Atla wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 8:37 amAgain, I'm not really sure what this Kantian noumenon-phenomenon delusion system is all about...
Well, as long as you insist it is a delusion, you are going to struggle. It is true that many people believe that there is something independent of mind which 'causes' phenomena; you yourself allude to as much here:
Atla wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 9:24 am Sunlight is reflected from the Moon, that light travels for a little more than a second, and then hits the eye. What happens after that is up to debate, no one really knows yet, but those signals get processed in various ways in the brain and then an imagine of the Moon is constructed from them.
Strictly speaking though, it is an hypothesis. Simply put it is something like: The cause of all the phenomena that suggest there is a universe made of some stuff, is a universe made of some stuff. However, as Descartes pointed out, and Hume hammered home, you cannot prove that any interpretation of phenomena is true.
Atla wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 8:37 amSuch properties exist regardless of measurement...
If you say this, then you are claiming that there exists something independent of measurement, which is precisely what noumenon means.
Atla wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 8:37 amI also wouldn't state that science is only about developing instrumentalist approaches for practical purposes, it used to be more than that.
Yup. Pretty much up to the publication of the second edition of Newton's Principia. Responding largely to Cartesians, Newton added the General Scholium, which included a passage known as
hypotheses non fingo:
"But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phaenomena, and I frame no hypotheses. For whatever is not deduc’d from the phaenomena, is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferr’d from the phaenomena, and afterwards render’d general by induction."
https://isaac-newton.org/general-scholium/
Atla wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 8:37 amWhich is why most founders of QM were locked in almost religious debates. But they encountered a philosophical brick wall that still stands 80+ years later.
Which is why physicists generally ignore philosophy and concentrate on the maths: "Shut up and calculate".