On Wednesday, February 25, 2015, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]> wrote:
> LizR wrote: > >> On 25 February 2015 at 10:52, Bruce Kellett <[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >> >> LizR wrote: >> >> On 24 February 2015 at 14:23, meekerdb <[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote: >> >> And I don't see anything incoherent about true randomness. >> We seem >> to have done well with it for a century. If you can accept >> randomness due to ignorance which can never be informed, why >> not >> inherent randomness. >> >> It is of course possible that the universe works on "oracles" >> like this, this is just my personal bias towards explanations >> that don't require infinite amounts of "in-principle unknowable" >> data to be injected into physics. But I admit I could be wrong >> to have that bias. >> >> >> You must have difficulty with quantum mechanics, then. QM is built >> on a lot of "in-principle unknowable" data. Hidden variable theories >> of QM do not really work, so that in radioactive decay, for >> instance, the time of any particular decay, and whatever it might be >> that caused that nucleus to decay now rather than at some other >> time, is "in-principle unknowable". >> >> MWI simply formalizes the fact that such data are "in-principle >> unknowable". >> >> >> It seems to me that the MWI explains, in principle, where the data come >> from - from first person indeterminacy. That isn't the same as spontaneous >> generation of random data from nowhere. >> > > First person indeterminacy is just another name for "in-principle > unknowable"! > No it's not. It provides an explanation of how the world can be completely deterministic but to you as an observer within it appear truly random, so that not even God would be able to tell you what you will experience next. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
