Quantum mechanics is the way we understand the behaviour of matter and energy. It is a thorough working description of the structure and functioning of a hydrogen atom.
No. It says nothing about quarks, for example, nor strings. Hypothetical components of a hydrogen atom, you might say; but very well supported hypotheses, in the former case at least. There are two or three tentative attempts at quantising quarks, it's true - but no one could say they're a thorough working description (even Feynman, responsible for the most successful such attempt, didn't claim that.) QM is of course deliberately accounted for in string theories - but the last time I looked there were at least five competing versions, and none of them "thorough" or, in any practcal sense, "descriptive". Your characterisation was roughly true of Bohr's model, in the 1920s; but though this provided the initial impetus for the development of the whole theory, it was very soon abandoned - because it wasn't a working description at all, except coincidentally, as it turned out. QED and QCD are much better of course - but again, not structural descriptions. Developments of Garrett Lisi's model might get there, eventually, because it's geometrically based to start with; but if so what we know as "QM" will of course have effectively disappeared, as "Newtonian gravitation" did in GR.
Interesting phrase. Do you mean by "emergent properties" things like wetness, or colour?
Depends very much on what exactly you mean by "QM". There are as yet no definitively satisfactory harmonisations of QM with GR, for example; and I would be immensely surprised if when such a theory arrives it does not entail at least as much contextualisation of our present theories of "QM" as it will of Relativity.
I'd make the more general point:
most of what we observe has nothing to do with QM whatsoever, and QM has no applicability to
it.
Well, well - I think we've unearthed an aspirant
philosopher hiding away in you, Alan!
The concept of reason derives from logic. Logic has nothing to do with any human quality; its principles are eternal, and abstract (in a Platonic sense - that is, they are what they are in every possible universe, including this one.)
Otherwise, you're confusing the meaning of the term "reason" with that of "purpose" or intention, it seems. Why, I don't know. The concepts of purpose and intention are certainly valid and seemingly indispensable ones in scientific explanation of the behaviour, and even structures, of living creatures - another aspect of the universe that QM does not apply to, incidentally. (And, also by the by, a fundamental feature of scientific study first established, in exhaustive study after study and catalogue after catalogue of the natural world - far more than Darwin or Russell ever achieved - by
Aristotle!)
Blimey. My advice is to stick to Physics! Or if you want to philosophise in
this sort of manner, do it under a French pseudonym. "Kristina de Baudelaire", I suggest.
Taken seriously, though - as, from your previous comment on the other thread, I presume you mean it(?) - Abacus would respond, or should respond, to be consistent with his argument, that you have no means to verify the validity of such a mapping. Actually, he wouldn't say this - for some reason he claims this is because it is an
a priori truth that such a function
can not exist. You only have knowledge of the codomain of experience: the putative domain he claims (on no evidence, by his own argument)
exists, but that there is no connection between the two. Or he hasn't been able to specify one, at any rate. It's certainly not a linear mapping. He insists there might be other forms of intelligence who would have a completely different experience - in fact, he claims that such a differerent experience
creates a completely different environment! (Though to be fair he's recently started to waver on that point - in very much the sort of way a slalom skier wavers when he travels downhill upside-down.)
So - another cognitive relativist. Good. Why haven't you been supporting Abacus, then? I mean - if I've understood you aright? My decipherment of your claims is that our theories about the nature of the world are arbitrary - projections of needs and interests in our own natures, and the set of beliefs we've invented individually and as a culture? Does this apply to perceptions, too? Or vice versa?
(A very interesting and provocative question has just occurred to me, as an aside. Why are cognitive relativists always lefties? What's the connection? Which is the chicken and which the egg?)