On 25 Feb 2015, at 19:36, John Clark wrote:
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.
Counter-example: step 3 of UDA. You are still stuck by this?
The iterated self-duplication gives an example of an infinity of first
person random events completely explained in a third person
deterministic theory.
>> 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.
I agree. Where I disagree is when you invoke this to stop searching
for a reason, when we do have a simple reason: either comp, or the SWE.
> 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.
+
4) the outcome of the experience are unique (= ~MWI)
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.
Not at all. We can abandon just four. You might read Tipler, or
Deutsch and Hayden, or others, which shows that there is no non-local
influence in the violation of Bell's inequality. I have explained this
on this list, in the simple informal way, that you can find also on
Steve Price Everett FAQ.
>> 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.
No problem, but does not address the point (which you unquoted also).
Magic and miracle are not illogical, but to invoke them when searching
an explanation is not rational. It consists in abandoning the
research. It is a gof-of-the-gap type of pseudo-religious explanation.
God also is not illogical, but saying "God did it" is not a rational
explanation.
Bruno
John K Clark
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