The Fundamental Power of Explanation
March 23, 2018 8:14 AM   Subscribe

In "Philosophy of Science" Brett Hall provides a non-mathematical and jargon free summary of David Deutsch's 2016 paper "The Logic of Experimental Tests, Particularly of Everettian Quantum Theory".

David Deutsch is "a Visiting Professor of physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation, the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University", and an expert on quantum physics and epistemology. He is also the author of two books for a general audience, "The Fabric of Reality" and "The Beginning of Infinity", the latter of which was the subject of an effusive review in the New Yorker, which also profiled Deutsch in 2011. His work has been discussed on metafilter previously.
posted by Ipsifendus (10 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
That was a fun and helpful read.

I used to teach physics at a high school level and would start my courses with some very very basic philosophy of science - partly because I personally found it interesting, and partly because the class was self-selecting for “[male] people who are at risk of becoming obnoxious about hard sciences vs all other subjects” and it seemed worthwhile to inject a little doubt and humility at an early stage.

Science is about making models, and improving those models, and any deep and seemingly fundamental truths that are spat out are worth cherishing and chewing on, but it’s important to remember that 1) they’re incidental to the process and 2) if you wait a while, something even more interesting and unexpected may come along.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 10:07 AM on March 23, 2018 [10 favorites]


Good to see more philosophy of science on the blue :)

This seems like a nicely accessible read if you’re curious about the sort of thing philosophers are up to these days. Scientific explanation isn’t really my thing, so I can’t speak to the content, but it’s worth noting that this is an account of the role of explanation in science. There are a few other views.

I do know a thing or two about Bayesianism, and Hall’s drive-by characterization is pretty disappointing. Bayes’ theorem doesn’t — it fundamentally can’t — tell you how much you should believe in a given theory or proposition. It tells you how your beliefs should change in response to evidence. Informally, however likely you think the proposition would be if you were to see a given piece of evidence should be exactly how likely you think it actually is when you actually have seen that evidence. If that’s not how your beliefs change, you’re effectively in disagreement with yourself about the nature of the universe, which raises some issues. (As a cheeky example, it implies that there is a bet you should be willing to take which is guaranteed to lose money.)

So it’s misrepresenting the math to say that an arbitrary Bayesian would calculate probability X for the truth of Newton’s theory, unless X is simply “a number strictly between 0 and 100%”. There are other little inaccuracies that might lead one to think Hall either doesn’t understand Bayes’ theorem, or isn’t interested in giving readers an understanding of it. That’s not really germane to the rest of the article, but it rankles.
posted by emmalemma at 10:46 AM on March 23, 2018 [6 favorites]


I get what this is saying about how science works philosophically , in "Popperian" terms, but how many functioning scientists (i know this broad term is problematic in itself) actually, pragmatically, behave as if this were the case? How many writers, other than philosophers, write as if this were the case?
Perhaps I am extrapolating too far, but is this saying that given the possibility of a multiverse, no observation can be said to be confirmation or refutation of any expected result other than that "in this universe, that result occurred", and all that does is help to make the next expectation better?
posted by OHenryPacey at 11:43 AM on March 23, 2018


How many writers, other than philosophers, write as if this were the case?

And as emmalemma says, it is by no means the case that philosophy of science is unified in holding a Popperian view.
posted by thelonius at 12:07 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]



From the Deutsch paper:
[...] whose multiplicity the various Everettian theories refer to by terms such as ‘multiverse’, ‘many universes’, ‘many histories’ or even ‘many minds’.
...which is more or less universally called the many-worlds interpretation (as opposed to the Copenhagen interpretation) of quantum mechanics... is it just me or is it weird that that this didn't make the list of synonyms? Is there some kind of politics I'm missing here? Just wondering
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 3:43 PM on March 23, 2018


Maybe because many-worlds is asinine?
watching that video, I learned that the direct translation of the German is closer to "unsharpness principle"
posted by Chuckles at 5:07 PM on March 23, 2018


The many worlds interpretation has some advantages in being deterministic and thereby conforming to the principle of sufficient reason. But it is very clearly not the best explanation of qm available, particularly when we have the much simpler Bohmian interpretation instead. As far as I could tell this isn't addressed at all.
posted by leibniz at 6:55 PM on March 23, 2018


The many worlds interpretation has some advantages in being deterministic and thereby conforming to the principle of sufficient reason.

posted by leibniz

:D
posted by Barack Spinoza at 8:08 PM on March 23, 2018 [4 favorites]


Naturally, if there are many worlds, this is the best possible one.
posted by leibniz at 8:34 PM on March 23, 2018 [4 favorites]


You don't spend much time in the potus45 threads do you?
posted by OHenryPacey at 11:50 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


« Older Hyping one thing after the other   |   You're it! Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments