On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: >> You've got to think what "random" means, nothing made "it" happen, "it" > is a brute fact..
> > How can you know that. This is equivalent with saying "we will not try > to understand". > If there is something to understand about why X happened, if there is a reason for it, then X is not random. You've got to think what "random" means. >> I don't find it astounding that some things have no cause, > > > > That is irrationalism. We could as well stop searching. > I'm not saying we should stop anything, I'm just saying that as far as I know there is no law of logic that demands every event have a cause. > Bell's violation just prove that if we abstract from the other branches > things seem indeterministic and non local, but the FPI [...] > OMG this juvenile slang gets wearisome, and I really don't care about the Foreign Policy Initiative. Let's get serious, Bell proposed an experiment involving the statistical likelihood of a photon of unknown polarization passing through a polarizing filter set at various angles. Using nothing but high school algebra and trigonometry he found a inequality and proved that if it is violated then *at least* one of the following must be untrue: 1) Realism: Things, like the photon, have a definite state even when you haven't measured them, you just don't know what it is. 2) Locality: A photon getting through the filter or getting stopped by it has something to do with the photon or the filter or both. 3) Determinism: True randomness is impossible. Einstein wanted determinism to be true but he thought it was the least important of the three. He thought #1 was true because he thought the moon existed even when he was not looking at it. He thought #2 was true because otherwise to understand anything you'd have to understand everything so we'd end up understanding nothing. We know from experiment that we must abandon one of the three, and perhaps all 3. >> Mechanism?? If a mechanism produces it then it's not random. Randomness >> is a event without a cause, and I don't see anything more illogical about >> that then a event with a cause. > > > > Magic is not illogical, > Some branches of magic are logical, a branch of magic that's repeatable, consistent, and describable. There is a name for that type of magic, it's called science. IF voodoo could predict how variations in doll manufacture effected performance of the curse, and IF a Fundamental Theorem Of Voodoo could determine the shape of the "needle penetration of doll versus distress of victim" plot, THEN voodoo would be as much a science as quantum mechanics. The important difference between magic and science is NOT that one deals in chants, incantations and crystal balls and the other deals in equations, lines of computer code and electron microscopes. The difference is that one works and the other doesn't. John K Clark -- 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.
