> [Krimel] > True enough but a great many things are highly unlikely. Ham's impersonal > big daddy in the sky for example, or the likelihood of Platt voting for > Hillary Clinton.
[Platt] You got that right. :-) So what good are probabilities in everyday life when a great many things are highly unlikely? In other words, why be concerned about the values of the quantum level of reality when the values that matter to us reside in the higher levels where probabilities are highly likely? [Krimel] Because while Certainty is elusive, likelihoods can be specified. Pattern recognition and estimation of probability are how we beat the odds. We are good at it. We do it instantly on a pre-intellectual level. We do not attend much to things that have low probabilities. They are irrelevant. The degree to which we do attend to things is a function of their likelihood. Frankly, I would advise ignoring about 90% of what people say about quantum mechanics. All manner of weirdness is proposed in its name. The fundamental uncertainty it talks about is really just a confirmation of the uncertainty shown mathematically by Gödel, and revealed through Thermodynamics and Chaos Theory. In the past we tried to conquer it or brush it into the corner and figured it would all even out. This allowed us to maintain the illusion of Platonic ideals and the kind of cause and effect fantasy world that Ham so desperately clings to. As Bacon observed with respect to Aristotle; he took us far but was hindered by his methods. We now possess better methods and we should use them to take us farther. Many of the methods we use today were not available in the past. Computer models, simulations and sheer raw processing power let us ask questions we had no hope of answering 50 years ago. I think the problem I have been hammering away at in this discourse with you and Ham is of a Kuhnian nature. There have been paradigm shifts; radical restructuring of the framework of western thinking. Kuhn talks chiefly of Copernicus, Newton and Einstein, as exemplars of these intellectual schemas. I would say that QM, and Chaos represent two more such shifts. The problem is not every one makes the shift and you dudes are operating in the world as it was seen two or three paradigm shifts ago. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
