On 31 Aug 2016, at 22:10, Brent Meeker wrote:
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Some thoughts about MATH MYSTERY or lack thereof in an Aeon 1600
word essay
He concludes:
<<I feel confident in saying that, yes, there is something mysterious
about math – but the main thing that’s mysterious is why there isn’t
even more mystery than there is.>>
Nice.
An answer is that when we point on the mystery, we are burned alive,
not by the skeptic, but by those who don't want to doubt in the
fundamental domain, that is: the believer in the current "established
authority". The believer in the universal theory: "the boss is right".
An early, at the platonist time, sense of the word "mathematician",
was "skeptical that the visible is the reality".
That is, those having the idea that the physical reality might only be
a symptom of a deeper non visible reality, like mathematics, or the
mind of God or something.
The original debate of the greeks (and indians, chinese, ...) was not
about the existence of God, which was just trivial for them, but on
the Material Universe.
With computationalism, in some sense, we don't need more than the
arithmetical reality, and actually, we can assume only the sigma_1
arithmetical reality (the computable), although such statements, when
formalized are machine's "blaspheme" (they belong to the true but not
assertable (obeying G* minus G).
That reality, or equivalent (in the Church-Turing sense) contains, or
emulates, or realizes all universal machines' relative dreams and
experiences, and when a universal machine introspects itself enough,
the whole reality, from inside, lost control if only because the
machine discovers something more convincing than any possible talk-
theories made by any possible other machines.
That is why religion get institutionalized: to prevent the mystical
search, which is eminently personal, and oppose quickly itself to all
arguments per authority (as used by nature all the times, not just the
humans).
The early mathematics was secret.
Today we 'know' that (assuming computationalism, I insist) there is a
sort of secret part. It is the part axiomatized by G* minus G, and its
many intensional variants. Physics is the 1p-visible part of a larger
reality 1p-reality.
Note the cognitive "Skolem paradox": the 1p-arithmetical reality is
*far* bigger than the tiny 3p arithmetical reality which makes it (the
1p-reality) exists.
But then, is not the size of the Universe just a question in our head?
Or the last talk in fashion by finite numbers of amoebas when they got
the cable (neurons)?
What is more mysterious? A star in a sky? or a man seeing or dreaming
about a star in a sky?
I think Scott Aaronson might still slightly be blinded by
(unconscious?) physicalist prejudices. The text is too short to really
conclude though.
Bruno
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