Reifying Ghosts

Belief in the existence of 'stochastic processes' in the real world; i.e. that the property of being 'stochastic' rather than 'deterministic' is a real physical property of a process, that exists independently of human information, is another example of the mind projection fallacy: attributing one's own ignorance to Nature instead. The current literature of probability theory is full of claims to the effect that a 'Gaussian random process' is fully determined by its first and second moments. If it were made clear that this is only the defining property for an abstract mathematical model, there could be no objection to this; but it is always presented in verbiage that implies that one is describing an objectively true property of a real physical process. To one who believes such a thing literally, there could be no motivation to investigate the causes more deeply than noting the first and second moments, and so the real processes at work might never be discovered. (p.506) Probability Theory, The Logic of Science, E.T.Jaynes