On 18 Jun 2015, at 22:45, John Mikes wrote:
Bruno wrote:
Do you assume a physical reality, or are you agnostic on this
question?
I do believe in a natural or physical reality, but I am agnostic if
it needs to be assume and thus involved primitive element, or if
what we take as a physical universe is a (collective) experience of
numbers that we can derive from arithmetic (as it seems to be
necessarily the case once we bet that brains are Turing emulable (I
am agnostic on this, but not on the fact that if the brain is Turing
emulable then the physical is an emergent pattern in the mind of the
(relative) numbers).
Hard to follow the summersaults of your concepts. I was waiting for
some 'mathematical' reality as well. To "LIVE" in this universe I
have to accept some scientific conclusions of the little info we so
far absorbed (observed?) from a wider infinite Nature. That does not
mean "I ASSUME". I may use it.
Turing - as I think - was a human person so T-emulable is human
conclusion.
It is a human theory. That does not make it necessarily wrong. That's
why we can be agnostic on this, and try to derive the consequence and
compare with the rest of our beliefs.
Again you seem to have circumwent the 'physical experience that we
can derive from arithmetic" vs. "arithmetic, for which we learned a
lot from Nature".
I don't think arithmetic just jumped out from the human mind as
Pallas Athene from the head of Zeuss. In full armor. Integers,
Primes or else. We know a nice history how "zero" was invented and
so on after the Romans with their decimal(pentagonal?) system.
Invented or discovered?
I don't think human can invent zero. They can learn it from nature,
but I doubt that nature would even exist without the number zero
making some sense.
Our agnosticism may be different (I stress the so far unknown and
maybe even unknowable infinite complexity of the Entirety as
potentially influencing our (known/knowable) world as the basis of
"MY" agnosticism. Beyond that I try to comply with the World as we
humans may know it by now).
We never know as such, except opur consciousness, which is not on the
public domain.
But it happens that some belief can be true. Today, we accumalate
evidence that nature is not fundamentally real, and that the nature
that we see arise from dreams statistics.
That might be false, or true, but that is enough to remain agnostic on
naturalism and physicalism. The least I try to do is to illustrate
that we don't know what is the case.
Bruno
JM
On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 3:59 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 17 Jun 2015, at 22:11, John Mikes wrote:
Bruno: to describe what OTHERS did does not mean (in my vocabulary)
that "I KNOW (agree?) the same domain as it was handled. I 'know' (or
may know) the efforts to derive science by human scientists.
Does NATURE have regularities indeed? or our scientific observation
assigns returning facets and calls them regularities as long as
they are not
contradicted? OK, maybe I should use "EVENTS" instead of
regularities.
And please do not make me a Straw-Man by repeating what I wrote.
Your sentence:
"Humans *might have learned a lot in mathematics by looking at
nature, but this does not prove that nature precedes logically
mathematics."
I have not included "logically" and may write: Q.e.D.
Do you assume a physical reality, or are you agnostic on this
question?
I do believe in a natural or physical reality, but I am agnostic if
it needs to be assume and thus involved primitive element, or if
what we take as a physical universe is a (collective) experience of
numbers that we can derive from arithmetic (as it seems to be
necessarily the case once we bet that brains are Turing emulable (I
am agnostic on this, but not on the fact that if the brain is Turing
emulable then the physical is an emergent pattern in the mind of the
(relative) numbers).
Bruno
On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 10:45 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
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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