: Nor should it. It's your personal philosophical choice as
: to what's "really" going on. You can believe
: that a perfectly deterministic universe exists
: side-by-side with our own, or anything else you want.
: All QM says is that any deterministic processes that
: are going on are hidden from our perception, and do
: not directly affect the universe we can see.
I think this is largely right. Science should be in the business of detecting observable regularities. Making conclusions from the perceived regularities is another field, namely philosophy, more specifically metaphysics. You are constrained, of course, that the interpretations be reasonable, and so I would not say you can interpret 'anything else you want.' What's the point of THAT?
It seems to me that QM is not so much OBSERVING that there are no deterministic process, but people are interpreting that conclusion from observations in a QM framework. 'There are no deterministic processes', after all, is not exactly an observable.
This point is not the same as 'no deterministic process has ever been discovered,' [I WOULD call this observable] a separate and also interesting question of fact. What I'm submitting is that whether a process is judged to be deterministic is a question of perspective.
Consider the question of true randomness. Rolling a die can be taken as a random event since we have no tools to predict which face will turn up. But at the same time we can imagine that if we had more perfect tools for predicting every force that was going to impact that die over the next 15 seconds and knew the initial condition of the die, it is in principle possible to predict which face would turn up. Of course, it may be the case that something like QM is always going to muck up the equation, because every minute interaction will add a touch of uncertainty, with uncertain spin or force on collision with the table. But what we're talking about right now are unobservable intuitions that run counter to one another. This gets even messier when we start to fuss about the tools used to gather the information and the observer effect.
I submit that processes can be effectively (for human purposes, and who else is science for?) random from a certain perspective and yet deterministic from another. A similar example is the way certain computers generate random numbers, by grabbing a few digits off of an operation it happens to be performing at the moment. Truly random? No, but effectively so.
The best we can say is that something appears to the best of our abilities not to have a regularity. Which may be enough, right? I don't think so.
Whether we have a deterministic world is an assumption, much like whether there exists a mind-independent world. We are not in a position to make such a call. Most of the time we do just fine to assume mind-independence and determinism. At the same time, certain questions seem to be answered best by adopting indeterminacy or mind-dependence. These assumptions don't make the house of cards fall because our observations aren't based on holding one or the other assumption. Our observations are silent about mind-dependance and determinacy. But we don't like to hear that because we want answers. But there's a limit to reason, at least to human reason.
So we CAN say 'we can't detect any regularity', but we CAN'T say 'there is no regularity', since we know about examples like the ones mentioned above. This is exactly analogous to how we refuse to declare our perceptions infallable since we know that perception can be fooled. We know that we are wrong from certain perspectives to judge a process to be determinstic or not. Ergo, we are not in a position to judge whether (the world; Life, the Universe, and Everything) is deterministic.
: Of course, one of the philosophical problems with science
: is that it can't *really* refer to the perceived
: universe, at least at anywhere near our level of
: knowledge. If it did, you could violate the
: inverse-square gravity law by taking LSD until stuff
: appeared to be floating.
Funny. One of the other philosophical problems with science is that it can't *really* refer to anything BUT our perceptions, AKA observations.
Paradox? Actually, I don't think science needs a mind-independent world. Moreover, I think it BETTER not need it, because it's going to have a hell of a time PROVING it. But I'll grant that playing the game of scientific explanations does get messier when you start trying to consider so-called 'altered states of consciousness.' But just because the game gets tough doesn't mean you get to make simplifying assumptions for no cause. And we can't conclude from LSD-enabled observations that what happens during an LSD trip isn't determined or law-abiding. In that natural sense of the word.... lol
: So you have to take science as referring to "the
: ideal perceived universe, the one you perceive if
: you're not insane or on drugs," or something like
: that. A universe sort of midway between our actual
: perceptions and the hypothetical "real
: world." Which is obviously unsatisfying, but what
: can you do? Bertrand Russell suggested creating a
: universal science which would take your direct sensory
: perceptions and emotions as data and output the
: predicted sensory perceptions and emotions you'll feel
: shortly, but we're a hell of a long way from that.
Russell also wanted to prove that mathematics was complete and consistent. He had a lot of grand ideas that fell short. But Russell's idea here, like the mathematical one, gets to a fundamental point about our expectations of science. It would be a different endeavor, Russellian Perceptive/Emotive Investigation (RPEI), much different than western science. You'd have to scrap much of the very valuable web of belief that's been painstakingly assembled for the past few centuries. But we may be nearing the point where we've taken this version of inquiry about the world as far as it can go. For instance, a science of consciousness is much more conceivable in RPEI than in the orthodoxy of modern science.
Science, even the modern othodox version, doesn't really have to suppose a mind-independent world. But I think we're all a lot more comfortable if we do suppose such a world, and we'd all be much happier if our science worked there.
: Well, they didn't have the question, did they? We do.
: "What is everything?" "Everything's a
: wave." Seems perfectly clear to me. :-)
Ah! But they did. "What is six times seven?"
Do you find the following explanatory? 'What is everything?' 'Everything is one.'
Me neither. But it's not because I don't know what 'one' means. I know perfectly well what 'one' means. I don't know what it would mean that everything is one.
I don't know what it would mean that everything is a wave. I can't even grasp that. Of course, I'm sure the unitiated had a hard time dealing with 'everything is an atom' and 'your uncle was a monkey'. So should I shut up and deal with it? Should I teach my child from the cradle that everything is a wave, in the hopes that one day he'll be able to explain it to me?
Or just shake his head at my ignorance?
