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RobbBB 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: 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'.