On 1/23/2014 7:33 PM, LizR wrote:
On 24 January 2014 16:08, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
wrote:
On 1/23/2014 5:46 PM, LizR wrote:
On 24 January 2014 14:40, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I'd say a finitist form of arithmetic is a good description of some
aspects of
reality - but don't try to add raindrops or build Hilbert's Hotel.
OK. So are there some fundamental aspects of reality that can't be
described by
mathematics?
Probably not. Or it might depend on how complete a description is required
(notice
that not all true sentences of arithmetic can be described). Mathematics
is just
axiomatized language, a way of making sentences definite and avoiding
self-contradicition. There might be something that can only be described
fuzzily;
poets have lots of candidates. Maybe consciousness is one. But it's like
asking is
there something science can't investigate. Maybe, but we won't know
without trying.
It's just that so far, after about 500 years, we haven't managed to find /anything/ that
looks remotely fundamental to the operation of the universe that can't be described to
fairly high precision by maths. I guess this is what has led some people to wonder if
there's more to it than just "a way of making sentences definite and avoiding
self-contradicition".
I think you're squinting through you math glasses. Everything that we can describe and
predict with high precision is described by math (for the reason I gave). So of course
whatever we think is the most fundamental theory is going to be described by math - they
alternative would to that it was described in say, poetry and metaphor. But then we'd say
that's vague and we need precise predictions to test this alternative theory.
(I guess other people think we cherry pick the stuff that's mathy, and there are vast
swathes of non-mathematical stuff out there just waiting to be discovered...)
Sure. It's the part Bruno dismisses as "geography": the messy contingent stuff that
biologists describe in notebooks or we treat statistically. We *think* it can be
explained in terms of the fundamental math (Schrodinger's equation, GR, QFT) and so we
tell ourselves we've got the really real equations, and aren't they mathy! But we also
know we've thought that before and been wrong, and besides they aren't even consistent
with one another (hence Susskind and the firewall debate).
Brent
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