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endoself comments on What do professional philosophers believe, and why? - Less Wrong Discussion

31 Post author: RobbBB 01 May 2013 02:40PM

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Comment author: endoself 01 May 2013 06:56:51PM 0 points [-]

If I understand this correctly, I disagree. Modern philosophical platonism means different things by 'abstract' than Tegmark's platonism. In philosophical platonism, I accept your definition that something is abstract if it is causally inert and non-spatiotemporal. For Tegmark, this doesn't really make sense though, since the universe is causal in the same sense that a mathematical model of a dynamical system is causal, and it is spatiotemporal in the same sense that the mathematical concept of Minkowski spacetime is spatiotemporal, since the universe is just (approximately) a dynamical system on (approximately) Minkowski spacetime. The usual definition of an abstract object implies that physical, spatiotemporal objects are not abstract, which contradicts the MUH. I don't think we really have a precise definition of abstract object that makes sense in Tegmark's platonism, since something like 'mathematical structure' is obviously imprecise.

Comment author: RobbBB 02 May 2013 03:16:28AM *  0 points [-]

For Tegmark, this doesn't really make sense though, since the universe is causal in the same sense that a mathematical model of a dynamical system is causal, and it is spatiotemporal in the same sense that the mathematical concept of Minkowski spacetime is spatiotemporal

I don't think that means that abstract objects in the ordinary sense don't make sense. It just means that he counts a lot of things as concrete that most people might think of as abstract. We don't need a definition of 'mathematical structure' for present purposes, just mathematically precise definitions of 'causal' and 'spatiotemporal'.