[extropy-chat] Nothingness and that Infinite Chain of Causesthingy.

gts gts_2000 at yahoo.com
Wed Jul 12 16:31:17 UTC 2006


On Tue, 11 Jul 2006 23:48:13 -0400, Jef Allbright <jef at jefallbright.net>
wrote:

> Welcome back, Gordon

Thanks Jef.

> As to the second part of your statement, I would suggest that you  
> certainly should *not* ignore that which appears to make no sense

You're right; my comment was a bit tongue in in cheek. :) I was thinking,  
for example,
of Popper's criticism of Bohr's complementarity principle as an example of
paradoxical nonsense in science, nonsense we should not accept as doctrine.

Popper writes on page 135 of _Conjectures and Refutations_:

"[The principle of complementarity] was used in a defensive mood - to  
rescue the
existing theory; and the principle of complementarity has (I believe for
this reason) remained completely sterile within physics. In twenty-seven
years it has produced nothing except some philosophical discussions, and
some arguments for confounding the critics (especially Einstein). I do
not believe that physicists would have accepted such an ad hoc principle
had they understood it was ad hoc."

In another book (one I have not yet read) Popper argues for a philosophy
of objective probability to make sense of quantum weirdness, one which
presumably does away with subjectivist interpretations and the
contradiction that is the complementarity principle. He argues, I believe,
for the existence of *real objective propensities* to explain the apparent
statistical randomness of quantum phenomena. (Not sure,  but as I recall
Heisenberg had a similar idea of objective propensities, which he called
"potentia". I've looked for a Heisenberg quote to confirm this memory of
mine but couldn't find one.)

-gts




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