On 15 Jun 2015, at 21:53, John Mikes wrote:
Brent concluded ingeniously:
They have a theory for why THIS might be so no matter what THIS is.
You just have to find the right mathematics to describe it and
miracle of miracles the mathematics is obeyed!
Brent
May I step a bit further: by careful observations humanity (or some
'higher' cooperating intellect maybe?) derived the connotions we
call 'theories', math, even axioms to make them fit. Then we fall on
our backside by admiration that they fit. Don't forget the historic
buildup of our 'science' etc, stepwise, as we increased the
observational treasure-chest of Nature.
So Nature does not "obey" mathematics, mathematics has been derived
in ways to follow the observed regularities of Nature.
I thought that you were agnostic, but here you talk like if you *knew*
something, which I don't.
Even assuming Nature, the question remains: why does it have
regularities? Why does it look like it obeys mathematics? To say we
derive mathematics from nature does not really address the question.
*Humans *might have learned a lot in mathematics by looking at nature,
but this does not prove that nature precedes logically mathematics. I
have given argument that the contrary might have happened: nature
might belong to the imagination of the Löbian machines or numbers. We
know that such imagination is lawful, and obeys strict constraints.
Bruno
JM
On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 2:45 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 6/14/2015 2:49 PM, LizR wrote:
On 15 June 2015 at 08:22, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
I'm not saying it's ineffective. I'm saying it's not a mystery why
it's effective.
Because the universe appears to operate on principles that map very
well onto some parts of maths,
I think that's an illusion of selective attention. Remember how
Kepler thought the size of the planetary orbits were determined by
nesting the five Platonic solids. An impressive example of the
effective of mathematics - except it turned out there weren't just
five planets. Now we regard the orbits as historical accidents and
predicted by any mathematics. Instead we point to fact that they
obey Newton's law of universal gravitation to great accuracy.
Another impressive example of the effectiveness of
mathematics...except it's slight wrong and Einstein's spacetime
model works better.
and may even map exactly (we have no reason to think not - every
improvement in measurement so far indicates this,
Except when they don't.
but there will always of course be room for doubt - just room
that's been getting steadily smaller over the last few centuries).
But you haven't said why it does so. I may not agree with Bruno or
Max Tegmark, but at least they have a theory for why this
They have a theory for why THIS might be so no matter what THIS is.
You just have to find the right mathematics to describe it and
miracle of miracles the mathematics is obeyed!
Brent
might be so, and I haven't seen any definitive demonstration of
mistakes in their theories as yet (there are lots of suggestions
that may become definitive with more work, of course).
So far, your answer to the question of the "unreasonable
effectiveness" of maths is basically "It works that way because it
works that way, I can't explain it - but trust me, it isn't worth
explaining."
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