Gee, I thought it was from the prologue of a published, book-length work....
js1138, just answer me a question: I had two respondents to that post. Both of you chose to "attribute motives" to Dr. Feynman, and both of you ignored the point of Grandpierre -- who very modestly observed that science ought to be understandable WRT the objects to which it refers. That it really ought to explain the phenomena with which it purports to deal, not just stop at the "water's edge" of mathematical statements, and then just remain "agnostic" about what such statements actually mean.
Now the reason I thought that remark had some merit is that I've been reading and posting here at FR for a long time now. And it has been my experience that, on numerous occasions, different posters (presumably people working in scientific fields) have told me, WRT say, QM, "it doesn't matter what it means; it only matters that it works." Or words to that effect. The implication being: "Hey, we've got the equations. Who needs anything else?"
What is your view of this matter?
Alamo Girl posted a link to a .pdf a while back from a physicist with an oriental name working in Germany, where he discussed approaches of trying to include the classical observer in the quantum mechanical system by means of entanglement. (The paper had all sorts of other flaws, but the overall approach was quite intriguing). That's an ongoing problem at the philosophy/physics interface. But if you're asking can we described QM purely in terms that mirror everyday reality, the answer is, no we can't. But QM is by no means unique. When I was a kid, I used to look at science books in which the atoms were color-coded, and I thought for that reason that oxygen atoms were red (and hard and shiny looking!). Of course, even to talk about the color of an atom is specious. But yet everything we see in our everyday world has a color, so it's difficult to accept that to talk about the color of an atom makes no sense.
I would argue the laws that circumscribe what we consider everyday reality are naturalistic constructs, which work to do the things we want to do, but it aren't any more correct than the laws that govern the evolution of a wavefunction. QM is certainly explanatory with respect to the objects with which it deals; the measurement paradoxes are extraneous to QM.
That's because we've seen him talk (at least on film).
"Hey, we've got the equations. Who needs anything else?"
I have an analogy for you. Do you fully understand God? Do you have a visual image that you could convey on paper or other media? A metaphor that can't be overextended?
I think you are having trouble with the notion that science can study and reliably predict phenomena for which there are no really good images or metaphors. In such a case it may take generations for the culture to find a way of talking about the phenomena. Do you suppose the people of Aristotle's time could have easily coped with Newton's equations? Before you answer I'd like you ponder the concepts of zero and infinity and how they relate to calculus. Both concepts are relatively modern.