Dear Mueller:
Excellent scholarly article.
I basically agree with your views:
"I argue to replace this perspective by a worldview in which a structural notion of 'real patterns', not 'things' are regarded as fundamental. Instead of a limitation of what we can know, undecidability and unpredictability then become mere statements of undifferentiation of structure."
..... but only partly, because "undifferentiation of structure" acknowledges our persistence ignorance. In fact, that is point of my essay.
Please, make time to read my essay and grade it.
"Complete Information Retrieval: A Fundamental Challenge"
https://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/3565
The universe is fundamentally stochastic because the observable radiations and particles are emergent oscillations/vibrations of the universal cosmic space, which is, at the same time, full of random "background" fluctuations. These fluctuations, however weak they may be, nonetheless are perturbing any and all other interactions going on in the universe. Since, human initiated measurements are also interactions between our chosen interactants in our apparatus, stochastical changes will be inevitable in every measurements, classical or quantum.
I am an experimentalist. Aprreciating persistent & continued incompleteness in our knowledge does not require complex philosophical arguments. Our measurements will always be imprecise. That we had been, we now are, and we will always be, information limited, emerges naturally when we enumerate the basic steps in any measurement:
(i) Data are some physical transformation taking place inside the apparatus.
(ii) The physical transformation in a detectable material always require some energy exchange between the interactants, the "unknown" and the "known", where the "known" is the reference interactant.
(iii) The energy exchange must be guided by some force of interaction operating between the chosen interactants.
(iv) Since we have started with an unknown universe, from the standpoint of building physics theories, the "known" entities are known only partially, never completely. This also creates information bottleneck for the "unknown" entity. Note that in spite of innumerable experiments, we still do not know what electrons and photons really are.
(v) All forces of interactions are distance dependent. Hence, the interactants must be placed within the range of each other's mutual influence (force-field). Force-field creates the necessary physical "entanglement" between interacting entities for the energy transfer to proceed. In other words, interactants must be "locally or regional" within their physical sphere of influence. They must be "entangled" by a perceptible physical force. Our equations are built on such hard causality.
(vi) The final data in all instruments suffer from the lack of 100% fidelity. This is another permanent problem of imprecision. We can keep on reducing the error margin as our technology enhances; but we do not know how to completely eliminate this error.
Many of my earlier papers have also articulated this position. They can be downloaded from:
http://www.natureoflight.org/CP/
You can also download the paper: "Next Frontier in Physics--Space as a Complex Tension Field"; Journal of Modern Physics, 2012, 3, 1357-1368 , http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/However, mp.2012.310173
Sincerely,
Chandra.
Prof. ChandraSekhar Roychoudhuri