ex-xian

No, we can have knowledge about them both up to a certain extent. We just can't certain about both of them simultaneously. That's why it's called the uncertaintly principle and not the randomness principle.

I am a theist...you'll have to ask my wife about the dirty part.

Quote:

MORE Here is a site that explains one option science has of explaining the apparently random system. You don't have to attack me by claiming I don't know what I'm talking about.

I will take a look at the site you referenced, but from a cursory examination, it seems to be another insufficient popularization.

I do apologize if my other comment came across as an attack. That truly wasn't my intent; it was merely an observation based on your previous posts.

Really? I'd be curious to know what type. Also, unless you've taken several upper level math and physics courses, you wouldn't be able to understand the scholarly papers and the popular works are generally regarded to be rubbish.

Don't see how contradictory that statement is? If I said that I was going to walk in a completely random path across a field, but then gave you a "general idea of where I was going to go, it wouldn't be random, would it? It would just be "fuzzy." Just like the electron if fuzzy.

If it was truly utterly random, then there is an equal chance for the electron of a hydrogen atom to be in the crab nebula as within an angstrom of the nucleus. Obviously, this is absurd.

I don't understand what this has to do with anything. Could you expound?


It's not purely indeterministic...it's just uncertain.

From your posted in the "question xians ignore" and them your posts here, I assumed you were a xian theist. And is relevent if one tries to force physics to fit their metaphysics. BTW, you assumed that I was a atheist, so there .

Saying something over and over doesn't make it true.

Normal

Ok you can posit how it might be possible in the future to determine the path of the electron, but right now the theory says it is impossible to predict. What is something that is impossible to predict? Why, I believe that is the very definition of random!

Duly noted.

The technical merit is obviously lacking, but the theory behind it is sound enough.

I would just prefer you point out why you think I don't know what I'm talking about instead of telling someone else I don't know what I'm talking about.


I might not understand some of the equations involved in the papers, but that does not put the theory behind the equations out of reach.

The things I'm dealing with here aren't even that advanced, but make up the general level of quantum theory.

I accept there is a probabilistic element to the path of the electrons. Do you accept the electron's path is unpredictable?

This is untrue. All it takes to be utterly random is an element of uncertainty. Something operating randomly within certain probabilistic limits 99.9% of the time can still be said to be "utterly random".

Something is either completely random or completely deterministic, there is no middle ground.

The components of matter are made up of electrons, what more is there to expound?

It might shock and astound you to know that indeterministic is a synonym for unpredictability.

Ok, we're even

Name calling aside, I thought my posts in the x-ian thread had little to do with christian mythology and much to do with subjective faith and immaterial worldviews.

ComestibleVenom

Originally posted by Normal
If it was 'purely' chaoric there would be no such thing as quantum theory. Quantum systems evolve systematically, and so the structure of the universe remains discernable

Your construal of causation as being essentially dependent upon a classical determinism.

This construal of a random "base" is clearly erronious if you believe that it rules out the transfer of energetic potential. (A fancy way of saying causation.)

But it does not matter if mutations are fundamentally random (given the quantum nature of chemistry and radiation, there is indeed a purely random element to thermodynamics, neurology and evolution alike.) The point is that stochastic randomness and order are not exclusive to an elegant descriptive characterization of nature


Apart from your contention that 'causation is unparsimonious in light of QM', one which is clearly misbegotten given the role

Unparsimonious relative to what? Faith? Faith-based epistemology may be simplistic, but it's hardly accurate to characterize it as being more parsimonious than the scientific method, given that it's utterly useless.

So again I ask, unparsimonious relative to which system? Where is your earth shatteringly revolutionary alternative to science?

bd-from-kg

Normal:

First off, “modern science” as such doesn’t point to any such thing. The only thing that “points to “ randomness is the Copenhagen interpretation of QM. There are two other well-respected interpretations, the transactional and many-worlds interpretations, which are completely deterministic. And according to a number of surveys a majority of particle physicists (who, after all, are in the best position to make an informed judgment) prefer one or the other of these interpretations to the Copenhagen interpretation.

But let’s waive that for the moment and assume for the sake of argument that the Copenhagen interpretation is correct. Then if “cause” and “effect” are defined in the usual way, so “A causes B” entails at least “if A, necessarily B”, it’s not much of a stretch to say that there is no such thing as cause and effect in this world. (Gravitational and relativistic effects are an exception. So far as we know at this point GR is completely deterministic.)

So up to this point you’re on pretty solid ground. Here’s where you really go off the rails:

Not so. The concept of evidence requires only that there be observable patterns and regularities in the course of events. It does not require perfect uniformity. Thus, if we observe that a certain cloud formation is followed by rain 99% of the time, the presence of this cloud formation is evidence that it’s going to rain.

More rigorously, “evidence” is defined by Bayes’ Theorem. To state this as simply as possible, if an observation O is more likely given the truth of hypothesis H than it is given the falsehood of H, then O is evidence for H. No “cause/effect” relationships are required.

It’s based fundamentally on the fact that there seem to be no observations which are significantly more likely given the truth of the “God hypothesis” than they are given its falsehood. To be sure, this may not be strictly true. There’s probably some evidence for the God hypothesis. But it’s not remotely strong enough to justify accepting it. In fact, so far as I can see what little evidence there is wouldn’t be good enough to justify accepting it even if it were a relatively ordinary hypothesis rather than a radical, far-reaching one that would require us to radically revise our ontological framework “all the way down”, as it were. No one in his right mind is going to accept such a hypothesis on any but extremely strong, incontrovertible evidence which cannot be accounted for by more conservative explanations. Needless to say, there’s no evidence for God remotely close to satisfying this requirement. Which is what’s generally meant by saying that there’s “no” evidence for God.

There doesn’t appear to be any underlying chaos. Quantum events are random, to be sure, but it’s a very structured, orderly randomness. It obeys well-defined statistical rules. Using the standard laws of probability we can predict with a very high degree of confidence what will happen macroscopically in most situations. That’s called “orderliness”.

If you like, you can say that the laws of probability are the “reason” for order at the macroscopic level in spite of the high degree of randomness (not chaos) at the quantum level.

You seem to be under the impression that the observed macroscopic order is some kind of deep mystery to physicists; that there’s some kind of disconnect between the “laws” observed at the macroscopic level and the randomness at the quantum level. Nothing could be further from the truth. The macroscopic level is exactly as orderly as (and in just the way) the quantum equations predict. There’s no disconnect; it’s all a seamless web so far as physics is concerned.

Normal

This is an assertion that keeps getting repeated in this thread. Quantum theory works within some limits of probability, but that doesn't make it any less "purely random". When you flip a coin, the flip is not "purely random", even though there are only 2 outcomes possible, because the result is determined by the speed you flip the coin, how high you flip the coin, etc. The electron has nothing determining the path it takes, so even if there were only 2 possible paths the electron could take (there are a lot more), and it had 50% chance of taking each path, it is still purely random. Saying you can measure the statistical probability based on this is committing the gamblers fallacy.

It is. You can only truly say something has a cause if you can identify a cause for that event. At the microscopic scale there are no causes, so any cause you ascribe to a macroscopic event is illusionary.

Of course it doesn't rule out transfer of energetic pontential, but it is a causeless transfer of energetic potential (fancy way of saying cause and effect is an illusion).

What is the parsimonious reason for this?

You have given no reason to think it's not.

Envoking a cause and effect system is unparsimonious, it is an "extra" system used to explain what can be explained without it, not only that, it is not even an accurate description of reality. It is an unparsimonious relative to the true nature of reality.

Normal

I've never understood why the MWI is given so much credit. It calls for an infinite number of parallel universes, so instead of invoking one infinity, we invoke a different kind of infinity, and all of a sudden theres no problem. The transactional interpretation involves waves going back in time, which is acceptable, although suspect. Both other interpretations involve systems taken on faith without observable evidence though, so they don't differ from the "god-theory" too much.

Patterns and regularities arise from the cause and effect system.

Seeing the cloud there, and it raining 99% of the time, actually have nothing to do with each other without invoking the cause and effect system.

But just because O is likely to give truth to H, even 99.9% of the time, the relationship can still be just an illusion. If there is no definite cause for O to imply H then it is just a coincidental phenomena. I'm talking about the TRUE cause of H, not the APPARENT cause of H.

All that conjecture is based on the unparsimonious system of "evidence" used to explain everything. You want "evidence" of god, but really you don't have "evidence" for anything.

As explained before in this thread, invoking statistical measure does not make something "less-random". Even if a statistical measure forces the electron to take 2 paths out of say a million possible paths, you still can't be sure which path the electron will take and assuming you know is committing the gamblers fallacy. Something is either deterministic or random, there is no middle ground.

But there is inherent randomness (yes, chaos, what is everyone's problem with that word?) in the probability, and you are making the leap from an indeterminstic system to an apparently deterministic system, based on inherent randomness.

Of course it's not a deep mystery. If QM were not a more accurate method for explaining the natural world it would obviously not be used. The fact that it is an accurate system, and current observations indicate the unpredictability of all effects at the quantum scale, indicate what we really think we know about the nature world is just an illusion.

Wounded King

MWI doesn't call for an infinite number of worlds, although certainly it requires so many of them that as far as we are concerned they might as well be infinite, butit is not a case of using one infinity to cancel out another.

The difference between differing interpretations of quantum mechanics and thr god theory is that there are proposals of ways to falsify these theories whereas the god theory seems to be exempt from falsification.

NonContradiction

Hi Jobar:

You mention Buddhism as an example, but then you turn around and say "that is what makes science superior to religion." Shouldn't that read "that is what makes science superior to Buddhism?" All religions are not the same. It appears as though you are equivocating here since Buddhism and religion are not synonomous.

ComestibleVenom

It permits statistical prediction, and any system in which statistical prediction can be made is not purely random.

Once again, this is a straw man. Causation is the transfer of energy potentials, that still occurs in quantum mechanics, abeit stochastically, and thus is still a valid heuristic conceptuion.

Cause and effect are obviously being revised. That being said, clear and extremely precise, time-sensitive relationships between the activities of different systems can be established. If you don't want to call this causation, that's absolutely dandy, but you are simply confused if you think that this equivocation constitutes a good argument against the high value of parsimony within scientific discourse.


You are asking a question demanding a merely tautological answer.. "What is the parsimonious reason that we would want to describe the world parsimoniously"? Well obviously because extraneous elements in our theories serve only to confuse us.

There are two related issues here. One is the continued use of classical-like talk of causation and the other is the modified causation of quantum mechanical systems.

On the first count, causation is used simply because in many cases the situation is such that a small sacrifice in accuracy can substantially expedite the scientific process. We don't use relativity or quantum mechanics to describe billard balls, but that doesn't mean that we have added to our ontology in doing so.

On the second, talk of causation is once again, not an addition to ontology. Any quantum mechanical talk of causation can be tacitly assumed to be heavily qualified unless the person talking about it doesn't know about Quantum Mechanics.

Your presupposition, bizzare as it is, is that scientists speaking of causation in the context Quantum Mechanics are actually talking about classical deterministic causation within the context of QM. This is simply absurd, since anyone smart enough to learn QM will be smart enough to avoid that simplistic contradiction.



As I have pointed out, no extra system is literally invoked, it is at merely used as a heuristic or (within QM discourse) it is tacitly qualified, hence still useful.

Having pointed out the well known fact that the term causation is not so bound to deterministic mechanics as you imagine, I would like to point out that even if such a jury-rigged system would be used literally, your assertion that it would consequently lack parsimony rings hollow. Unparsimonious relative to what? It's still the best theory.

Normal

Let me put it a different way.

A system is either determinstic or indeterministic. A deterministic system is characterized by order. An indeterministic system is characterized by an element of randomness. The quantum level events that underlie existence are an indeterministic system.

Your dogmatic reconstruction of the definition of cause is only clouding the utter absense of it at a quantum level.

Let's continue with this "transfer of energy potentials" as a definition of cause. This is to imply that electrons composed of matter in state X transfer to state Y and thus transfer their energy to form the effect of the transfer of X to Y. So is the transfer itself the cause or effect? You might have me believe that the transfer is the cause of the event, but in reality, if you look at the semantics, the transfer is the event itself, while the cause of the transfer is utterly absent from the equation. To put it another way, you are only looking at effects. To put it another way still, causes are an illusion.

Now back to my point: what is the parsimonious reason for causes to exist at the macroscopic scale while retaining a causeless base?

The common answer so far is "probability". Probability is not a reason for causes to exist, probability is a system. To use probability as a reason for a pseudo-deterministic system to arise from an indeterministic system is a fallacy, specifically, the gamblers fallacy.

To describe the world truly parsinomniously, we would say that all effects are causeless. Cause and effect is an extraneous system.

The system is unparsimonious relative to the nature of the universe. The cause and effect system is indeed extraneously invoked. It might be the "best theory", but, taking into account quantum mechanics, it is still illusionary and unrepresentative of what the truth is.