Eugine_Nier comments on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism - Less Wrong

51 Post author: ChrisHallquist 01 March 2014 08:52AM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 May 2014 07:55:07PM 0 points [-]

People could imagine such a thing before studying nature showed they needed to; they just didn't. I think there's a difference between a concept that people only don't imagine, and a concept that people can't imagine.

In the interest of not having this discussion degenerate into an argument about what "could" means, I would like to point out that your and hen's only evidence that you couldn't imagine a world that doesn't run on math is that you haven't.

Comment author: private_messaging 03 May 2014 08:17:17PM *  2 points [-]

For one thing, "math" trivially happens to run on world, and corresponds to what happens when you have a chain of interactions. Specifically to how one chain of physical interactions (apples being eaten for example) combined with another that looks dissimilar (a binary adder) ends up with conclusion that apples were counted correctly, or how the difference in count between the two processes of counting (none) corresponds to another dissimilar process (the reasoning behind binary arithmetic).

As long as there's any correspondences at all between different physical processes, you'll be able to kind of imagine that world runs on world arranged differently, and so it would appear that world "runs on math".

If we were to discover some new laws of physics that were producing incalculable outcomes, we would just utilize those laws in some sort of computer and co-opt them as part of "math", substituting processes for equivalent processes. That's how we came up with math in the first place.

edit: to summarize, I think "the world runs on math" is a really confused way to look at how world relates to the practice of mathematics inside of it. I can perfectly well say that the world doesn't run on math any more than the radio waves are transmitted by mechanical aether made of gears, springs, and weights, and have exact same expectations about everything.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 04 May 2014 01:56:09PM *  1 point [-]

"There is non trivial subset of maths whish describes physical law" might be better way of stating it

Comment author: private_messaging 05 May 2014 03:50:09AM *  1 point [-]

It seems to me that as long as there's anything that is describable in the loosest sense, that would be taken to be true.

I mean, look at this, some people believe literally that our universe is a "mathematical object", what ever that means (tegmarkery), and we haven't even got a candidate TOE that works.

edit: I think the issue is that Morpheus confuses "made of gears" with "predictable by gears". Time is not made of gears, and neither are astronomical objects, but a clock is very useful nonetheless.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 05 May 2014 09:50:56PM 1 point [-]

I don't see why "describable" would necessarily imply "describable mathematically". I can imagine a qualia only universe,and I can imagine the ability describe qualia. As things stand, there are a number of things that can't be described mathematically

Comment author: dthunt 05 May 2014 10:00:43PM 0 points [-]

Example?

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 05 May 2014 11:38:45PM 1 point [-]

Qualia, the passage of time, symbol grounding..