quantum mechanics: Kastner\'s brilliant blog (Introduction)

by rekastner , Wednesday, July 17, 2013, 20:28 (4148 days ago) @ dhw

Wait, you have a hidden assumption in your statement "even if there are objective realities outside spacetime, we cannot know what they are."-Your assumption is basically an empiricist approach to knowledge: the doctrine that one can gain knowledge ONLY through sensory perception. But many philosophers, including Plato and Descartes, disagreed with this. Rational analysis is a key ingredient of scientific theory and can yield advances in theoretical description not available based only on studying sensory observations.-So we can't observe these entities directly, but in fact we can gain indirect knowledge of them based on rational analysis of what we can observe. That's what QM is -- it's a theory of objects that cannot be directly observed. Again, I do address these methodological issues in my book, in particular in Chapter 2.