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Regarding Bohr, isn't that very similar to what Kand said about noumenon and phenomenon? Aren't there serious epistemological issues at the core of all this?
ThatBritGuy:
"It's random within probabilistic constraints" seems to be all that QM can tell you. There may be a theory which defines the ontology in more detail. But QM doesn't seem to be it. The only difference between an observer and a non-observer is that the observer is consciously aware of a measured value. But that doesn't define the value.
"It's random within probabilistic constraints" seems to be all that QM can tell you.
There may be a theory which defines the ontology in more detail. But QM doesn't seem to be it.
The only difference between an observer and a non-observer is that the observer is consciously aware of a measured value. But that doesn't define the value.
sniff, sniff Chris, is that you cooking up another batch of your pudding somewhere? Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
That depends what you expect physics to do. There's a difference between explaining reality, modelling reality, and defining reality.
I think realistically (sic) the best you can hope for is models of increasing sophistication and usefulness. Explaining reality is best left to theologians. (Not that they have a clue either, but it keeps them busy.)
No one should be trying to define reality, ever, but it's easy to fall into the trap of believing that a theory with predictive power is what's going on ontologically.
Too much physics is still cursed by Platonism. According to Penrose et el., models supposedly float around outside reality telling it what to do.
But there's a huge gap between using experimental recipes to predict what's going to happen next, and assuming there's a Central Recipe Database running things behind the scenes.
One is pattern recognition, the other is metaphysics. One assumes that reality works consistently and the consistency can be enumerated. The other makes unwarranted assumptions about the mechanisms which create that consistency.
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