Do you ever read something once and think somebody said one thing; and then read it again and find they said something very different? That just happened to me. When I decided to (re-)read what you'd written instead of what I was expecting you to write, the flavor of your side of the discussion came out much differently. I'm sorry for the degree of confusion I'm responsible for above.... [and below, in advance, as long as I'm at it!]
: Earlier posts--one in particular--suggested that you were
: interested in functional determinism: "Presented
: with observations, what conclusion do you draw? That
: there's more observing to be done, or that there's no
: more to be done, and stuff's just random like that?
Hmm, I agree that sounds that way. All I can say is that I was thinking more generally here. I wouldn't respond thus to, say, specific claims about the implications of Bell theorem, for example. At least I hope I didn't. I forget where I said this.
: "Sure indeterminacy sounds good compared to that. My
: claim is that there is in principle a way to determine
: reliably the roll of a die or the flip of a
: coin."
Not this one--the emphasis is supposed to be on 'in principle', which may or may not be the wrong phrase. Perhaps 'ideally'? Or maybe the point should be put that in principle the coin flip IS DETERMINED. It's tricky to say this right. I see why we've been confusing each other.
: I'd say that yeah, a lot of physicists infer absolute
: indeterminism from QM, for simplicity's sake--if you
: can't observe something, why bother assuming it
: exists? But this is a personal philosophical choice,
: and most physicists are pretty good about emphasizing
: that fact. The problem arises when 2nd- or 3rd-hand
: reports of what they say begin to mix the philosophy
: and the science.
I agree with your claim on the origin of the confusion. Actually, coming full circle, this is where the Berkeley (Bishop, not CA) stuff comes in. If you can't observe something (directly), why bother assuming it exists? This is why I think dealing with the question of the existence of a mind-independent world really gives a grounding to the whole discussion. Do you see what I'm getting at? I take it as an analogous situation--the existence of a mind-independent world; whether the world is deterministic or not.
Briefly, there are reasons to think something exists without getting direct proof of it. For one, what sort of things are assumed merely by playing the game of science? Why ARE we so confident that a mind-independent world exists when we don't just lack evidence for it, but are fundamentally incapable of getting evidence of it?
This is also where Kant is at his best. These should be antinomies added to his list. Some things that must be one way or the other are unthinkable either way (there is no God, there is a God; there is a start to time; there is no start to time; space is finite, space is infinite; there is no free will, there is free will)--ideas that are either 'too small' or 'too big' for us to get our minds around. I think a mind-dependent world and indeterminacy are 'too small' and mind-independence and determinacy are 'too big'.
I hope I haven't lost everybody by now. By the way, do you think anybody else is even reading this exchange, SiliconDream?
: I never said science was simply truth. This whole
: discussion started because you argued--with reference
: to my number-list example--that a theory can't be
: scientific unless it has a story. I take exception
: to that, but that doesn't mean I don't think stories
: are part of science. Science, the human endeavor,
: contains more than theories.
Here is a case, I think, of YOU reading ME as saying what you want me to say. I don't remember using the word 'story'. You may be taking 'justifier' or 'logos' as 'story', but that's not how I intend the terms.
I'm curious at what you're imagining. Are you taking science as the collection of the laws of nature? If that's what we're talking about, sure. There's not anything more needed than that. At least, you don't need a cute story to tie it all up. You just have to know how to map the variables and constants on to the world. And that's algorithmic, so it's not problematic in my book.
But we need to focus on the number-list theory, because that's not a law of nature. (Or are you that good?) What I'm saying is that producing a list of numbers that turns out to be the correct prediction of a die roll does not count as knowing what the next die roll will be unless there's a justifier, a logos, an explanation of why it's coming through time after time. Until then, it's a puzzle, a miracle, a magic trick. And, as I claimed before, anyone that DID buy into it is presuming something-I-know-not-what behind the scenes.
If you're not thinking of the laws of nature, what are you thinking of when you're thinking of science? Or should I say SCIENCE? (I'm hearing that guy from Thomas Dolby's She Blinded Me With Science in my mind.)
And if you had this one oddball law of nature out on the periphery operating all on its own providing correct predictions for die rolls, you'd call that an anomaly. It wouldn't be normal science, that's for sure.
: I hope that throughout this you were using
: "truth" as shorthand for "apparent
: truth given the validity of the inductive
: principle," btw.
C'mon, all swans are white! Oops... Um, I mean all crows are black!
