Could the Born probabilities be basic—could there just be a basic law of physics which just says directly that to find out how likely you are to be in any quantum world, the integral over squared modulus gives you the answer? And the same law could’ve just as easily have said that you’re likely to find yourself in a world that goes over the integral of modulus to the power 1.99999?
But then we would have ‘mixed references’ that mixed together three kinds of stuff—the Schrodinger Equation, a deterministic causal equation relating complex amplitudes inside a configuration space; logical validities and models; and a law which assigned fundamental-degree-of-realness a.k.a. magical-reality-fluid. Meaningful statements would talk about some mixture of physical laws over particle fields in our own universe, logical validities, and degree-of-realness.
I guess I understand better now where your dislike of the “shut up and calculate” non-interpretation of QM is coming from. You refuse to acknowledge that the Born probabilities could be a manifestation of some deeper physical law we do not yet know, and that the Schrodinger equation could be another manifestation of the same law, thus removing the need for the “third thing”. The standard reaction to what I just said is “but we don’t need anything else, just the Schrodinger equation”, and then proceed to make extra assumptions equivalent to the Born rule, only more complicated.
In the first paragraph you quoted, EY arbitrarily and pointlessly juxtaposes two different questions. I say “pointlessly” charitably, because if there is a point, it’s a bad one, to (guilt-by-)associate an affirmative answer to the first, with an affirmative answer to the second.
Could the Born probabilities be basic? “Could” would seem best interpreted here as “formulable consistently with the two-factor Great Reductionist approach.” “Basic” I’ll take as relative to a model: if a law is derived in the model, it’s not basic. Now that we know what the question is, the answer is: sure, why not? Physical laws mention “electric charge”, “time”, “distance”; adding “probability” doesn’t seem to break anything, as long as the resulting theory is testable. That basically probabilistic theory might not be the most elegant, but that’s a different argument. And there’s no need to top probabilities with fundamental-degree-of-realness sauce.
Physical laws mention “electric charge”, “time”, “distance”; adding “probability” doesn’t seem to break anything, as long as the resulting theory is testable.
He is not an instrumentalist, so he finds this approach (anything that helps one make good predictions goes) aesthetically unsatisfying.
I’m not saying or implying that “anything that helps one make good predictions, goes”. I really don’t think instrumentalism is relevant here; if we take it off the table as an option, there still doesn’t seem to be any reason to disprefer a theory that posits “objective probability” to one that posits “electric charge”, aside from the overall elegance and explanatory power of the two theories. Which are reasons to incline to believe that a theory is true, I take it, not just to see it as useful.
I guess I understand better now where your dislike of the “shut up and calculate” non-interpretation of QM is coming from. You refuse to acknowledge that the Born probabilities could be a manifestation of some deeper physical law we do not yet know, and that the Schrodinger equation could be another manifestation of the same law, thus removing the need for the “third thing”. The standard reaction to what I just said is “but we don’t need anything else, just the Schrodinger equation”, and then proceed to make extra assumptions equivalent to the Born rule, only more complicated.
In the first paragraph you quoted, EY arbitrarily and pointlessly juxtaposes two different questions. I say “pointlessly” charitably, because if there is a point, it’s a bad one, to (guilt-by-)associate an affirmative answer to the first, with an affirmative answer to the second.
Could the Born probabilities be basic? “Could” would seem best interpreted here as “formulable consistently with the two-factor Great Reductionist approach.” “Basic” I’ll take as relative to a model: if a law is derived in the model, it’s not basic. Now that we know what the question is, the answer is: sure, why not? Physical laws mention “electric charge”, “time”, “distance”; adding “probability” doesn’t seem to break anything, as long as the resulting theory is testable. That basically probabilistic theory might not be the most elegant, but that’s a different argument. And there’s no need to top probabilities with fundamental-degree-of-realness sauce.
He is not an instrumentalist, so he finds this approach (anything that helps one make good predictions goes) aesthetically unsatisfying.
I’m not saying or implying that “anything that helps one make good predictions, goes”. I really don’t think instrumentalism is relevant here; if we take it off the table as an option, there still doesn’t seem to be any reason to disprefer a theory that posits “objective probability” to one that posits “electric charge”, aside from the overall elegance and explanatory power of the two theories. Which are reasons to incline to believe that a theory is true, I take it, not just to see it as useful.