Hello Hans,
On 02 Feb 2017, at 16:32, Hans von Baeyer wrote:
Thank you Pedro for mentioning my new book.
Actually, there is a connection between my book and the curious
tale. QBists look at the future as a web of interlaced personal,
numerical probability estimates, with no certainties anchored in
REAL mechanisms. The probability that CERN will blow up the world
is small enough to be negligible for most people, but not for all.
The thing QBists reject as in principle unattainable is ABSOLUTE
certainty, which many lay people and some physicists (Einstein was
among them) continue to long for.
I am not absolutely certain about this. (grin).
Nor am I sure that Einstein defended absolute certainty (an
epistemological notion). He defended determinism (a metaphysical or
theological notion), which is neutral on what human or other creature
can know, believe, know-for-sure or predict, ....
If we discard, like Feynman, the reduction of the wave postulate in
quantum mechanics, we come back to a purely deterministic physics, but
this does not enforce *any* certainty for any human, at least
concerning physical prediction.
I tend to think that in the tiny "constructive" part of arithmetic
(known as sigma_1 arithmetic: it allows only existential quantifiers),
we can have something akin to certainty. It is hard to doubt that 3+4
= 7, for example, or that it exists some number n such that n + 4 = 7.
Bruno
Hans Christian von Baeyer
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