: 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!]
Not your fault. Everyone involved was unclear...how much fun would discussions be if we all knew what the other people were saying the first time around?
: 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.
: 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.
All righty then. Everyone agrees that absolute determinism remains up in the air. :-)
: 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.
Well--even if you take into account experiments like the one Forrest mentioned, and I'd still like a reference for that--QM definitely doesn't even suggest that there's not a mind-independent world. In many ways, it argues more strongly for a "real world" than classical mechanics. The forces and "billiard balls" of classical physics, easily visualizable and in principle directly perceptible, could perhaps be thought of as elements of one's own mind--but QM's wave functions are difficult to conceive of and can only be detected "through a glass darkly" via semi-random measurements.
Furthermore, there are indications that we're being ridiculously self-centered by basing the whole issue on "measurement" anyway...that is, measurements are likely to be only a subset of a larger class of interactions which all perturb wave functions in such a fashion. For instance, the neutrino flavor oscillation effect that all the pop science articles have been talking about recently can be summarized as: if neutrinos have mass, then the environment can "observe" that mass and thereby, via an Uncertainty Principle variant, randomize their flavors. Consciousness not required.
Personally, the philosophical view which QM most readily suggests to me is that there's a physical world, filled with wave functions and probabilistic interactions, and "walled off" from the mental world so that only certain aspects of those interactions can leak through. But there ain't no equations for that. :-)
: 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 don't know that I'd argue that such concepts are really unthinkable, though of course people are very bad at estimating their own mental limits. I'd tend to follow Russell and say that so far it just simplifies scientific problems to postulate an external world...then you can break every problem down into the question of what's "really going on" and the psychological question of how that translates into what you perceive. And that hypothetical external world can apparently be regularized and made consistent more easily than our own minds, at least at many scales. So I guess I'd say that an external world is a reasonable consequence of use of the inductive principle and Ockham's razor.
: I hope I haven't lost everybody by now. By the way, do
: you think anybody else is even reading this exchange,
: SiliconDream?
Archer, Forrest and Ghôlsbane certainly are. :-) And I'm always amazed by the number of people who read the Asylum but never post...
: 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.
If by "justifier" and "logos" you mean "a conceptually appealing algorithm," then yeah, it's not appropriate to use the term "story." I was lumping your statements and Archer's when I shouldn't have, I think. So forget "story."
: 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.
I should mention that, as you say, a mapping system for the terms and variable is necessary in my eyes. I certainly wouldn't consider a number list a theory unless it had a label saying what the numbers corresponded to--dice rolls or the weight of the earth at 1-second intervals or whatever.
: 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.
You might call it an anomaly while you watched it return correct prediction after correct prediction--but that doesn't mean it's not a scientific theory. Because at the end of the universe, you can check every prediction it ever made and see if they line up.
I think one must distinguish between whether a theory is scientific, and whether it's useful. We wouldn't pay any attention to a number list because--due to its not being reducible to a simpler set of equations or algorithms--we can't check if those equations are satisfied now and then infer by the inductive principle that they'll be satisified in the future. Nonetheless, we can still in principle wait around to check every possible prediction--and once we've done that, we know it's valid.
As a parallel, consider the theory that the Christian afterlives exist. We can't prove this now: even if someone has a near-death experience, there's no way to prove that their visions of heaven and hell are based off the real thing. Nonetheless, I would consider that theory scientific, because it can eventually be verified--and will be, by each of us, when we die. The theory is pointless right now, but it's still scientific.
--SiliconDream
