eqblaauw2 said:
juanrga said:
t_siva03 said:
Not at all, what I am doing is separating the science from the philosophy. Often people get them all mixed up together.nazarbaz said:
What objects are you understanding?
This is exactly the kind of "mixing up" philosophy and physics that I'm pointing out. We have no kind of basis to scientifically support these beliefs of yours, all we have any evidence of whatsoever is that we will continue to push new theories into domains where our predictions are currently suspect. That's it, that's what we can say. How do you know when you have made sense of the physical world? You expect a sign that reads "you have it correct-- you have reached your destination"? Every single scientific culture since Aristotle thought they were making room to make sense of the physical world in the near future! These are just the facts of the matter, as scientists, we should at least deal in facts.
Nah, I just know the difference between a scientifically demonstrable claim that is not liable to change in the future, and an interpretation that is.
Let's examine your logic here. Your syllogism is apparently "we have effective technology, any effective technology must be based on understanding "what things are", ergo, we understand what things are." Does that really sound like a logically bulletproof argument to you? You can't think of any examples of technologies that worked fine being used by people who had no idea of why? Do we have any idea why two slits make a diffraction pattern, just because we can write an equation that predicts it? Why do you think we can build and fly airplanes without knowing any string theory?
juanrga said:
juanrga said:
BruceW said:
eqblaauw2 said:
juanrga said:You are welcome
Ken G said:
Yes, I would say that is true. If it makes different predictions, it's a different theory, not a different interpretation of a theory. However, different interpretations might stimulate different new theories, so they are not moot.BruceW said:
Ken G said:
Ken G said:
juanrga said:
BruceW said:
Yeah, in my view that section of the article translates to "here's why the many-worlds interpretation does not fit into my own personal philosophical priorities about what science is", but it is not actually framed that way. The article would do much better to simply analyze what those philosophical priorities are, and then it follows rather immediately whether MWI fits into them. This would put the focus on its proper place.BruceW said:
Ken G said:
eqblaauw2 said:
BruceW said:
I think that is very much the idea. The point of MWI is not just to give a statistical basis to the interpretation of a probability (as being N events out of M possibilities, because the ensemble interpretation allows that just fine), it is to have a mathematical description of any closed system that maintains both unitarity and completeness. So that's why the "alive cat" and the "dead cat" must both be equally real in MWI, regardless of what we see when we open the box, because nothing else would allow us to interpret unitarity as giving a complete description of the reality of closed systems (including closed systems that involve observers).BruceW said:
BruceW said:
eqblaauw2 said:
juanrga said:
Ken G said:
eqblaauw2 said:
I feel it should really be labeled as "unempiricist" rather than "unscientific." Most people feel that science is deeply rooted in empiricism, that's true, but quite a few scientists, probably most notably some of the great theoretical physicists, see it as more deeply rooted in rationalism (i.e., the mathematical models are the reality, the observations are just how we check those models). If you adopt the latter view, you say that observations can falsify models, but observations do not falsify that the cat is both alive and dead because the observations are coming from within the system, and may not have access to complete information about the system. But the empiricist view is that observations must have access to complete information because they define complete information. Rationalists say that complete information is whatever we think it is, not whatever we observe it to be. Consider the question in the book by the celebrated astrophysicist Mario Livio, "is God a mathematician?" (http://plus.maths.org/content/god-mathematician) So it's not exactly "unscientific" to be rationalistic-- the relative fortunes of empiricism and rationalism have demonstrably ebbed and flowed many times in the fledgling history of our physics.juanrga said:
Ken G said:
Nothing in that "lost causes" website was at all convincing tht MWI has flaws, that website was merely categorizing the philosophical priorities of its author. Given those priorities, it is obvious that MWI would not be looked on favorably. That's the point-- one can only judge interpretations subject to a set of philosophical priorities. We don't argue axioms, we merely identify them, and track their ramifications.juanrga said:
But that isn't true. A strongly rationalistic physicist, like say Max Tegmark or Steven Weinberg, will do exactly that. They may well recognize that any given model has shortcomings, but they view the "actual truth" as simply a deeper model that is very much along the same lines as the existing one but with some improved features. Above all, they view the truth about the reality as being described by a mathematical model, because to them, that's just exactly what truth is. There's just no point in arguing axioms like that, only in identifying them, and tracking their ramifications.
Feynman always tended toward empiricism, which is one reason I like his approach. But a rationalist could easily counter that Euclidean geometry is only one brand of geometry, and no one ever said reality had to be Euclidean. They would still hold that reality is fundamentally geometric, whether Euclidean or some other.
Indeed, they always tend to "go overboard" in interpreting the ramifications of each new theory, I agree. All the same, every theorist dons a "rationalist hat" pretty much every time they sit down to try and conjure a new theory. So there is no question that rationalism is a useful angle from which to view reality, even if one does not have to take it quite as seriously as the "God is a mathematician" camp does.
And there's the rub right there-- he won a Nobel. So there is a demonstrable value to being able to think rationalistically. But I agree that rationalism is probably not a good way to build a world view that transcends what science can demonstrate-- it's just too unlikely to be right.
The way I put that earlier in the thread is, the problem with rationalism is that the theories keep changing but the observations don't. Still, the rationalist counters that a good theory is always a good theory-- for whatever it is good at. To me, the bottom line is, "don't take the theory too seriously." Or how this is often said, "the map is not the territory."
Ken G said:
Yes, that's the "ensemble interpretation", it simply holds that QM is not a complete description for individual systems.BruceW said:
Yes, there is quite a tension between definiteness and indefiniteness in quantum mechanics. The two seem to be halves of the same coin.
The deBroglie-Bohm approach holds that the initial state is already collapsed, we just don't know it. It places a level of mathematics beneath the wave function, interpreting the wave function like we interpret the density of a gas-- an emergent equilibrium property of a more complicated underlying system. The emergent equilibrium is treated statistically, but the underlying system is deterministic and inaccessible in practice. It is the closest to classical, but still has an "angels on a pin" feeling because it equilibrates so readily that we never encounter anything else.
Ken G said: