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Quantum mechanics demolishes the first two bullet points, so in some sense, science has marched on and progressed past that naive ontic naturalism, and exchange

Quantum mechanics demolishes the first two bullet points, so in some sense, science has marched on and progressed past that naive ontic naturalism, and exchanged it for a humbler epistemic naturalism. The points become rephrased: > that there is an epistemic reality about which all rational observers can know half of the ontic facts > that this epistemic reality is governed by natural laws which are themselves epistemic And so on. Crucially, there are no local hidden variable theories which can reproduce what we observe already; there are situations where there cannot possibly have been an objective ontic reality in the laboratory.

qsort 6y ago
Science never in fact required ontic naturalism. The only real assumption is that "there exists something as opposed to nothing", i.e. that there are some phenomena independent of the subject doing science. It is a tenable position to argue that the theory of general relativity (or quantum mechanics, or anything else) is not what the world is, but merely a model of the world, that we accept because it's useful and provides correct (or "correct enough") predictions. Regardless of whether one agrees or not with that perspective, it's entirely possible to discuss a scientific theory with no consideration of its ontological status; one may at the same time disagree with the interpretation and agree with the mathematical account. It doesn't seem to me like any kind of 'naturalistic' assumption is required for science to work.
- throwaway9887 6y ago
  >The only real assumption is that "there exists something as opposed to nothing", i.e. that there are some phenomena independent of the subject doing science. Former does not imply the latter.
  - qsort 6y ago
    It's rather difficult to make sense of the concept of 'existing' starting from the point of view that everything is the product of one's mind, but yeah, strictly speaking I used imprecise language (which is why I put that sentence in quotes). The actual assumption is the latter.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  >It is a tenable position to argue that the theory of general relativity ... is not what the world is It is not just tenable, but unavoidable, because GR is, in detail, incompatible with QM. QM has been tested overwhelmingly more thoroughly than GR, and GR doesn't seem to predict any of it.
voxl 6y ago
Please, I would love for you to explain in excruciating detail how Quantum Mechanics invalidates the first two points. Hint: you can't.
- Kednicma 6y ago
  [0] is a 20min video which you can replicate for $20 at a convenience store. [1] has Conway explaining in detail, although it's not excruciating. I don't see why the burden of proof is on me; Bell's inequalities are not new. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs [1] https://plus.maths.org/content/john-conway-discovering-free-will-part-i https://plus.maths.org/content/john-conway-discovering-free-...
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    The question is whether Bell's inequalities really imply that there is an objective reality. If I understand correctly, the loss of objective reality is one explanation for Bell's inequality, but not the only one. And no, I'm not going to watch a 20 minute video to find out what your argument is. And as for the second point, even if you don't like "objective reality" in there, do you deny that there are natural laws that govern things? (Bell's inequality would be one such law.)
    - Kednicma 6y ago
      My argument is the same one that Bell, Kochen, Specker, Conway, and so many others have covered before: If photons were locally real, then we'd see different measurements from what we actually do see. The video covers the basic idea of witnessing this using polarizing filters, as well as explaining Bell's inequalities using basic discrete set theory and Venn diagrams. We don't have to lose reality; we could instead lose locality. However, then we also lose most of physical causality and spatial relevance. [0] covers all of the material but takes more than 20min to read. At the end of it, we're left with a very weak theory that has trouble ruling out FTL influences. On the second point, it doesn't particularly matter whether those natural laws exist; my point was that they're not fully knowable. There's no reason why the universe ought to admit a short legible encoding of its own structure, especially considering that such structure ought not be observable by creatures like us residing in the universe. Rather than knowing the natural laws, we know predictive models which are good approximations. There is fundamental uncertainty preventing our approximations from sharpening to some arbitrarily fine precision. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality
bryan0 6y ago
I think that may have been true in the early days of QM, but I do not think that is the main viewpoint anymore. The ontic reality of QM is the wavefunction. The measurement problem we currently do not understand, but it is an active area of scientific research.

qsort 6y ago

Science never in fact required ontic naturalism. The only real assumption is that "there exists something as opposed to nothing", i.e. that there are some phenomena independent of the subject doing science. It is a tenable position to argue that the theory of general relativity (or quantum mechanics, or anything else) is not what the world is, but merely a model of the world, that we accept because it's useful and provides correct (or "correct enough") predictions. Regardless of whether one agrees or not with that perspective, it's entirely possible to discuss a scientific theory with no consideration of its ontological status; one may at the same time disagree with the interpretation and agree with the mathematical account. It doesn't seem to me like any kind of 'naturalistic' assumption is required for science to work.

throwaway9887 6y ago
>The only real assumption is that "there exists something as opposed to nothing", i.e. that there are some phenomena independent of the subject doing science. Former does not imply the latter.
- qsort 6y ago
  It's rather difficult to make sense of the concept of 'existing' starting from the point of view that everything is the product of one's mind, but yeah, strictly speaking I used imprecise language (which is why I put that sentence in quotes). The actual assumption is the latter.
ncmncm 6y ago
>It is a tenable position to argue that the theory of general relativity ... is not what the world is It is not just tenable, but unavoidable, because GR is, in detail, incompatible with QM. QM has been tested overwhelmingly more thoroughly than GR, and GR doesn't seem to predict any of it.

voxl 6y ago

Please, I would love for you to explain in excruciating detail how Quantum Mechanics invalidates the first two points. Hint: you can't.

Kednicma 6y ago
[0] is a 20min video which you can replicate for $20 at a convenience store. [1] has Conway explaining in detail, although it's not excruciating. I don't see why the burden of proof is on me; Bell's inequalities are not new. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs [1] https://plus.maths.org/content/john-conway-discovering-free-will-part-i https://plus.maths.org/content/john-conway-discovering-free-...
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  The question is whether Bell's inequalities really imply that there is an objective reality. If I understand correctly, the loss of objective reality is one explanation for Bell's inequality, but not the only one. And no, I'm not going to watch a 20 minute video to find out what your argument is. And as for the second point, even if you don't like "objective reality" in there, do you deny that there are natural laws that govern things? (Bell's inequality would be one such law.)
  - Kednicma 6y ago
    My argument is the same one that Bell, Kochen, Specker, Conway, and so many others have covered before: If photons were locally real, then we'd see different measurements from what we actually do see. The video covers the basic idea of witnessing this using polarizing filters, as well as explaining Bell's inequalities using basic discrete set theory and Venn diagrams. We don't have to lose reality; we could instead lose locality. However, then we also lose most of physical causality and spatial relevance. [0] covers all of the material but takes more than 20min to read. At the end of it, we're left with a very weak theory that has trouble ruling out FTL influences. On the second point, it doesn't particularly matter whether those natural laws exist; my point was that they're not fully knowable. There's no reason why the universe ought to admit a short legible encoding of its own structure, especially considering that such structure ought not be observable by creatures like us residing in the universe. Rather than knowing the natural laws, we know predictive models which are good approximations. There is fundamental uncertainty preventing our approximations from sharpening to some arbitrarily fine precision. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality

bryan0 6y ago

I think that may have been true in the early days of QM, but I do not think that is the main viewpoint anymore. The ontic reality of QM is the wavefunction. The measurement problem we currently do not understand, but it is an active area of scientific research.