Ruth and causality (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 20, 2013, 12:11 (4112 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I'm fine with "QM is not really in our world", but not with CAUSATION "is not really in the world". Ruth links her scepticism to expectation and prediction.-DAVID: Re-read her blog with George Musser. it makes her theory clear to me:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical-opalescence/2013/06/21/can-we-resolve-quan...-I've reread the blog, and also our brief discussion of those same passages under the heading "quantum mechanics: at another level" (see our exchange on 28 June at 12.31 and 16.01, and 29 June at 08.26), on the thread "Combine General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics" (opened on 9 January). We reached an amicable agreement, so do please reread those three posts. I need to reiterate that like yourself I'm intrigued by the possibility that QM may open a window onto a world outside of space and time. It stands to reason that if there is such a thing, it may not conform to the same laws as those that govern our own space/time world, and this may tie in with psychic experiences like NDEs. I remain open-minded. But Ruth invited us to read her Chapter 7 and to ask questions which might help with her new book for lay readers. That is what I'm doing.-I've sought clarification of her concepts of knowledge and reality, have asked how the problem of subjectivity "evaporates" because the same transaction is "interpreted differently by the different observers", and now I'm grappling with her "elimination" of causality. At the start of this thread I wrote: "I don't have a problem when [Ruth] says that cause preceding effect in the empirical world "should not be thought of as necessarily extendable to the unobservable entities of the micro-world." [...] But I do find it extremely confusing when scientists and philosophers apply their anti-causality theory to empirical reality itself." This is what Ruth does with her billiard balls. You think it's a bad example because you want her to confine the argument to the quantum world, but that is precisely my point. In spite of the above reference to cause preceding effect, Ruth does take her scepticism into the empirical world. If the billiard ball example is a mistake, and Ruth does NOT mean that causality has been "eliminated" and "is not an ontological feature of the world", then perhaps the wording of the text itself is the cause of my confusion rather than my ignorance of the subject. Only Ruth can tell us.-DAVID: Conclusion: there are no immediate causes and effects in QM. It is all probability, results depending upon what you look for. I still defend Ruth. This blog is what originally caught my eye. If correct it makes perfect sense because it takes us away from classical cause and effect.-Once again, I don't have a problem with that ... the quantum world is a total mystery to me, as is the origin of life and of consciousness, and so I remain open-minded. But you have said yourself (18 August at 16.26) that "everything has a cause", and "Ruth's hidden causes in QM have to exist". How, then, can you defend the claim that causality is not an ontological feature (i.e. not part of the 'reality') of the world? If you also dispute this claim, we are in agreement. And both of us need clarification from Ruth!