GENIUS FORUMS

David Quinn wrote:I can't really respond to the rest of your post without knowing more specifically what you mean by indeterminism.

Jamesh wrote:Don’t see any need to. There is virtually no mystery out there for me, just some interesting forms, some structural differences.

maestro wrote:It is rather egoistic on your part to assume that physicists have not been troubled by these paradoxes of QM, after all the foundation of physics is logic and physicists would be loath to give that up so quickly as you assume. but since this is what they observe, they model based on the evidence.

maestro wrote:These observations have led to the formation of commonsense logic, If we lived in the atomic realms, I am sure even logic would have looked different, there would be no things but only random variables.

Kevin Solway wrote:Nothing can ever break the law of logic.

Nothing in the QM world satisfies me that determination should be considered realistic.

victor: hahahahahahahahahahaha.

Have a look here

Kelly Jones wrote:Maestro, how are you defining philosophy?

Philosophaster wrote:

Jamesh wrote:Don’t see any need to. There is virtually no mystery out there for me, just some interesting forms, some structural differences.

LOL.

The mystery is deep down in your bellybutton, guys. Keep on gazing and you can become enlightened like me.

maestro wrote:David,
It is rather egoistic on your part to assume that physicists have not been troubled by these paradoxes of QM, after all the foundation of physics is logic and physicists would be loath to give that up so quickly as you assume. but since this is what they observe, they model based on the evidence.

If you can do a better job can you provide a hypothesis which can explain the EPR paradox.

maestro wrote:

Kevin Solway wrote:Nothing can ever break the law of logic.

And by logic you mean A=A, which means that things are true by definition. Your philosophy is just a mass of words and definitions, where does it touch anything real.

From what I understand your logic works in the following way

Femininity=unconscious, untruthful, delusional.

Since A=A this implies Femininity is the above

QED.

Masculinity= Truthfulness courage honesty

A=A hence Masculinity=Truthfulness courage honesty

QED.

What is the use of the philosophy if it just deals with definitions and A=A.

maestro wrote:And I hasten to add that they have not discarded logic but the commonsense macroscopic logic. Probability theory is a part of maths and is not illogical.

Commonsense logic says that if you push something it goes in the direction of the push. According to QM, if you push a particle its position will be a random variable with the mean in the forward direction, what this means is that if you push something it may go backwards, in the subatomic realm with some probability. In our macroscopic world everything is an agglomeration of particles and we observe the expectation (i.e. mean) everytime. In other words when we push a thing moves forward, and it is extremely unlikely that you will observe anything else. These observations have led to the formation of commonsense logic, If we lived in the atomic realms, I am sure even logic would have looked different, there would be no things but only random variables.

David Quinn wrote:So how does [randomness] differ from saying the events "just happen"?

Is this what modern science is being reduced to?

Jamesh wrote:

victor wrote:Nothing in the QM world satisfies me that determination should be considered realistic.

victor: hahahahahahahahahahaha.

A simple wording mistake. I meant unrealistic.

The pitfalls of making posts during working hours when distractions happen.

David Quinn wrote:It's a bit more sophisticated than that.

It gains its usefulness because all human delusion is generated by faulty definitions and faulty applications of A=A. In other words, by contradictory thinking, baseless assumptions, confused concepts, blinkered vision, etc.

vicdan wrote:I would be curious about any 'not predictable in practice' things which are indistinguishable from random events. I know of no such.

Pincho Paxton wrote:The aether

DHodges wrote:I was thinking of ordinary, everyday things like flipping a coin or tossing a die. It might be good to leave QM out of it altogether for a while and just talk about statistics and probability to clarify exactly what is meant by terms like 'random' and 'determinate'.

If I flip a coin, in theory the result is completely determined by all the physical inputs: exactly how hard and at what angle I toss the coin, the properties of the air it moves through, the distance it travels and so on. (I suppose one could construct a very controllable flipping machine, perhaps in a vacuum, to test or demonstrate this, but I assume most people would take this as a given.)

However, things like the exact force I exert with my thumb are hard to measure and hard to control, and there is a very high sensitivity to initial conditions, such that in practice I can not tell in advance whether a particular coin flip will be a heads or a tails.

Colloquially, the outcome of a process like flipping a coin is called a random event, but strictly speaking this is misleading. Randomness is a mathematical property of a variable or distribution, and not a property of a physical event or observation.

DHodges wrote: Generally, this is the case with random variables. They are used to model classes of events where we have limited information about the detail underlying the process, but we can model the overall behavior of a number of observations.

DHodges wrote: Colloquially, the outcome of a process like flipping a coin is called a random event, but strictly speaking this is misleading. Randomness is a mathematical property of a variable or distribution, and not a property of a physical event or observation.
Usually, the distinction is not important, and we treat a coin flip as if it were an observation from a distribution. We just consider this mathematical abstraction as if it were an actual thing in the world - because the mathematical model works so well.
Are you with me?

vicdan wrote:But only because you deliberately construct the experiment in such a way that precise measurement is impossible. That's not randomness, that's simply ignoring input variables.

As your own point about vacuum flipping machine demonstrates, the coin flip is not random within the macro constraints. it might be chaotic, though i doubt it. it's is only random enough for government work, so to speak.

IMO this is not a material distinction here. The distribution of quantum decoherence events is random within the given probabilistic distribution, just like the distribution of dice-rolling result is (in statistical sense, as long as we ignore the determinism of macro events). So we can simply take a shortcut and call an event 'random' if it results in a random distribution.

(...)Nevertheless, what appears random to one observer may not appear random to another observer. Consider two observers of a sequence of bits, only one of whom has the cryptographic key needed to turn the sequence of bits into a readable message. The message is not random, but is unpredictable for one of the observers. One of the intriguing aspects of random processes is that it is hard to know whether the process is truly random. The observer can always suspect that there is some "key" that unlocks the message. This is one of the foundations of superstition and is also what is a driving motive, curiosity, for discovery in science and mathematics.

Under the cosmological hypothesis of determinism there is no randomness in the universe, only unpredictability.

Some mathematically defined sequences exhibit some of the same characteristics as random sequences, but because they are generated by a describable mechanism they are called pseudorandom. To an observer who does not know the mechanism, a pseudorandom sequence is unpredictable.

Chaotic systems are unpredictable in practice due to their extreme dependence on initial conditions. Whether or not they are unpredictable in terms of computability theory is a subject of current research. At least in some disciplines of computability theory the notion of randomness turns out to be identified with computational unpredictability.

Randomness of a phenomenon is not itself 'random'. It can often be precisely characterized, usually in terms of probability or expected value. For instance quantum mechanics allows a very precise calculation of the half-lives of atoms even though the process of atomic decay is a random one. More simply, though we cannot predict the outcome of a single toss of a fair coin, we can characterize its general behavior by saying that if a large number of tosses are made, roughly half of them will show up "Heads". Ohm's law and the kinetic theory of gases are precise characterizations of macroscopic phenomena which are random on the microscopic level.

DHodges wrote:No, that's generally what's going on when we talk about macroscopic "randomness".

I'm not ready to talk about QM yet. I'm trying to sort out exactly what (if anything) it means to say something is random, and especially if it means something that we can distinguish from "unpredictable."

Under the cosmological hypothesis of determinism there is no randomness in the universe, only unpredictability.

vicdan wrote:

Pincho Paxton wrote:The aether

The aether doesn't exist, as was shown by the Michelson-Morley experiment which demonstrated the absence of aether wind, and many other experiments since.