okay, Bruno.Otto
From: Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
To: fis Webinar <fis@listas.unizar.es>
Sent: Sunday, February 5, 2017 3:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] A curious tale and QBism
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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