On 11/21/2019 9:42 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Thursday, November 21, 2019 at 6:22:05 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote: On 11/21/2019 11:28 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:They make predictions of outcomes whether or not those outcomes are ever observed.It's tautalogous that predictions are of "outcomes". The point was that they can be judged right or wrong/*only*/ if they are predictions of /*observations.*/ Otherwise they are like your priest predicting that a donation to the church will put you in heaven when you die.Whether predictions are "right" or not is a pragmatic practice that is outside the scientific model/formulation/theory itself.A pragmatic practice? So when Eddington measured the deflection of starlight by the Sun, he should have then asked himself whether it will be/*useful */to think that his observation matched Einstein's predict? He should have thought about what papers could be written and chairs endowed? BrentModels make predictions of outcomes whether they are observed by humans (or hypothetical intelligent beings) or not. The models predict outcomes in galaxies far from ours. In multiverse models, they may make predictions of outcomes in other universes where we don't even live.
In fact they predict all nomologically possible outcomes. Which is why it is a problem to interpret the Born rule.
How human observations relate to models (their predicted outcomes) is a matter of *pragmatic philosophy*, or so-called agreed-upon scientific practice. But this is not part of the models.
Maybe (I didn't know you were a fan of pragmatism). But observations are. Otherwise it's just mathematics. In QM they are even called "observables".
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