by postodave » January 11th, 2008, 5:12 pm
I was trying to remember something I read about this and this was it: unfortunately you can't access it unless you are subscribed but I did read the full article in the magazine and although I didn't understand the maths it did look to me like the guy had a case against indeterminacy.
I once read something by Frank Tippler that seemed to argue the case that quantum indeterminacy could be the cause of 'free will' in humans. He began by saying that the retina of a toad can respond to the impact of a single photon, then he argued that while a human retina is not that sensitive there could be some part of the brain that was. Then he sort of took it from there in some very speculative ways. His theory needed a maximal amount of alternative worlds so that every quantum possibility could be realised somewhere; it seems to me that that is just reintroducing determinism on a huger scale.
I am going to have to read up on Bell's inequality I think. I am trying to remember something JP said somewhere to the effect that the judgement that Quantum indeterminacy was ontic rather than epistemic was a result of physicists preference for regarding what they could know as what was real. Which seemed to me a weak basis for saying that's it we've got the final theory. Clouser who I know you dislike wrote something that covers some of the ground you mentioned in your review about the philosophical basis of Heisenberg's indeterminacy theory. It is in the Chapter on the religious basis of theories in physics in 'The Myth of Religious Nutrality. He compares it to wanting to know the temperature of a glass of water using a thermometre which will always change the temperature - so you can never know what the temperature was aside from the measurement. Is he thinking on the wrong lines?
So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown