You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

torekp comments on Pluralistic Existence in Many Many-Worlds - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Neotenic 12 March 2013 02:18AM

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

Comments (30)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: torekp 15 May 2016 03:45:11PM *  1 point [-]

Let's start with an example: my length-in-meters, along the major axis, rounded to the nearest integer, is 2. In this statement "2", "rounded to nearest integer", and "major axis" are clearly mathematical; while "length-in-meters" and "my (me)" are not obviously mathematical. The question is how to cash out these terms or properties into mathematics.

We could try to find a mathematical feature that defines "length-in-meters", but how is that supposed to work? We could talk about the distance light travels in 1 / 299,792,458 seconds, but now we've introduced both "seconds" and "light". The problem (if you consider non-mathematical language a problem) just seems to be getting worse.

Additionally, if every apparently non-mathematical concept is just disguised mathematics, then for any given real world object, there is a mathematical structure that maps to that object and no other object. That seems implausible. Possibly analogous, in some way I can't put my finger on: the Ugly Duckling theorem.