apokrisis

OK. You still don't get how it works. Cool.

Sadly, there are an infinite number of wavefunction world branches in which that is guaranteed to be the case. The equation has no other solution but ...

Are we talking about the defining feature of the model or the reality. (You understand the difference by now, right?)

But you were saying something about reality itself being comprehensible. We might certainly be inclined towards such an ontological belief given a sup...

Why do you keep avoiding the "modelled as" point particles? I mean it is normal in physics to understand that it is a specific kind of useful idealisa...

So if particles are modelled as strings rather than points, the SM is "wrong"? Sounds legit.

Hah. That's a very good point. The Anglican church in the UK is pretty relaxed about actual belief in God these days. The social service aspect is wha...

No. Totally legit. Complete sense.

So God is moving the whole of time as a block. Is He pulling off that feat by shifting it to some other point of ... time? Sounds legit.

What I was originally pointing out to you was the big difference between reacting to Newtonian vs modern understandings of space/time. So for instance...

I'm still mystified by what you mean. But I guess I shouldn't hold my breath hoping you will explain. Opacity is your weapon of choice again it appear...

Do you mean spacetime? I don't follow. Why do you think it doesn't relate to the dynamical view I described?

As you say, that is what he argued directly against. So he may have been reacting with a religious/idealist point of view. But the context was still a...

Leibniz and Kant may not be much help then as they were still operating in a Newtonian reference frame in which the best that could be imagined was Ga...

Time is either going to be a global dimension through which things move or it is instead a measure of local change. And as usual when faced with a com...

I agree. But then that is the target - the way we have wired in a machine-like approach to life in our general social institutions. You can blame the ...

My problem with this is that it is so vague that it can be interpreted as being true either way. So a systems scientist at least would say that the wo...

Of course it plays a role. But don't we find the origins of the notion of individuality in ancient Greece - overtly in Athenian democracy/Socratic phi...

Thermal decoherence adds extra constraints on those probabilities now, keeping the weirdness suitably quantum scale. The observer/collapse issue is no...

You do realise that you keep trying to build in a classical notion of causality where the past constrains the future in some general fashion? So you a...

Honestly, you are only demanding to be given a "better law of nature" here - one that conforms to your bent for counterfactual definiteness at all tim...

Yeah sure. Just like a coin toss. Because we can only give a probability of heads vs tails, we must abandon foolish notions about there being heads or...

I just said that QM gives you a probabilty of either statement being the true one. So physics says counterfactuality is not just epistemology but look...

A logicist concerned with the deductive truth of a conditional arguement might well think that there is a problem here in drawing a true conclusion fr...

My point was that counterfactuality amounts to having some theory in play. You can be sure of X because you are sure of what would count as not-x. So ...

Sure, how would you distinguish between the accidental and the necessary when dealing with particular conditionals? Especially when the Peircean view ...

Yep. In the end, the default position has to be some bare instrumentalism. But Peircean epistemology wants to offer more that that. It recognises also...

But modern physics - the path integral or sum over histories view - is more sophisticated in realising that many possiblities are contradictory in the...

The role of counterfactuals is provide the empirical definiteness - the possible acts of measurement - by which we can take a statement or concept to ...

From a natural phillosophy POV, I would say rather than distancing us from psychological value, we need to see money and power (the ability to expend ...

The plover when caught on its nest staggers away, feigning a broken wing. A neat little evolutionary trick known to any ornithologist. But I'm sure th...

Sounds pretty religious to me.

But this confuses epistemology and ontology. Of course our causal accounts of nature might well be varied and poorly connected due to accidents of his...

Hah. I'm glad this turned out to be just an extended in-joke and you don't want to make any serious point.

So these "historical accidents", are they all material events or instead are some of them symbolically meaningful interactions? When a protein acts as...

So what is stopping them in your view? It would be possible right?

So reductionism = abstraction? Have we changed the subject just to avoid you answering my question about a failure to be able to compute protein foldi...

All I've asked you is whether it matters that protein folding can't be completely modelled as an addition of local bonding forces. Surely you accept t...

You tell me. I'm unclear whether you are simply defending reductionism on the grounds of epistemic utility or - as it does sound - trying to make a st...

Does reductionism fail in your view if protein folding via free energy minimisation counts as an NP complete problem? Or is it OK to be hand-wavingly ...

I think I answered this just a moment ago over in the "what do you care about thread". But briefly, the very idea of making that measurement - claimin...

One thing not being mentioned is that causation - out there in the world - is heavily contextual. Things happen in predictable fashion because the wor...

Yep. If even causality is in the end merely another reasonable (from observation) hypothesis for us, then that just strengthens an epistemology that i...

I'm explaining why a pragmatist might not be bothered. And that's because induction doesn't have to be true right now, just true in the long run. The ...

Maybe you have a short memory? So again, why should we believe induction has a "logical problem" (when it is viewed as the accumulation of a constrain...

But is there some "logical" reason to doubt that the past acts as a constraint on future events such that repetition becomes so likely that it approac...

Its natural to consciousness that it is the attempt to see through to the stability of the world - a mental picture of some panorama of predictable ob...

Yep. The usual question is how can we know what we perceive is real and not imagined. But turning it around - internalising it all - it becomes a matt...

If "we" are trapped inside anything, it is the present moment in time. We are poised between the two kinds of world that are the past (some accumulati...

That's why you need networks of neurons. To mark a state. When you had to learn your times tables, a whole lot of neural connections grew to fix the p...