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Amanojack comments on The mathematical universe: the map that is the territory - Less Wrong
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Kharfa,
o You seem to be asserting anti-realism and trying to arrive at a correct ontology using an Aristotelian application of deductive logic. Would you like some help with that?
I'm not denying the reality of anything that you can show me. Please show me where "2+2=4" is or where it exists. Using that type of argument that things like this exist is like saying Santa Claus exists. That's possible, but we can't prove it or disprove it, and you can't show him to me. There's no point in discussing it. And, by the way, I don't need any help with that. Patronizing attitudes especially when not backed up by sound reasoning are of no interest to me.
o there's good evidence that minds are made out of math, instead of the contrary position.
Not disagreeing, but fleshing out part of what it seems you're trying to say:
Numbers don't exist, that much ought to be clear. I think Eliezer says that numbers are in our minds, and our minds exist, but this is not the case: it's not numbers that are in our minds but representations of numbers.
Mathematical Platonism is, to me, religion for intellectuals. Mathematicians as esteemed at Kurt Goedel have even gone so far as to postulate that mathematics exists in an alternate universe. This is a basic error or at least wildly unparsimonious, akin to saying that modus ponens exists in an alternate universe.
To see how silly this is, it helps to realize that a sufficiently intelligent being would find all our mathematical theorems just alternative ways of stating the axioms, and all our mathematics just axioms and definitions with a bunch of obvious rephrases of the same. It would find our most advanced theorems as simple and obvious as modus ponens is to us - as just rewordings of the axioms and definitions.
From the perspective of a sufficiently intelligent being, mathematics is just a set of initial statements (axioms and definitions), along with humans' silly little demonstrations to help each other realize that a bunch rewordings of those statements (theorems) all mean the same thing.
From the perspective of a sufficiently intelligent being, physics is just a set of initial statements, along with a silly demonstration that history is what you get when you apply those statements over and over. How dull!
Amanojack,
One thing I've noticed that is probably covered somewhere in LW archive (I hope!) is that really smart and rational people can sometimes just be really good at hiding the truth from themselves. In other words, the smarter you are, the better you are at Dark Arts, and the easiest person to trick with Dark Arts is sometimes yourself.
[Heads up: your comments are displaying as one long line requiring side-scrolling instead of with natural line breaks.]