This quote from the post Beautiful Math seems to take a position of "math is in part pre-existing (at least those that involve physics) but Platonia write large is illusionary." It's written in 2008 and EY doesn't seem to have changed his mind in the interim.
Stars are mine. EDIT: Erm Italics. Damn sorta reddit markup while also having some differences!
http://lesswrong.com/lw/mq/beautiful_math/:
"The joy of mathematics is inventing mathematical objects, and then noticing that the mathematical objects that you just created have all sorts of wonderful properties that you never intentionally built into them. It is like building a toaster and then realizing that your invention also, for some unexplained reason, acts as a rocket jetpack and MP3 player.
Numbers, according to our best guess at history, have been invented and reinvented over the course of time. (Apparently some artifacts from 30,000 BC have marks cut that look suspiciously like tally marks.) But I doubt that a single one of the human beings who invented counting visualized the employment they would provide to generations of mathematicians. Or the excitement that would someday surround Fermat's Last Theorem, or the factoring problem in RSA cryptography... and yet these are as implicit in the definition of the natural numbers, as are the first and second difference tables implicit in the sequence of squares.
This is what creates the impression of a mathematical universe that is "out there" in Platonia, a universe which humans are exploring rather than creating. Our definitions teleport us to various locations in Platonia, but we don't create the surrounding environment. It seems this way, at least, because we don't remember creating all the wonderful things we find. The inventors of the natural numbers teleported to Countingland, but did not create it, and later mathematicians spent centuries exploring Countingland and discovering all sorts of things no one in 30,000 BC could begin to imagine.
To say that human beings "invented numbers" - or invented the structure implicit in numbers - seems like claiming that Neil Armstrong hand-crafted the Moon. The universe existed before there were any sentient beings to observe it, which implies that physics preceded physicists. This is a puzzle, I know; but if you claim the physicists came first, it is even more confusing because instantiating a physicist takes quite a lot of physics. Physics involves math, so math - or at least that portion of math which is contained in physics - must have preceded mathematicians. Otherwise, there would have no structured universe running long enough for innumerate organisms to evolve for the billions of years required to produce mathematicians."
I don't think that physics existed before humans; physical law did. Physics is the study of physical law, just as math is the study of mathematical objects and systems of laws that are obeyed by those objects. Thus I wouldn't say that math existed before intelligent life, but nathenatical objects did.
I recognize the title could be more informative. At the same time I believe it says what is important.
I believe in a deity, I believe in mathematical entities in the same way.
The community of LessWrong (from whenceforth: LessWrong) is deeply interesting to me, appearing as a semi-organized atheist, reductionist community.
LessWrong seems very interested in promoting rationality, which I applaud. The effort does seem scattered, though, and this is the reason I post.
One has Eliezer's website with some interesting posts. The same of this community. The community links to some posts when you are coming for the first time into it, and you also have a filter for top posts. One has the blog. And recently, the center for modern rationality (in the same page as harrypoter fanfiction about rationality).
The point being there is no defined roadmap to go from AIC (average irrational chump to make an analogy to Game - which also seems to come up around quite a bit) to RA (again, rationality artist).
I write this post as to maybe generate a discussion on how the efforts could be concentrated and a new direction taken.
Should the creation of the Center for Modern Rationality envision this same concentration, this post may and should be disregard.
If it does not, then I leave it to your consideration.
Hang.