On Monday, April 18, 2022 at 3:35:22 PM UTC+3 agrays...@gmail.com wrote: So what, in your view, bugged AE about probability in QM? AG >
I think I have come to a crisp understanding of this issue, which I want to submit to you. However, we must take into consideration that the notion of probability many scientists have these days is very different from the one implied in Einstein's comment "God doesn't play dice". Einstein seems to have a good old-fashioned understanding of probability based on rolling the dice, shuffling the deck, and so on, which has also been formalised as "Kolmogorov complexity". That is, a shuffling complicated enough to make it technically impossible to run the needed calculations in the next 15 seconds, say, in which I am obliged to play my hand. Of course I trust that no other players in this game can run such calculations in the prescribed time (I trust with "moral certainty", not with absolute certainty). This outlook of probability is incompatible with certain currently popular views of probability. For one, entropy considerations are irrelevant in general, unless when they just describe shuffling in other words. So-called Bayesian priors are also baseless strictly speaking, though they do serve in a "let us try this" approach. One more notion to shed is that of propability issuing from ANY theoretical probabilistic model, for example conventional QM. (Surely, if you are comfortable with the latter, then Einstein's comment is meaningless!) I cite an important (I think) philosophical work by Wolfgang Schwarz: "No Interpretation of Probability" Erkenntnis 83, 1195–1212 (2018), <https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9936-9>. He argued that such models do NOT issue probability; they issue just numbers which the users ACCEPT AS probabilities -- in whatever interpretation of probability one assumes as fundamental. This is the key to understanding Einstein's comment. So, in plain words, Einstein's comment means the following. If the interpretation of QM treats normalised measures as probabilities, we need to understand this in terms of our basic notion of probability, that is shuffling the deck or rolling the dice. So in each measurement someone must roll dice or something, in order that probability will arise. Since QM does not allow for such a mechanism, we are left to trusting that probabilities issued by QM are as good AS IF generated by a randomising mechanism (of a familiar kind). This "as if" creates a doubt whether the notion of probability from QM is equivalent to that from shuffling. This is not a silly question, because it has relevance to decision theory (in particular, on whether Maximisation of Expected Utility is a rationally justified method). George K. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/2058484b-5b5f-4e76-9458-13c7a73892dbn%40googlegroups.com.
