Catholics retreat into dogma again

Don't think the church is against evolution or natural selection - it has a problem with the idea of 'randomness' in the process of development or evolution. If we believe that God is behind all process in the universe, there is an order or reason for how things have become - God's intention whether we understand it or not.

If Fr. Coyne agrees with the randomness issue, then maybe he is not fit to be in charge of certain departments in the Catholic church. Nothing said about his status in the church. You woud want the leaders of any organization you belong to, to be totling the party line on immportant issues in public. So too for the Church - So What?

But the randomness in evolutionary theory is epistimetic, not ontological[1]; the universe could be completely deterministic and you'd still have 'random' mutations in evolution, simply because the processes that cause them are not described by the theory. The randomness issue is a red herring, that comes about because chance, like omnipotence or ominescience (or free will) is an incredibly difficult concept that everyone thinks they understand perfectly.

On the sacking: Is it possible that this is less to do with evolution than politics? The Jesuits are notoriously liberal, especially when compared with the present papacy, and this could just be Benedict trying to rid himself of a troublesome priest. (Even so, it's a damn shame. I've always had a fondness for the Jesuits, despite them being founded to counteract the effects of Protestantism.)

[1]Quantum mechanics, on the other hand is (except in the interpretations where it isn't), though I can't really see any theological problems with it that can't be solved by thinking carefully about the matter [2]. However, one would actually like to see a working interpretation before drawing final conclusions.

[2] Or by modifying classical theism.

It turns out Coyne was 73, which puts a somewhat different slant on it. But assume he has been deposed for ideological reasons:

The Church has a history, from the very beginning, or objecting to randomness (they treated Epicurus as the very devil - the notion that he was all about satisfying tastes of the flesh is secondary to his view that it "all began with chance", which he didn't - exactly - say). Even today, in the era of statistics and stochastic processes, theologians have real trouble accepting that the universe has an inherent stochasticity to it.

Iowerth, I would say that there are two senses of "random" here. One is a lack of correlation between the future fitness pressures of a population and the variation that occurs today by mutation and allelic combinations. This is not "epistemic"; it is a fact of the organisms themselves (although there is also epistemic uncertainty attached to this). The other is a fundamental random distribution of usch things as atomic decay propensities and the like. This is also a fact of the things themselves. Both the distributional nature of physical causation (i.e., the fact that such causes as ensembles of atomic decay fall on a small distribution curve), and the lack of correlation, are objective facts (well, as much as anything is, but I have to say that because of the Guild Rules). The epistemic uncertainty is parasitic, in part, on this, but also is due to our lack of knowledge and inability to deal with high dimensional problems.

Anyway, in the relevant sense, the universe is fundamentally random, but not entirely chaotic.

NO, the events that you write surrounding George Coyne is absolutely incorrect. George Coyne is in his mid 70s, recovering from cancer, and this particular changeover has been in the works a long time [1].

Amara Graps

[1] Reference
Private email correspondance with Guy Consolmagno 22-23 August 2006.

If you say so. I only just found out how old he is. But the article that I cited was my major target here, and it is a pro-Catholic activist site. And that is worrying.

[Late Note: actually it is a pro-life site, and we now know these aren't all Catholic. My apologies.]

Here's what the Catholic News Service says:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI has appointed Argentine Jesuit Father Jose Funes, 43, to be the new director of the Vatican Observatory. The astronomer, an expert on disk galaxies, has served as a staff astronomer at the Vatican Observatory since 2000. Father Funes succeeds U.S. Jesuit Father George V. Coyne, 73, who had served as director since 1978. The observatory staff divides its time between facilities at the papal summer villa in Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, and the University of Arizona in Tucson. The observatory traces its origins back to the observational tower erected at the Vatican by Pope Gregory XIII in 1578 in preparation for reforming the Western calendar. The tower began being used for astronomy in 1800. Pope Leo XIII formally established the Vatican Observatory in 1891, and it has been entrusted to the Jesuits since 1934. Father Funes, the new director, was born in Cordoba, Argentina, in 1963 and earned a master's degree in astronomy from the National University of Cordoba in 1985.

It looks more like a retirement than a firing to me. According to this article, Coyne will still be on the staff.

'Iowerth, I would say that there are two senses of "random" here. One is a lack of correlation between the future fitness pressures of a population and the variation that occurs today by mutation and allelic combinations. This is not "epistemic"; it is a fact of the organisms themselves (although there is also epistemic uncertainty attached to this).'

True, but it would still be 'random' in a deterministic universe, which is what I was trying to aim for. 'Epistemetic' was a bad word to choose, though. :)

'Even today, in the era of statistics and stochastic processes, theologians have real trouble accepting that the universe has an inherent stochasticity to it.'

Apart probably from the ones (orthodox and otherwise) who have been influenced by Whitehead, I'd guess (but I imagine that few of those are Catholic). I'm probably being dense, but it's very hard for me to see how 'chance' could be a problem for a being who's allegedly outside of time. Perhaps more theologians need philosophical and scientific training...

As for the inherant stochasticity of the universe, at least on the quantum level, I'm rotating which interpretation I believe in on a periodic basis. So I disagree with you on Fridays and Mondays, I'm afraid. ;)

If you wish to verify:

Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ
Specola Vaticana
V-00120
Vatican City State
gjc@specola.va

Thanks for the scoop Amara.

Give it a break guys.

A priest retires honorably (for a change) and everybody gets their boxers all twisty with conspiracy, and what not and so forth.

Yes, it also now appears that Funes is no friend to ID either. The real story here is the way it was twisted by the ID crowd. I should have been more acute and titled this "IDers retreat into dogma, as always".

And Coyne indeed retires with honour...

'I would say that there are two senses of "random" here.'

Ooh. Ooh. Philosophy of probability --- and a really interesting case study which I hadn't thought of.

'One is a lack of correlation between the future fitness pressures of a population and the variation that occurs today by mutation and allelic combinations. This is not "epistemic"'

OK, it's not epistemic. Two further issues:

1. (serious questions, not passive-aggressive rhetorical ones, honest) Are you sure you want to call this randomness? Why? I'd have thought the paradigm case of randomness was the following. A trick coin which always lands heads is not random but a normal coin is ... regardless of the settings in which we toss them, and so regardless of whether their outcomes correlate with anything else. I don't (yet) see that that has much in common with the case we're discussing on this page. What am I missing?

'The other is a fundamental random distribution of usch things as atomic decay propensities and the like.'

I'm with Iorwerth except more opinionated. I don't think QM gives us any good reasons to think the universe is random in that sense, and I think this every day of the week.

By the way, here's a jargon alert just in cases you write this up elsewhere: I think you mean 'distribution of atomic decays', not 'distribution of atomic decay propensities'. The way philosophers of probability use the words, fixed propensities give random outcomes [except in trivial cases of propensities of 0 or 1]. So, you MIGHT mean that the propensities themselves are random, but more likely, I think, you mean that the propensities are fixed by the current biology and the outcomes of the propensities are random.

'theologians have real trouble accepting that the universe has an inherent stochasticity to it'

Goodonem.

Jason, the anti-stochastic atheist

P.S. I wrote:

> 'theologians have real trouble accepting that the
> universe has an inherent stochasticity to it'
>
> Goodonem.
>
> Jason, the anti-stochastic atheist

Disclaimer: I only mean goodonem for being anti-stochastic about physics. I've got no doubt that evolutionary theory is effectively stochastic. After all, evolutionary theory effectively doesn't supervene on physics, even if there's maybe some in-principle sense in which it does.

Jason again

Curse you for opening up that can of worms, JasonNotJasonJ.

Whether or not evolution (mutation+drift+natural selection) is stochastic or random in the technical senses, it is cast in the literature as a random process (at the variation end). Indeed, this is one of the key criticisms that theologians have had with evolution since before Darwin. To them it smacks of Epicureanism, and hence a denial of the intimate involvement of God.

I know (and know you know, and that you know I... never mind) that fitness is often cast in terms of propensities, and so forth, but selection is regarded as the "noise filter" of evolution.

Is this all random or not? Is it chance? Well I really don't know; you are better placed to make that call. There are probabilities of mutations and probabilities of elimination of alleles through selection, so I would suggest that it is, in that regard. Sober does a lot of probability calculus treatments of selection, for instance. But in the standard sense (of an unbiased distribution?) mutation isn't even random. Some mutations are more likely than others, due simply to the chemical nature of the bonds. It is even thought that there are regions in the genome akin to the variable region in antibody-producing cells that are predisposed to mutate (the key term here, if anyone wants to go looking, is "evolvability") because that is fitness enhancing, so the situation is messier than just the ordinary account, even.

On QM - I tend to think that quantum indeterminacy is washed out in the level of physics that I am interested in, but somebody posed the following question on talk.origins (I think it was Stanley Friesen): could God created two universes exactly alike such that after 13.5 billion years they would have the exact same outcomes of today? After a lot of thought, I ended up deciding no, because quantum indeterminacy at crucial moments would magnify over time. You'd get a similar universe, with planets and seas and possibly similar organisms, but not the exact same ones (assuming God can't act as a hidden variable to force the right quantum events). Please (and I mean that - I really want to be a determinist here) tell me how I'm wrong.

[Note to lurkers - JasonNotJasonJ is a philosopher of probability, and I am his projectionist and stunt double.]

No matter how scientifically literate the Catholic Church chooses to become, they are bound by a very specific non-random event with respsect to the creation of human beings: the spontaneous creation of the soul.

Regardless of the motivation for Dr./Fr. Coyne's dismissal, the church has a bit of a conundrum trying to reconcile the prospect of evolution (which was accepted on the whole by the church via a papal decree in the late 40s) and it's randomness in generating a life form and the non-probabilistic creation of the soul by god. In other words, to be human requires divine intervention and, therefore, sets us apart from the other animals, gives us purpose. No matter what they decide to accept, I suspect that they can only go as far in accepting the full impact of evolutionary science as they can and still find a way to weasel out to "But god says we're special."

'quantum indeterminacy is washed out in the level of physics that I am interested in ... quantum indeterminacy at crucial moments would magnify over time'

What quantum indeterminacy?

'You'd get a similar universe, with planets and seas and possibly similar organisms, but not the exact same ones (assuming God can't act as a hidden variable to force the right quantum events). Please (and I mean that - I really want to be a determinist here) tell me how I'm wrong.'

If there is quantum indeterminacy, then I think you're exactly 100% right. I just don't know any good reason for thinking there is any ... and I have looked.

Jason

What quantum indeterminacy?

You know. That quantum indeterminacy everyone always talks about... dont ask me to be specific. I don't do quantum.

"But the randomness in evolutionary theory is epistimetic, not ontological[1]; the universe could be completely deterministic and you'd still have 'random' mutations in evolution, simply because the processes that cause them are not described by the theory."

As noted by others here there are two different sources of randomness, coarsegrained classic and finegrained quantum. Some mutations are affected with both.

"But in the standard sense (of an unbiased distribution?) mutation isn't even random."

That a stochastic variable have a nonuniform distribution doesn't mean it has lost its randomness.

"After a lot of thought, I ended up deciding no, because quantum indeterminacy at crucial moments would magnify over time."

As evidenced by CMBR and the distribution of galaxies. Galaxies were seeded from quantum spacetime fluctuations at the start of inflation. Inflation blew them up and resulted in mass fluctuations and so CMBR fluctuations and galaxies.

And based on either source of randomness in life, the same happens here.

"What quantum indeterminacy?"

The one most physicists subscribe to AFAIK. You want to keep QM local so you can extend it into relativistic quantum field theory - lorentz invariance causality needs locality. Then you see from experiments and Bell's inequalities that hidden variables are forbidden. That leaves you with genuine randomness when the wavefunction collapses and a random result is picked out of the possible ones.

"Some mutations are affected with both."

And of course selection are affected by coarsegraining.

'The one most physicists subscribe to AFAIK. You want to keep QM local so you can extend it into relativistic quantum field theory - lorentz invariance causality needs locality. Then you see from experiments and Bell's inequalities that hidden variables are forbidden. That leaves you with genuine randomness when the wavefunction collapses and a random result is picked out of the possible ones.'

That's largely dependent on which physicist you ask! For example, Gererdus t'Hooft has a proposed a deterministic theory that underlies QFT (and which is apparently very, very strange; a count against it on first blush, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong). Also, I suspect Many-Worlds type explanations are also ok in QFT; these are deterministic (in that every possible outcome occurs). There may be others; the preponderance of the 'it's genuinely random' [1] viewpoint is largely because of how it's taught, and largely beacuse for all practical purposes, it doesn't matter.

Unless you lie awake at might thinking about these thing. like me. (I seriously need to get a life.)

[1] And I'm pretty agnostic about this; the fact that the formalism givs us only the probabilities of outcomes means very little for ontology, as the whole apparatus is so shot through with operationalist assumptions that taking it literally is perhaps a bit naive.

'[C]ould God created two universes exactly alike such that after 13.5 billion years they would have the exact same outcomes of today? '

That's interpretation dependent:

Operationalist Copenhagen/Baysian Interpretation: You can't tell, because the QM formalism tells us nothing about what's really going on.

Everettian Many Worlds (I think coherent histories approaches belong here too): Yes, but He's also caused all the other outcomes to exist as well.

Mystical Copenhagen: Yes, for He collapses the wavefunction. Or failing that, you do, creating the entire history of the universe up until this point... I'll stop here, as this is quite silly.

Transactional Interpretation: Since there's backwards causation in this interpreation, He has to create the future alongside the initial conditions, so yes.

Hidden Variables/t'Hooft QFT: Yes, since the underlying reality, though wierd, is deterministic.

Objective collapse: No, because the existence of the wavefunction and its collapse into one outcome or the other is an objective fact.

Relational Interpretion: Buggered if I know. I *thought* I understood it, but on reflection I realise that I don't. Oh well.

Before I finish off this rather long post:

'Whether or not evolution (mutation+drift+natural selection) is stochastic or random in the technical senses, it is cast in the literature as a random process (at the variation end). Indeed, this is one of the key criticisms that theologians have had with evolution since before Darwin. To them it smacks of Epicureanism, and hence a denial of the intimate involvement of God.'

Right. Just trying to clear this up -- it's still a problem of terminology? They're seeing that wicked word 'chance' and hareing off after a red herring. (Is that a mixed metaphor? Oops.) What I'm trying to articulate is whether what we're talking about is closer to classical thermodynamics (in which we have a stochastic description of something which is deterministic [1]) or statistical mechanics (in which we have a stochastic description of something which is quantum). Apologies if I'm being obtuse here.

(I've just realised that part of the reason I'm finding this a tad confusing is that I only tend to read theologians who don't have much of a problem with evolution[2]. Life's too short for me to read stuff that'll only raise my blood pressure. Good thing I'm not a philosopher...)

[1] Avoiding for a moment the knotty issue of Poincare recurrence vs. the Second Law of thermodynamics, which could be due to chaos theory, emergence or Great Cthulhu mucking about with the particles while no-one is looking...

[2] Even if they don't understand it that well.

Iorwerth:
"That's largely dependent on which physicist you ask!"
Not AFAIK, the great majority believes QFT is important and that QM can't be deterministically described.

"For example, Gererdus t'Hooft has a proposed a deterministic theory that underlies QFT (and which is apparently very, very strange; a count against it on first blush, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong)."

IIRC Gerard 't Hooft's quantum theory isn't as strange as QM. (Nothing is. :-) But the problem is that it is deterministic. "Quantum Gravity as a Dissipative Deterministic System ... The notion of time in GR is so different from the usual one in elementary particle physics that we believe that certain versions of hidden variable theories can -- and must -- be revived." ( http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/9903/9903084.pdf )

"'t Hooft was looking into how to construct a classical, non-local (to avoid Bell's theorem), statistical mechanics-like theory that would appear like quantum mechanics. An interesting, crazy idea which I look forward to seeing land in the arXiv some day if he ever makes it work." ( http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/04/25/the-future-of-theoretical-cosmolog… )

't Hooft is a respected physicist; holography was first introduced by 't Hooft and Susskind. But that doesn't mean that his ideas isn't speculative.

"Also, I suspect Many-Worlds type explanations are also ok in QFT; these are deterministic (in that every possible outcome occurs)."

Two interpretations are main stream AFAIK, Copenhagen done right (real waveform) and MW. I happen to like MW right now since I like the multiverse solution for the anthropic principle, the work on decoherence, and some of Max Tegmark's ensemble theories combined with modal realism. Multiverses solve a lot of problems.

Yes, regarded over the ensemble of universes split over all observer outcomes it is deterministic with no wavefunction collapse. But for the individual observer, like us, each outcome is as much random and sudden as in the CDR interpretation. Remember why they are called interpretations - currently they give the same results. And that is why it is still genuine random from the view of each observer, due to the no hidden variable requirement. The fundamental QM events fulfill Kolmogorov's axioms in our accessible and well-defined universe even in MW, so it is genuine as observed in our universe.

"'[C]ould God created two universes exactly alike such that after 13.5 billion years they would have the exact same outcomes of today? '

That's interpretation dependent"

Not in my view. AFAIK gods can always run the whole universe wholesale, ie run it non-locally by superluminal signals in his parallel supernatural universe. [Note: He can't do it here, since superluminal signals destabilises gauge theories, and also there are no room for more fundamental interactions.] That would undercut the hidden variable problem.

Or equivalently they could do a Last Thursday. But these are both a philosophical and theological problem. No parsimonity and Cosmic Cheaters.

"Relational Interpretion".

Don't work, it breaks lorentz invariance, so no QFT. Really, of interpretations only CDR, CDW and MW work AFAIK. Speculative QM's break lorentz invariance, woo-woo QM's demands dualisms. Consistent histories is special, since it is sooo close. But it can't pick out the clean state vectors that we see at an observation, and need to have to prepare for the next one. Darn, its a pretty idea.

"Just trying to clear this up -- it's still a problem of terminology? They're seeing that wicked word 'chance' and hareing off after a red herring."

I believe so. For example, selection makes the process locally constrained, it makes local hill climbs in fitness function space, so it isn't totally random. But they dismiss selection etc. to keep the strawman.

"Iowerth" - Iorwerth.
"Kolmogorovs axiom" - Kolmogorovs axioms.

Torbjörn, I made those corrections in your comment. It's a good post, and worth being pretty...

' "That's largely dependent on which physicist you ask!"
Not AFAIK, the great majority believes QFT is important and that QM can't be deterministically described. '

Sure, but the vast vast vast majority haven't thought seriously about the measurement problem (to take just one example of philosophically important things that they haven't thought seriously about). So there's no point in making any arguments from authority in this particular area. As you'd probably all agree.

Jason

John:
"It's a good post, and worth being pretty..."

Why, thank you! (Scuffles feet...) I couldn't do it without you guys, you know.

"Sure, but the vast vast vast majority haven't thought seriously about the measurement problem (to take just one example of philosophically important things that they haven't thought seriously about)."

Granted, with reservations. Some have made an effort, not all work on all problems, and hard problems are often put on hiatus.

But it is a pity Consistent histories doesn't work, since it has the thermally equilibrated vacua as potential observer.

"So there's no point in making any arguments from authority in this particular area."

Granted, but I don't think any of the above discussion touched that.

Actually, as for many other hard problems (wavefunction of the universe, anyone?) "We don't know" is a scientifically acceptable answer. But philosophers don't like that...

Uuups - the answers below the remark is for Jason.

Well, good comment or not, I managed to make a mistake in it.

I didn't remember correctly, apparently Consistent histories are called Copenhagen Done Right. So CDR becomes CWR (Copenhagen Waveform Real) and CDW becomes CWN (CW Nonreal).

Jason:
My change from CWR to MW is so fresh (last week) so I haven't checked up on the philosophically important things thoroughly. It seems MW buys off the measurement problem for many worlds with the help of entanglement and world split.

As I understand classic MW briefly, observation entangles observer entity subsystem and observed entity subsystem, and the world split means that each correlation becomes a pure state. (Remember, I don't buy in to that decoherence manage to create pure states.)

This removes the privileged position of and defines the observer entity as any subsystem of the observed entity type, ie with observables. And apparently two CW axiom. (Collapse description, and Born's probability law becomes derivative.)

"This removes the privileged position of and defines the observer entity as any subsystem of the observed entity type, ie with observables."

Um, probably not since we can have entangled observed systems. So we have an unprivileged classic observer. (Which decoherence may explain.)

What do you make of the preferred basis problem?

(Incedentally, the derivation of Lorentz-type causality in Peskin and Schroder -- that is, the one I'm familiar with -- is a little peculiar in that it permits particle propagation faster than the speed of light, but doesn't allow this to affect measurements. I'm not going to make much of this -- there's probably a stronger demonstation without that oddity somewhere, and anyway, the gauge conditions you mentioned should be a strong enough condition for causality anyhow. It's largely irrelevent to philosophical and theological concerns, though; AFAIK some of the big problems like logical and theological determinism are to do with the structure and nature of logical propositions, a topic which can't really be covered by QM without begging the metaphysical question.)

Iorwerth:

"What do you make of the preferred basis problem?"

I find QM and interpretations interesting, but it is way outside of my area of expertice, and I have nothing to say here yet.

"Incedentally, the derivation of Lorentz-type causality in Peskin and Schroder -- that is, the one I'm familiar with -- is a little peculiar in that it permits particle propagation faster than the speed of light, but doesn't allow this to affect measurements."

I'm not surprised by the permission, if it is temporary. That is consistent with what I have stumbled on in string theory, where as in QFT I haven't even read any popular account of yet. But it seems these theories permits tachyonic fields and tachyons as a sign of instability in the spacetime vacuum.

For string theories that may be when geometries change and branes annihilates. "The appearance of tachyons is a potentially lethal problem for any theory: Although the notion of an imaginary mass is troubling, what is really being quantized here is the scalar field and it turns out that for the case of an unstable scalar field, information still does not propagate faster than light. The "imaginary mass" really means that the system is unstable and that solutions will grow exponentially, but not superluminally (there is no violation of causality). Tachyon condensation drives the physical system to a stable state where no physical tachyons exist." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon_condensation )

"It's largely irrelevent to philosophical and theological concerns, though; AFAIK some of the big problems like logical and theological determinism are to do with the structure and nature of logical propositions, a topic which can't really be covered by QM without begging the metaphysical question."

I just stumbled on a model of physics and causality from a scientists view that seem to cover metaphysics, and seem to reverse the begging AFAIK.

"A materialist model may be said to consist of four elements. First, we model the world as some formal (mathematical) structure. (General relativity describes the world as a curved manifold with a Lorentzian metric, while quantum mechanics describes the world as a state in some Hilbert space. As a more trivial example, we could imagine a universe which consisted of nothing other that an infinitely long list of ''bits'' taking on the values 0 or 1.) Second, this structure exhibits patterns (the ''laws of nature''), so that the amount of information needed to express the world is dramatically less than the structure would in principle allow. (In a world described by a string of bits, we might for example find that the bits were an infinitely repeated series of a single one followed by two zeroes: 100100100100...) Third, we need boundary conditions which specify the specific realization of the pattern. (The first bit in our list is a one.) Note that the distinction between the patterns and their boundary conditions is not perfectly well-defined; this is an issue which becomes relevant in cosmology, and we'll discuss it more later. Finally, we need a way to relate this formal system to the world we see: an ''interpretation.'
...
Once we figure out the correct formal structure, patterns, boundary conditions, and interpretation, we have obtained a complete description of reality. (Of course we don't yet have the final answers as to what such a description is, but a materialist believes such a description does exist.) In particular, we should emphasize that there is no place in this view for common philosophical concepts such as ''cause and effect'' or ''purpose.'' From the perspective of modern science, events don't have purposes or causes; they simply conform to the laws of nature. In particular, there is no need to invoke any mechanism to ''sustain'' a physical system or to keep it going; it would require an additional layer of complexity for a system to cease following its patterns than for it to simply continue to do so. Believing otherwise is a relic of a certain metaphysical way of thinking; these notions are useful in an informal way for human beings, but are not a part of the rigorous scientific description of the world. Of course scientists do talk about ''causality,'' but this is a description of the relationship between patterns and boundary conditions; it is a derived concept, not a fundamental one. If we know the state of a system at one time, and the laws governing its dynamics, we can calculate the state of the system at some later time. You might be tempted to say that the particular state at the first time ''caused'' the state to be what it was at the second time; but it would be just as correct to say that the second state caused the first. According to the materialist worldview, then, structures and patterns are all there are --- we don't need any ancillary notions." ( http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/nd-paper.html )

It is an interesting read for me. I had a more confused view of causality, but the remains fit nicely into Carroll's account. The same goes for modelling physics and metaphysics.

Now I don't think such an account will be accepted by philosophers easily. And of course it leaves gaps since it doesn't model the methods or particulars of either physics or metaphysics. But since my picture of logics and mathematics is that they are built on models originally inspired by nature and still is interacting in such a way through science, and philosophy as studying the meaningful propositions that remains after observations and theory has been made, it seems to fit nicely with my own earlier views.

On the preferred basis problem:

Fair enough. The foundations of QM are kind of tangental to what I do as well!

On Lorentz Invariance:

As a mere lattice field theorist turned condensed matter theorist, I can't really comment on what string theorists think. But it sounds about right. I imagine the loop-hole I descirbed probably goes away in a more mathematically rigourous treatment. (Probably algebraic quantum field theory, or some such.)

On metaphysics:

It's a fairly interesting viewpoint, and one I think a lot of people might share, and it can be argued for. Peverse bugger that I am, I don't really agree with it [1], but that's life...

It doesn't dodge logical fatalism, though:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fatalism/

[1] It's a too strong form of scientific realism for my liking, and is smuggling some hefty assumptions about laws of nature under the carpet (e.g. that they exist in the strong sense needed for that to go through).

Iorwerth:

"Peverse bugger that I am, I don't really agree with it [1], but that's life...

[1] It's a too strong form of scientific realism for my liking, and is smuggling some hefty assumptions about laws of nature under the carpet (e.g. that they exist in the strong sense needed for that to go through)."

Yes, it is strong, which is probably why I made sure to use "[it] seems to". I am most interested in that it is a complete though naive model of science that constrains philosophy, and it seems to me reverse the usual idea of who begs whom questions. But I'm still digesting this view. It does indeed do away with such concepts as objects and conflates them with patterns ("laws"). But objects can be recovered as observable more or less stable quantizations of fields, stable under the actings of dualities, so perhaps I worry unduly. Or to be more concrete, bosons vs fermions.

"It doesn't dodge logical fatalism, though: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fatalism/"

I'm not sure, since the model doesn't do away with genuine randomness. Fatalism and free will is IMHO more of a problem for neuroscience since the brain seems to work in the classical regime.

But Mark Chu-Carroll of "Good Math, Bad Math" has made a good job of convincing me that the Church-Turing thesis in computer science means that "there is a fundamental limit to what is computable, and any "acceptable" system can compute anything up to that limit" (the effective computing systems limit). (What can I say, I'm obviously impressionable! Perhaps that is *my* perversion...)

He also seems to say that breaking this means solving the halting problem (refute gödel incompleteness), and that however brains working emerges it can't do better. ( http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/06/an_introduction_to_information… )

It seems to me the halting problem kills fatalism, since one can't predict what will happen deterministically in such systems. If predictability is illdefined, the question that uses it is wrong. I see that Aristotle says that the prediction requirement can be removed, but when he is modelling the system differently and goes from asking if it can be predicted to asking if it is lawful. I believe that is two different questions. The loss of predictability will stop us from claiming "that we are powerless to do anything other that [sic] what we actually do". Specifically for the halting problem and its realisation in our brains, waiting a bit will enable more "problems" to be answered, and change things, all else alike.

Finally I think that the new successes in verifying the Lambda-CDM cosmology, including now recently CDM by itself and finding the missing lithium from baryogenesis buried and consumed in stars, makes me somewhat overconfident in science and its tradition of realism. It will be interesting to see when and why I change my mind on metaphysics next time.

Thanks for an interesting and thoughtprovoking discussion!

"It seems to me the halting problem kills fatalism, since one can't predict what will happen deterministically in such systems."

And in reality I believe coarsegraining makes this point pretty much an unncessary fallback claim.

You're welcome!