Even before a fair coin is tossed, the notion that it has an inherent 50% probability of coming up heads may be just plain wrong. Maybe you’re holding the coin in such a way that it’s just about guaranteed to come up heads, or tails, given the force at which you flip it, and the air currents around you. But, if you don’t know which way the coin is biased on this one occasion, so what?
Maybe it isn’t really 50%, and it isn’t really 100% how-it-came up either. That it is rational to make estimates based on our own ignorance is not proof that the universe is deterministic. You can’t deduce the nature of physical reality from your own
reasoning processes.
To make the coinflip experiment repeatable, as frequentists are wont to demand, we could build an automated coinflipper, and verify that the results were 50% heads and 50% tails. But maybe a robot with extra-sensitive eyes and a good grasp of physics, watching the autoflipper prepare to flip, could predict the coin’s fall in advance—not with certainty, but with 90% accuracy. Then what would the real probability be?
Maybe it isn’t really 50%, and it isn’t really 100% how-it-came up either. That it is rational to make estimates based on our own ignorance is not proof that the universe is deterministic. You can’t deduce the nature of physical reality from your own reasoning processes.
Whatever QM says.