Uh, no, I frequent this site because I enjoy learning new things. I don’t mind if my worldview changes in the process. For example, I used to be a naive physical realist before I thought about these issues, and now I’m more of an instrumentalist. Now, is your mind made up? Do you allow for a chance that your epistemology changes as a result of this exchange?
apologies shminux, I hadn’t intended to convey the impression I believed I was more open-minded than you in general; I was just gauging your level of interest here before plunging on. Instrumentalism? Well, certainly the price of adopting a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is extraordinarily high, namely Everett’s multiverse. The price of also preserving reductive physicalism is high too. But if we do relax this constraint, then the alternatives seem ghastly. Thus David Chalmers explores, inconclusively, Strawsonian physicalism before opting for some kind of naturalistic dualism. To my mind, dualism is a counsel of despair.
I believe I lack context for most of your statements here, since none of them seem make sense to me.
As for my version of instrumentalism (not generally accepted on this forum), I do not postulate any kind of external/objective reality, and hence do not consider terms like “exist” very useful. I care about models accurately predicting future data inputs based on the past data inputs, without worrying where these inputs come from. In such a framework all QM interpretations making identical predictions are equivalent. I suspect this sounds “ghastly” to you.
Uh, no, I frequent this site because I enjoy learning new things. I don’t mind if my worldview changes in the process. For example, I used to be a naive physical realist before I thought about these issues, and now I’m more of an instrumentalist. Now, is your mind made up? Do you allow for a chance that your epistemology changes as a result of this exchange?
apologies shminux, I hadn’t intended to convey the impression I believed I was more open-minded than you in general; I was just gauging your level of interest here before plunging on. Instrumentalism? Well, certainly the price of adopting a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is extraordinarily high, namely Everett’s multiverse. The price of also preserving reductive physicalism is high too. But if we do relax this constraint, then the alternatives seem ghastly. Thus David Chalmers explores, inconclusively, Strawsonian physicalism before opting for some kind of naturalistic dualism. To my mind, dualism is a counsel of despair.
I believe I lack context for most of your statements here, since none of them seem make sense to me.
As for my version of instrumentalism (not generally accepted on this forum), I do not postulate any kind of external/objective reality, and hence do not consider terms like “exist” very useful. I care about models accurately predicting future data inputs based on the past data inputs, without worrying where these inputs come from. In such a framework all QM interpretations making identical predictions are equivalent. I suspect this sounds “ghastly” to you.