On 11/17/2019 11:39 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Sunday, November 17, 2019 at 11:23:29 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote: On 11/17/2019 2:47 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:On Sunday, November 17, 2019 at 4:36:13 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote: On 11/16/2019 11:39 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:On Saturday, November 16, 2019 at 4:45:56 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote: On 11/16/2019 2:38 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:On Saturday, November 16, 2019 at 10:54:06 AM UTC-6, Brent wrote: The epistemic interpretation just says the wf is our mathematical representation of what we know about reality. If that is the definition of epistemic, then any mathematical physics is epistemic ("ur mathematical representation of what we know"):It is the definition of epistemic. And it is in contrast to the ontic interpretation of QM which says that the wave function is real and changing it due to a measurement must be described a some physical process, not just taking the measurement into account to update our knowledge. Brent From an applied mathematics perspective, it seems that *Schrödinger equation*, *Einstein equations*, *Maxwell's equations*, ... are all tools for making predictions about measurements, whether those measurements are made by lab instruments or telescopes. I don't see where a philosophically metaphysical and esoteric term like "knowledge" comes in in any of those equations.It comes into QM because it's probabilistic. If you wrote Maxwell's equations for the field produced by charged particles whose position was only given by a probability density function you would get a probabilistic prediction and when you measured the field at a few points and got definite answers, you would change you prediction of the field so that it matched the measurements at those points. Your knowledge of the field would still not be definite but it would have changed due to the measurement. Schrodinger's equation only predicts probabilistic measurement results, so it's always like that. Brent Just because one formulates stochastic vs. deterministic models doesn't mean "knowledge" has any special place in one type vs. the other, I took a course in stochastic differential equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_differential_equation <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_differential_equation> and I don't think the philosophical subject of "knowledge" came up in any special way vs. the subject of (deterministic) differential equations.Then there was something that changed when you got a measurement, whatever you called it. Maybe the Bayesian estimated density function. BrentStochastic modeling has nothing (in general) to do with Bayesian modeling. (Though the latter of course can be considered a special case of the former.) And quantum mechanics works fine as a stochastic model without ever introducing Bayesian probability densities.
You avoided the point that when you get a measurement result to you change something. You denied it was knowledge. So what is it?
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