Dear Professor Yanofsky,
It was a pleasure to read your well-written and enjoyable essay relating limitations of physics to the working of the human mind. I wholly agree that how the world around us appears to us must also have to do with how the mind functions and interprets the world.
I have a comment on the said quantum indeterminism and the so-called collapse of the wave function during a measurement. As you may know, the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber theory of spontaneous localisation provides a dynamical explanation for collapse of the wave function. The collapse is still random, but is now a law of nature, even if phenomenological.
More recent research shows where spontaneous localisation comes from, and why it is random. The guiding principle for understanding this is: coarse-graining an underlying deterministic system can induce apparently random behaviour in the emergent dynamics. This is what is happening to quantum mechanics: it is a coarse-grained approximation to a deterministic matrix dynamics operating at the Planck scale.
Thus perhaps this property of QM and classical world [absence of macroscopic superpositions] can be attributed to the mind not being able to probe very small length scales, without supporting experimental technology.
My thanks and best wishes,
Tejinder
