On 14 January 2014 13:38, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 1/13/2014 3:06 PM, LizR wrote: > > Quite possibly, of course! But in my humble opinion, Max Tegmark and > Bruno and Eugene Wigner (and Galileo, Gauss, Einstein etc) do have a point, > that maths does seem to "kick back" and to be "unreasonably effective", and > I think that it's worth thinking about why that is, even if it leads us > into what may be wild flights of fancy ... just in case they turn out not > to be. > >> >> In your model of the world, with chairs and tables and planets and >> people, where is the number 2? >> >> It's part of an explanation of where the chairs and tables etc come > from. > > Of course Bruno and Max would say that it's the whole of the explanation; > that tables and chairs are just mathematical objects. >
Yes I assume they would consider that a reasonable hypothesis. Or at least that a chair is a spatial factorisation of the universal Hamiltonian that is robust towards decoherence (I must use that phrase next time I tell my other half to move a chair across the room ... why it hasn't caught on already is beyond me :) > I don't know about Wigner, but I'm pretty sure the other three saw > mathematics as describing our models of the world - but not *being* the > world. > Well, I think Wigner thought it was a puzzle that needed to be answered. The other three thought that maths was "the queen of the sciences" but I doubt that they reified it to quite the extent that Tegmark etc have. But perhaps, if anyone had thought to do so, they might have... However, logically it seems at least *possible* that the world is "made of maths". That is, I don't think the idea is actually logically incoherent, although it's very counter-intuitive (my breakfast certainly didn't taste like a bunch of equations, even if there were some "e numbers" in it...) Supposing the world actually can be described by a TOE, what "breathes fire into the equations" ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
