One of the problems that I have with science is that it claims to have “discovered” things people have known for a very long time. Please don’t consider me to be a Kantophile, however, in the West, we can easily go back to Kant’s dictum that “the things in themselves” cannot be known. He died in 1804. Perhaps now there is some form of empirical evidence for what has been known for a long time, but it is hardly a discovery.
BTW “cannot both be true” (law of non-contradiction) has also been completely blown out of the water, empirically. Does anyone know “fuzzy logic”? Probably not. Oh well. The Japanese have long been masters of engineering applications of fuzzy logic. Guess what. It is used to more closely approximate human experience and “reasoning” that the data crunching probability models (Monte Carlo engine being well known) almost exclusively relied upon in the West.
I was working with Engineers who were trying to “merge” the two and were confronted with an intractable problem: the clock went backward in all simulations.
Hossenfelder’s solution to the problem is to argue that the tree knows in advance whether anyone will be in the forest and makes a sound only if there is.
I am not sure that this is any less anti-intuitive than all the other options, clearly it appeals to Sabine’s intuitions, but I think she is a bit dismissive of some of the other thinkers in this space, and also that she somewhat misrepresents Bell’s motivations and views (as I understand it he was sympathetic to hidden variable theories) .
It’s certainly a pretty tough sell on her part! Bell’s theorem makes some pretty plausible assumptions and works from there. However, it seems worth trying to probe those assumptions or see if it’s possible to formulate a somewhat more plausible way in which they might not hold, which Hossenfelder and some others seem to be trying to do for this “statistical independence” assumption.
Some of her characterisations of other physicists in that video are probably a bit over the top. As you say, I think Bell was sympathetic to the whole Bohm pilot wave approach, a non-local hidden variable theory. That’s not a popular interpretation of quantum mechanics, but still remains a viable contender as far as I can tell.
