: 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.
My claim is stronger: that no possible human observation could shine light on the question. Not under a theory of relativity, not under QM, not under The Next Great Thing.
The next step--the interesting one--is that there still might be reasons to hold that such a world exists. Personally, I find this a fascinating discovery, a discovery about human belief systems.
: Furthermore, there are indications that we're being
: ridiculously self-centered by basing the whole issue
: on "measurement" anyway...
I shortened this paragraph, but don't follow you on this point. I'd point out that science will be necessarily self-centered, and based on measurement. Unless we have a revolution.
: 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. :-)
I'm going to let this idea rattle around in my head for a little while as I continue my daily grind of appraising real estate. My spider sense is tingling.
But the first question to you is: are observations physical or mental? And are you holding a sort of mental/physical duality or something else?
: 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.
'Unthinkable' is my term, and I haven't yet found anybody else that likes it. I don't say it's terribly accurate, but it sums up in my mind Kant's point in a single word. Are you familiar with the antinomies?
: 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.
Do you have a source for this from Russell? What's curious about this is that there's a strong prima facie case that bringing in talk of unobservables (e.g., a mind-independent world) complicates rather than simplifies a problem, ANY problem. It seems to me like to really get the answer you have to move beyond a functional excuse (I need mind-independence to get the right answer), because those will never work, and find something more compelling. For just one example, co-opting Descartes, if you could show that you needed a mind-independent world just to be doubting whether one existed, then that might be a reason to suppose such a world existed. If you needed it just to get off the ground, so to speak.
: So I guess I'd say that an external world
: is a reasonable consequence of use of the inductive
: principle and Ockham's razor.
That's what you're going to hang your hat on at the end of the day? A false principle and an old wive's tale? Actually, Plus, see above: I would resist the idea that claiming the existence of an external world makes things simpler.
: 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.
OK, there's 'empirical', which means, roughly, 'testable'. It sounds like your use of 'scientific' means what I'd call 'empirical'. You can force a psychic friend to make empirical statements that are not scientific because they're guesses. If they turn out to be true (I AM pregnant with my ex-financee's baby!), that doesn't mean a scientific theory is validated.
