledge belonging to an abstract subject, a Kantian subject, or a sort of Hegelian spirit that evolves. It is the actual organization of experience by men and women in their history.
As Bogdanov writes, psychological order is experience organized individually, whereas physical order, such as science, is experience organized socially. This is beautiful. Abner Shimony, an analytical philosopher, has this beautiful expression: closing the epistemic circle. We need an ontology which is consistent with our epistemology, not only because it is supported by our epistemology, but also because the epistemology is grounded in the ontology itself. We are part of the network of relations that nature is, of this assembly of phenomena of the natural form; and, just as we are part of the nature of organization, our knowledge is part of what we are interacting with in the rest of the world. That is why we know about it.

I conclude by going back to my thanks in the book, my acknowledgement of Heisenberg and Bogdanov. Heisenberg knew little or nothing of politics. He was not interested in politics. I do not know what he thought about the revolution in Russia, but his rethinking of fundamental science is a Machian giving up of metaphysics and opening science to a relational perspective. This works much better for us in understanding the world, and so it is a better way of organizing what we know about the world. Heisenberg's peers were very close in that thinking, as they had the same influence, Ernst Mach. Bogdanov, even if less directly, embraced the scientifically-useful idea of thinking of reality in terms of organization, in terms of structure. The more I read about Bogdanov, the more I am captured by this way of thinking as a way that saves us, not only from the narrowness of reducing things to the object, but also from the narrowness of reducing things to the subject.

I will stop here.

## REFERENCES

* Bogdanov, A. A. (1989). Tektologia: Vseobshaya Organizatsionaya Nauka (Books 1–3). Ekonomika (in Russian).

* Bogdanov, A. A. (1996). Bogdanov's Tektology: Universal science of organisation—Book 1. P. Dudley (Ed.). Translated by V. N. Sadovsky, A. Kartashov, V.V. Kelle, and P. Bystrov. Centre for Systems Studies Press.

* Lenin, V. I. (1909). Materialism and Empiriocriticism: Critical comments on a reactionary philosophy, in collected works (1968 eds). Progress Publishers.

* Rovelli, C. (2021). Helgoland: Making sense of the quantum revolution. Penguin Books.

* Rovelli, C., & Jackson, M. C. (2023). Quantum mechanics and Alexander Bogdanov's worldview: A conversation. *Systems Research and Behavioral Science*, 40(2), 320–327. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2928