poke comments on Timeless Physics - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 May 2008 09:09AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (116)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: poke 28 May 2008 01:28:48AM 0 points [-]

I'm a huge fan of the general program of philosophical minimalism (i.e., doing away with epiphenomena). One of my favorite works in this respect is Hartry Field's Science Without Numbers. There's a long line of argument in philosophy for the reality of mathematical abstracta on the grounds of its indispensability to science. Field formulated a version of classical physics without numbers.