rubi said:
Nobody knows what the right assumptions about reality are. It's your personal opinion that QM doesn't describe reality.
In the minimal interpretation, QM does not pretend to describe reality. If an interpretation claims that no reality exists, I reject it as nonsensical. But the minimal interpretation does not make such claims, it simply does not give a description of reality.
rubi said:
I was just countering your claim that Reichenbach's principle can be used to deduce that there is no common cause in QM.
I never made such a claim. Reichenbach's principle claims the existence of causal explanations, like common causes. It also specifies what a common cause is.
There are rules of reasoning, which cannot be proven to be false by any observation, because to derive some nontrivial predictions - something which could be falsified by observation - has to use them. So, claiming that these rules are wrong would be simply the end of science as we know it. If we would take such a solution seriously, we would simply stop doing science, because it would be well-known that the methods we use are inconsistent. (Ok, also not a decisive argument - we do a lot of inconsistent things anyway.)
Whatever, there is a hierarchy, we have rules, hypotheses or so which make science possible, to reject them would make science meaningless. They are, of course, only human inventions too, but if they are wrong, doing science becomes meaningless. We would probably continue doing science, because humans like to continue to do things even if they have recognized that doing them is meaningless, which is what is named culture. But this culture named science would not be really science as it is today, an endeavor to understand reality, to find explanations, but like the atheist going to Church as part of his living in a formerly religious culture.
But this has not happened yet, at least for me doing science has yet some of its original meaning, and is an endeavor to understand reality, to find explanations which are consistent with the rules of logic, of consistent reasoning. And this requires that some ideas, like the rules of logic, of consistent reasoning, the existence of some external reality, and the existence of explanations, have to be true.
It is not only the point that giving them up would make science meaningless. It is also that there is no imaginable evidence which would motivate it. Because, whatever the conflict with observation, this would be always only an open scientific problem. And giving up science because there are open scientific problems? Sorry, this makes no sense. Science without open scientific problems would be boring.
rubi said:
You don't have to reject reality. You just have to realize that reality can be different from what one might naively assume. Nature is the ultimate judge. She doesn't care about our philosophical preferences.
Of course, one could imagine a Nature so that some beings in this Nature would be unable in principle to invent a theory about it without logical contradictions.
rubi said:
You were claiming that there cannot be a common cause explanation for the Bell correlations in QM. This is wrong. The true statement would be that hidden variable theories are incompatible with a common cause explanation. Theories that reject hidden variables might still allow for a common cause.
Simply wrong. There are causal explanations, they are even quite simple and straightforward, but violate Einstein causality. This is not really a big problem. Anyway, the other appearances of a similar symmetry (like for acoustic wave equations, where also Lorentz transformation with the speed of sound allow to transform solutions into other solutions of the wave equation) are known to be not fundamental.
rubi said:
Right, it is my personal theory (and also the personal theory of many others). It is also your personal theory that the world must be described by hidden variables, which is also a non-trivial assumption about reality.
Fine.
rubi said:
QM is not in conflict with logic. It is built using standard mathematics, which uses nothing but classical logic. Hence, we can use classical logic to talk about QM. Also, reasonability isn't a necessity for a physical theory. A physical theory must describe nature. If nature contradicts our intuition, then we have to adjust our intuition. Millions of physicists have learned quantum theory and have acquired a good intuition for quantum phenomena.
It is you who claims QM is in conflict with logic, namely with the rules of probability theory, which are, following Jaynes, Probability theory - the logic of science, the rules of consistent plausible reasoning. Consistent reasoning is not at all about intuition.