Mermin habitually answers opinions, real and abstract

“I hope you will agree,” David Mermin writes, “that you are not a continuous field of operators on an infinitedimensional Hilbert space. Nor, for that matter, is the page you are reading or the chair you are sitting in.” His comment is a nice example of the logical fallacy known as “appeal to belief”: Most people believe X is true, so X is true. That many people believe they are not operators in Hilbert spaces, believe they do have free will, or do or don’t believe in global warming makes no difference as to whether a statement is true or false. I have no basis on which to decide what I “really” am. And though I personally think any such argument is a waste of time because it can never be decided anyway, and though I am sympathetic to the opinion Mermin expresses, his article dismisses the relevance of both quantum foundations and the philosophy of science out of hand in a rather polemic and not very insightful way.