What is there to discover for God, an omniscient being? — goremand

Now that the system is being tested, are people sure it will work to protect democracy? — Christoffer

That's a tricky perspective to proffer, if you ask me, since the very condition of life is suffering - it depends upon it for its continuance. — Tom Storm

God is supposed to be the author of everything, something that he sincerely opposed would never exist in the first place. — goremand

Of course there are many legitimate grounds for deporting illegally-arrived migrants
— Wayfarer

They're being in the country, for one. — AmadeusD

Couldn't he have left well enough alone? — goremand

the obvious answer to the problem as you put it is to conclude that suffering is in fact not evil — goremand

I don't see relying on philosophy for that, though again you may disagree, and think more benevolently of it. — J

I thoroughly agree with everything you say here (until the last paragraph). To go from "each individual must make their own judgments, illuminated by reason and conscience as best they can" to "all individual judgments are equally perspicuous and moral" is the mistake, and a big one. — J

I'll try and explain what I meant by subjectivism. It's not as if it's a doctrine or school of thought; only that, for deep questions of value and meaning, as these are not necessarily adjudicable by science, then whatever is held about them, is said to be a personal matter, or a matter for individual judgement.
— Wayfarer

Let's make it a little clearer. Deep questions of value and meaning are matters for individual judgment; how could they be otherwise? You can't look them up in a textbook. What you mean, I think, is that subjectivism believes that human judgment has no further court of appeal, where it might receive an answer as to whether the judgment is correct or not. In that sense, these judgments are either based on subjective considerations that don't necessarily hold from one person to the next, or they are unfounded by a first principle of rationality. — J

It's been slow to dawn on me that others on TPF, including yourself to an extent, view "liberalism" as an entire panoply of philosophical and ethical attitudes, intent on various levels of proselytizing — J

They're being in the country, for one — AmadeusD

I don't think anyone should have rights simply by arriving (illegally) in the country. — AmadeusD

Sure, but I would say it is arguably still better than many other interpretations given it provides an explanation for quantum behavior, it completely deflates the measurement problem and classical limit, it returns metaphysics to what is intuitive and commonsensical. — Apustimelogist

I would say from a standpoint of rationality this is a preferable theory because arguably we shouldn't update our beliefs about the universe (or anything) any more than required given the evidence. — Apustimelogist

I don't know. — Quk

“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” Trump added in his Truth Social post. “We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do. What a ridiculous situation we are in.”

Are we not talking about the double slit experiment where light is sent through slits and certain interferences are observed? — Quk

The point is that they (i.e. religious beliefs) can't play a deliberative role, other than as a statement of what the person believes. — J

Or would you rather we adopted a set of transcendental values, and based the polity on them? How would that differ from theocracy? (An alternative, more critical, response here would be: The liberal state does adopt a set of transcendental values, but they are precisely the procedural values of neutrality and impartiality, as Janus points out. — J

Modernity did not usher in the long-promised utopia. There are many things wrong with culture and many instances of people being wronged in culture. There are problems to be solved: the problem of meaning, the problem of value, the problem of rights and duty, and so on. But these problems can’t be solved because of a deeper systemic—or better, philosophical—problem with modernity. The root problem of modern society, according to Paul Tyson in his book De-Fragmenting Modernity, is that “Modern Western knowledge is blind to truths of being and belief” (p. 5). To moderns, only objective facts, shorn of value judgments, are knowable. When it comes to “being” or questions of ultimate reality, modernity delivers scientifically discoverable atomic truths understood within the immanent frame (Charles Taylor’s term) of a causally-closed physical universe, a universe devoid of meaning, purpose, or value. Tyson argues for abandoning of this shallow modern life-world picture and a turning back to a more ancient and Platonic way of conceiving things. Fundamentally, this change involves the adoption of the ontological priority of being and an openness to transcendence.

Understood — Quk

Wayfarer especially has this bias, which is why I can push his buttons by mentioning MWI. — noAxioms

Everett’s scientific journey began one night in 1954, he recounted two decades later, “after a slosh or two of sherry.” He and his Princeton classmate Charles Misner and a visitor named Aage Petersen (then an assistant to Niels Bohr) were thinking up “ridiculous things about the implications of quantum mechanics.” During this session Everett had the basic idea behind the many-worlds theory, and in the weeks that followed he began developing it into a dissertation.

Everett addressed the measurement problem by merging the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. He made the observer an integral part of the system observed, introducing a universal wave function that links observers and objects as parts of a single quantum system. He described the macroscopic world quantum mechanically and thought of large objects as existing in quantum superpositions as well. Breaking with Bohr and Heisenberg, he dispensed with the need for the discontinuity of a wave-function collapse.

Everett’s radical new idea was to ask, What if the continuous evolution of a wave function is not interrupted by acts of measurement? What if the Schrödinger equation always applies and applies to everything—objects and observers alike? What if no elements of superpositions are ever banished from reality? What would such a world appear like to us?

Everett saw that under those assumptions, the wave function of an observer would, in effect, bifurcate at each interaction of the observer with a superposed object. The universal wave function would contain branches for every alternative making up the object’s superposition. Each branch has its own copy of the observer, a copy that perceived one of those alternatives as the outcome. According to a fundamental mathematical property of the Schrödinger equation, once formed, the branches do not influence one another. Thus, each branch embarks on a different future, independently of the others.

What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all. It replaces them with an experience of pseudo-facts (we think that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now. We might reasonably wonder if there is any value — any meaning — in what remains...

What varies in an electromagnetic wave? — Quk

the stochastic interpretation amounts to a phenomenological interpretation of quantum statistics that doesn't explain entanglement and the origin of Bells inequalities. — sime

That's why I keep asking about if, say, a hurricane, a chair etc is really a true physical object — boundless

the quote is from Gallagher’s recent book, Action and Interaction. His notion of justice departs from Rawls in not being grounded in neutrality or fairness. For him, the sense of justice is prior to that of fairness. Given that Gallagher’s perspective is a cognitive enactivism informed by phenomenological hermeneutics, he sees justice more in terms of openness to the autonomy of the other than elimination of bias. He traces the sense of justice back to playful interactions among other animals. — Joshs

Well, I believe that the point made here is that in MWI there is only one physical object which evolves deterministically. — boundless

what existential or epistemological difference do the ontological interpretations of "quantum physics" make to classical beings classically living in a classical world — 180 Proof

it can espouse a version of neutrality that at least takes a hands-off approach to differences among religious and/or social groups -- and that's not nothing. It asks for public neutrality, regardless of what any particular member of the polis may personally believe. That is not the same thing as publicly declaring that there are no transcendental values, which the opponents of liberalism often seem to believe is the agenda. — J

I wonder what he'd say to something radical like MWI, radical at the time, accepted by some only decades later. But Einstein liked simplicity and symmetry, and MWI certainly is those. — noAxioms

Assuming the particles follow a path of some kind, how is it they manage to favour some paths over others? — tim wood

The wave function itself has no physical reality; it exists in the mysterious, ghost-like realm of the possible. It deals with abstract possibilities, like all the angles by which an electron could be scattered following a collision with an atom. There is a real world of difference between the possible and the probable. Born argued that the square of the wave function, a real rather than a complex number, inhabits the world of the probable. Squaring the wave function, for example, does not give the actual position of an electron, only the probability, the odds that it will found here rather than there. For example, if the value of the wave function of an electron at X is double its value at Y, then the probability of it being found at X is four times greater than the probability of finding it at Y. The electron could be found at X, Y or somewhere else.

Niels Bohr would soon argue that until an observation or measurement is made, a microphysical object like an electron does not exist anywhere. Between one measurement and the next it has no existence outside the abstract possibilities of the wave function. It is only when an observation or measurement is made that the ‘wave function collapses’ as one of the ‘possible’ states of the electron becomes the ‘actual’ state and the probability of all the other possibilities becomes zero.

For Born, Schrödinger’s equation described a probability wave. There were no real electron waves, only abstract waves of probability. ‘From the point of view of our quantum mechanics there exists no quantity which in an individual case causally determines the effect of a collision’, wrote Born. And he confessed, ‘I myself tend to give up determinism in the atomic world.’ Yet while the ‘motion of particles follows probability rules’, he pointed out, ‘probability itself propagates according to the law of causality’ — Kumar, Manjit. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality (pp. 219-220)

Maybe there is a system of resonances that influence the particles as they pass through the slit to follow one or another of a limited number of discrete paths? — tim wood

You, for instance, have decided that we are better off with religion than without it, so of course you’re going to prefer the secular vantage to what you call ‘proselytizing liberalism.’ — Joshs

the interference pattern arises not because the particles are behaving as classical waves, but because the probability wavefunction – designated by the Greek letter ‘psi’, ψ, and often referred to as the Schrödinger equation, in honour of Erwin Schrödinger who devised it — describes where at any given point in time, any individual particle is likely to register. So it is wave-like, but not actually a wave, in that the wave pattern is not due to the proximity of particles to each other or their interaction, as is the case with physical waves. Consequently, the interference pattern emerges over time, irrespective of the rate at which particles are emitted, because it is tied to the wave-like form of the probability distribution, not to a physical wave passing through space. This is the key difference that separates the quantum interference pattern from physical wave phenomenon. This is what I describe as ‘the timeless wave of quantum physics’.

Spooky action has never been demonstrated. — noAxioms

So paradoxically, even the idea of ‘what is independent of mind’ is an idea we arrive at only through thinking about it.

I find no paradox in that at all. — noAxioms

I do see this more as an aporia. — boundless

The very idea of science from the usual point of view is to take out everything to do with human subjectivity and see what remains. QBism says, if you take everything out of quantum theory to do with human subjectivity, then nothing remains — Christian Fuchs

It's not that secular reason "has no use" for teleology or eschatology, it's more that to introduce either dimension into a liberal polity is to immediately desecularize the neutral normative constraints in favor of some religious tradition's view. — J

Not surprising from someone who Rorty relentlessly critiqued for his need of Kantian transcendental underpinnings, or ‘skyhooks’ as Rorty called them. — Joshs

Habermas does not want to embrace religion wholesale for he does not want to give up the “cognitive achievements of modernity” — which include tolerance, equality, individual freedom, freedom of thought, cosmopolitanism and scientific advancement — and risk surrendering to the fundamentalisms that, he says, willfully “cut themselves off” from everything that is good about the Enlightenment project. And so he proposes something less than a merger and more like an agreement between trading partners: “…the religious side must accept the authority of ‘natural’ reason as the fallible results of the institutionalized sciences and the basic principles of universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality. Conversely, secular reason may not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith, even though in the end it can accept as reasonable only what it can translate into its own, in principle universally accessible, discourses.”

As Norbert Brieskorn, one of Habermas’s interlocutors, points out, in Habermas’s bargain “reason addresses demands to the religious communities” but “there is no mention of demands from the opposite direction.” Religion must give up the spheres of law, government, morality and knowledge; reason is asked only to be nice and not dismiss religion as irrational, retrograde and irrelevant. The “truths of faith” can be heard but only those portions of them that have secular counterparts can be admitted into the realm of public discourse. (It seems like a case of “separate but not equal.”) Religion gets to be respected; reason gets to borrow the motivational resources it lacks on its own, resources it can then use to put a brake on its out-of-control spinning.

The result, as Michael Reder, another of Habermas’s interlocutors, observes, is a religion that has been “instrumentalized,” made into something useful for a secular reason that still has no use for its teleological and eschatological underpinnings. Religions, explains Reder, are brought in only “to help to prevent or overcome social disruptions.” Once they have performed this service they go back in their box and don’t trouble us with uncomfortable cosmic demands.

if one renounces the assumption that what is present in different parts of space has an independent, real existence, then I do not at all see what physics is supposed to describe.