I tend to agree with you about causality. The attempts to understand how the classical world arises from quantum laws seem particularly boneheaded to me. I guess people (scientists) don't want to let go of causality because who knows what chaos and mayhem will befall the world if we give up on this. And the philosophers have a term "causal closure" which seems to be axiomatic in alot of their discussions. But they just don't want to talk about any kind of mystical stuff that might seep in through the gaps.
Two books in particular have me thinking in this direction... Drift into Failure, by Sidney Dekker, which is about understanding failure in highly complex systems (aircraft, nuclear reactors, etc), and The World Beyond Your Head, by Matthew B. Crawford, which is really a philosophy book, but has substantial criticism of Enlightenment thinking (which includes reductionism, from Descartes/Newton, the basis of the scientific method).
Note that neither of these authors argue that the scientific method is wrong (as some new-agey types do), but rather that it is incomplete, and a poor tool for understanding the real world in many situations.
> how the classical world arises from quantum laws seem particularly boneheaded
What classical world do you refer to? Newtonian physics? That's well understood, the general area of study is called thermal physics.
Are you talking about how the brain works? The biologists understand the meso-scale structures and the microscale structures, and the wiring. What they lack is a certified, detailed diagram, which is admittedly hard, but it's hard like understanding the wiring diagram of an ARM chip is hard.
> That's well understood, the general area of study is called thermal physics.
I don't agree at all. Thermal (classical) physics may be consistent with quantum physics but this does not at all show how a classical world arises from the quantum.
Not thermodynamics, thermal physics. You very literally start from quantum states and work you're way up to large collections about which you make estimates which are highly consistent with the real world. Perhaps "statistical mechanics" is a better term.
I suspect that a detailed diagram of a brain would not be understandable at this point, though it would probably be a big help in getting there. While all of biology is nominally reducible to physics, that is not how to understand it.
> The attempts to understand how the classical world arises from quantum laws seem particularly boneheaded to me.
Why? They have been completely successful. The reduction from QM to newtonian mechanics is very easy; you just turn the action way up so that you can't see the quantization gaps between actions anymore.
QM is not acausal. Even in QFT where we have interactions that look time-reversed, they still aren't acausal.
> The reduction from QM to newtonian mechanics is very easy
This is just not true. For example when enanglement is involved all of this goes out the window. Indeed, the next few decades of quantum computing is going to be completely non-reducible to newtownian mechanics.
> QM is not acausal.
I disagree entirely. QM is exactly acausal. Also known as the measurement problem.
> For example when enanglement is involved all of this goes out the window.
Fair enough, this is sort of a counter example to the "increase the action" trick, but it does work for any local effects.
> Also known as the measurement problem.
There is no need to violate causality to solve the measurement problem. Even superluminal solutions don't allow for the superluminal transmission of information, so causality is preserved. There are huge families of solutions that don't require superluminality at all (einselection, many worlds, etc.).
I'm not suggesting to violate causality, I'm saying there just is no cause.
> to solve the measurement problem
I don't think there is any solution. The physical laws of the universe are incomplete, they do not determine what "happens." There are constraints in the form of probabilities, so it's not like anything can happen at any time. But what actually happens, it's spontaneous, un-caused.
> huge families of solutions
This is a vast area of research that has spanned decades and yielded very little in the way of solutions. Hence my use of the term "boneheaded" above.
> There are constraints in the form of probabilities, so it's not like anything can happen at any time. But what actually happens, it's spontaneous, un-caused.
Ah, your problem is that you only seem to be aware of the Copenhagen interpretation. There are other interpretations available that work just as well, but don't have anything as inconvenient as nondeterminism.
> This is a vast area of research that has spanned decades and yielded very little in the way of solutions.
Yes, what were these?
I tend to agree with you about causality. The attempts to understand how the classical world arises from quantum laws seem particularly boneheaded to me. I guess people (scientists) don't want to let go of causality because who knows what chaos and mayhem will befall the world if we give up on this. And the philosophers have a term "causal closure" which seems to be axiomatic in alot of their discussions. But they just don't want to talk about any kind of mystical stuff that might seep in through the gaps.