Andrew M

I would suggest a third view that integrates the subjective and objective without transcending the senses. That would be Aristotle's immanent realism.

Independent in the sense that the world was there before humans were around to talk about it. We don't rise above those capacities (which would be the...

Properties like taste and color are pragmatic abstractions. What makes them objective is that they have an ostensive meaning and logic of use. It's no...

Not at all. We experience and describe the world from a human vantage point but it is still the world, independent of what humans say about it, that w...

I would suggest that objective explanations always directly or indirectly reference experience. For example, you might explain addition by showing how...

Physicalists don't deny the inner, private part either as meant in the ordinary sense of those terms (e.g., that you can be stoic, hide your true feel...

I accept color realism, with the qualification that "out there in the world" includes the physical particles in an animal's or person's brain and body...

Yes and your usages of "pain" and "red" here are the ordinary usages. So, per physicalism, this is where the impossibility of p-zombies becomes appare...

They presumably mean the same thing as you do. They're not redefining the term "pain" as hopping and yelling even in the absence of any felt sensation...

The analogy with "qualia" here is to "hole in the sky". We can deny that there are holes in the sky while affirming that stars exist. Similarly, a beh...

There's actually no problem making (bivalent) truth apt statements for quantum scenarios. The problem is only that statements that are truth apt in a ...

Yes.

No, we have to abandon the idea that the statement meaningfully refers to something. Suppose I was speaking to a crowd of people and I said, "You have...

Under unitary quantum mechanics, the statement, "if I had opened the box at earlier time t I would have found the cat to be dead" doesn't have a truth...

The ESP seems to me just a version of a common-sense principle that we apply in everyday life. Suppose we are predicting whether it will rain this aft...

I think you may have misunderstood my comments on the Born rule (or I could have expressed them better) - I certainly agree that it should be derivabl...

Quantum states are fundamental to QM. The Schrodinger equation describes how the quantum state of a quantum system changes with time.

I see the Born rule as an empirical result that is useful for making predictions about the state that will be observed. But I don't have an explanatio...

The mathematics of QM describes the world. That is what is being modeled. It is not a description of people's knowledge. It's difficult to discuss thi...

As it happens, Many-Worlds does involve the minimum ontological commitment (albeit more of the same ontology we are already familiar with) - it's bare...

Mathematically, the states in a quantum superposition are represented as probability amplitudes (complex numbers), not probabilities (real numbers bet...

You're misunderstanding that sentence. The modulus squared is the probability that that particular quantity (the amplitude) will be measured. The ampl...

Agreed. Probabilities relate to observer predictions, not the world itself.

The Hamiltonian tells you how a quantum state will (deterministically) evolve. When it is applied in the Schrodinger equation, it produces a superposi...

Note the word "measures". Probabilistic language relates to the measurement of the system, not its ontology, which is what the Schrodinger equation de...

The Schrodinger Equation describes the deterministic evolution of the wave function of a quantum system. In the double-slit experiment, the system evo...

Quantum interference effects are real and are predicted by Schrodinger's equation. You won't find any mention of possibilities or probabilities in the...

MW is a causal theory - the wave function evolves deterministically with the parallel branching and merging built in. I've been making just your argum...

So what about MW does not make sense, or is mistaken, on your view?

Explanation is an account of why something happens. I've just quoted Duhem, probably the main proponent of instrumentalism in the 20thC, who rejects t...

Multiplication is a scaling transformation. An example of observing this is when we see a car moving towards us from 200 meters to 100 meters away and...

If a scientific theory, per instrumentalism, makes no ontological commitments (i.e., is neither true nor false), then neither can it be offering an ex...

That's what it means to regard QM as an explanatory scientific theory. The alternatives are to either change the theory (e.g., dynamical collapse or B...

Yes. Consider, for example, an emitted particle in the double-slit experiment. The Schrodinger wave equation describes the evolution of the particle a...

The parallel worlds can't be removed from QM without also changing its predictions. Which is why Everettian QM is used in practice even if people don'...

Yes. The point is that there is no ad hoc modification to QM to preserve determinism. Everettian QM is just the natural interpretation of the wave fun...

As Tom mentions, hidden variables have a particular history in a quantum context. In particular, Bell's Theorem shows why no physical theory of local ...

So there isn't a desire to remove that probability in Everettian QM, which would amount to an ad hoc change to QM. As an example, consider a particle ...

Thanks Tom, I'll take a look. No I don't disagree. That's the self-locating uncertainty that I mentioned. The wave function assigns a complex number (...

Yes it's counterintuitive. That's not a valid argument against it. If that's the way the world is, then we should change our intuitions. Energy is con...

Because Everett considered the wave function to be real and the world as not inherently probabilistic.

Just to clarify this, Everettian QM is a local realist theory. What Bell's theorem falsifies are realist theories that depend on local hidden variable...

The determinism is built-in to QM - the wave function evolves deterministically according to the Schrodinger Equation. And self-locating uncertainty i...

There is a lot more to the issue than that. There is nothing at all in QM that implies or predicts wave function collapse. Copenhagen doesn't postulat...

The Ptolemaic epicycles were ad hoc additions to preserve geocentric intuitions. The branching is intrinsic to QM. So it's dynamical collapse and hidd...

As you probably know by now (even if you don't like it!), local realism works just fine under Everettian QM. If you measure one of the photons and its...

You can approximate the apple as a point, or treat it as an extended volume (which would be a world tube) or aggregate the segments of the individual ...

Your explanation needs to account for the double-slit experiment. What goes through the slits, if anything, such that an interference pattern is obser...

World lines apply to objects, whether particles or apples. The world line for an apple is the convergence of particle world lines. That's a causal exp...

So on what grounds are you denying that apples exist? There is a distribution of particles following a world line that we can identify as the apple.