Vladimir?
You said "Your analogical arguments are a sort of clever intellectual exercise to categorize various ideas in physics."
I chose physical ideas as a gold standard of accuracy and trust, but at no time do I consider other ways of knowing as being inferior, or less trustworthy.
Actually, I first saw a pair of dualities, viz. mind-body from philosophy and wave-particle from quantum theory, and came to recognize that there is an analogy between the two dualities, like "what mind is to body" is similar to (~) "what wave is to particle." From then on as they say, the dam burst: gene-protein; freedom-determinism; same-difference; variation-selection, bit-it; etc. etc.
You said "I am not against that - but when you do that it creates artificial divisions. Some of us are trying to unify physics to show, for example, that both classical and quantum ideas are causal, linear and local."
Well, I am sorry if I had created "artificial divisions", but I thought I was just reporting only what I saw, and recording what follows indubitably from the symmetry principles that is synonymous -- and at home -- in physics.
I am not a physics major (and give me ropes here! ), and my understanding as such is that there is a thin line between noncausal and causal, between freedom and determinism, between linear and nonlinear, between connection and noconnection, between global and local, between etc. and etc.
And I don't see the "thin line" as a barrier. I see that as the Nature's way of saying that we are free to choose the sides without incurring large penalties of losing lifes or limbs for either. I see the "thin line" as a blessing, an opportunity to exercise free will.
I have left out this passage from the essay I submitted to FQXi Contest, but I should have included it for more clarity:
'We have two fundamental laws of physics, the QUANTUM and the CLASSICAL. The quantum deals in chance and probability, in uncertainty and in freedom, while the classical revels in the power of its Laplacian determinism, demonically fixing the destinations of planets and the destinies of people from now to eternity, leaving nothing to chance or willfulness. There is no place for our humanity in this Laplacian cosmos of classical physics! But we know we are willful creatures, and the sense of freedom and the flexibility we obviously needed and enjoyed do conflict with the deterministic claims of classical physics.
What is more, the determinism defined within classical physics is also not - I believe - compatible with automaticity characteristic of the analogical, mainly because the determinism of classical physics is parasitic on the precision of the input variables for it to work, while the strength of analogy is that it works from small hints and vague inputs.
How does Nature deals with this dichotomous competing worldviews? By forcing both to work together simultaneously on one small thing!
One can marvel at what a small constant can do, creating an impersonal cosmos of unimaginable dimensions out of nothing as it were, while not forgetting to populate a corner of it with conscious human beings like us, brimming with desire to know what the Bleep is all about.'
I believe dualities are Nature's way of saying that there are two sides to the same coin. The coin is the Planck constant with light of low and high frequencies, or as I generalize it as the Mother of All Dualities.
Vladimir, I hope to have more exchanges like this, and in the meantime, I wish you the best.
Than Tin