Part I
: And as I said above, that's fine. It's functional
: randomness I'm talking about here. A randomness that
: can't ever be beaten by humans, whether or not it can
: be beaten in principle by a godlike entity.
I care a lot more about 'absolute' randomness rather than 'functional' randomness. I think this is the conclusion many people draw from QM, that it implies 'absolute' randomness. Is this not a fair characterization of Archer's complaints that got the ball rolling? To me, allowing the possibility of absolute determinism but functional indeterminism completely takes away the bite of Schroedinger's Cat, for instance. It's supposed to shake you because it's supposed to be talking about reality and not the limits of rationality. At least that's the way I took the point. I think it's at most a footnote if it wasn't meant like that, wouldn't you agree? What's so paradoxical about being in superposition with respect to the ability to KNOW if a cat is alive or dead?
'Absolute' randomness is what bugs people about QM. But it's not a forced move, not even from accepting Bell.
: But either's
: invalidity precludes us from creating a determinist
: theory, which is what you've been asking for all
: along.
Wrong, What I'm arguing for is what you're calling absolute determinism. Rather, I'm arguing for NOT ( NOT (absolute determinism) ), which is close to equivalent except in the burden of proof department. I'm arguing for the possibility of absolute determinism. You can throw functional determinism out the door, and probably even before Bell and his theorem, as far as I'm concerned.
Although this does explain why we seem to be talking past each other. What makes you think I'm interested in (full) functional determinism? As I take it, Archer's concerns are allayed if QM is silent on absolute determinism. Many people at least talk as if QM-->absolute indeterminism. Or don't you think so?
Part II
: Certainly people expect more from a scientific theory.
: But what people expect is hardly connected to truth,
: is it? If you don't like terms like
: "simplest" and "prettiest," you
: should hardly be prepared to take human expectations
: into account.
I may have overstated my case when I said I didn't like those terms ('simple', 'pretty'). I was thinking primarily that they are often misleading. So pretend I didn't say that--because now THAT'S confusing the issue.
Anyway, for clarification's sake, MY POSITION (I didn't think it even worth mentioning until hearing you speak ("reading you write"?) about science):
Science is more than truth. Scientific knowledge is more than true belief. It's true belief PLUS something: a justifier, a maker-so. People's expectations of science do matter because science is a human endeavor, an element of human behavior. And scientific explanation is a psychological phenomenon, as I said earlier. People's expectations come in not on the 'truth' side, but on the 'justifier' side--the logos side.
There are plenty of famous counterexamples to science simply being truth, but from what I've heard from you already I take it you'd resist them, so this point will probably be the end of it. I'm not sure there's any sense in trying to convince you that science is more than truth if you want to claim otherwise. At that point we're clearly talking about different things--you truth and me truth plus a logos.
