"Reality" is another taboo word.
Reality is the thing that produces our experience and which we are trying to describe with our models. Stop playing dumb.
If there is a single lesson from QM, it is that looking (=measurement) affects what happens. This has nothing to do with minds.
Yes, looking affects what happens, but that is fully accounted for by the physical process of looking. That is, the effect of looking can be predicted and explained by treating the observer with the same laws of physics as whatever is observed. This does not mean you can make stuff up about unobserved events, or claim that events haven't really happened until they are observed ("For a local observer spacelike separated events do no exist until they come into causal contact with it.").
Reality is the thing that produces our experience and which we are trying to describe with our models.
I'm perfectly happy with the models being testable experimentally, without introducing this untestable thing you call reality.
Stop playing dumb.
I guess this concludes our exchange.
Today's post, Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality was originally published on 14 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Dilemma: Science or Bayes?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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