Reality is mathematics / Mathematics is reality ?

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Write4U, Nov 27, 2018.

  1. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Can you answer me these two questions;
    a) Did the current universe evolve from pure chaos?
    b) Is the current universe more orderly than it is chaotic?
    c) What will be the ultimate state of the universe, orderly or chaotic?
     
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  3. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mathematical.html

    I can relate to this "learned mind". It makes sense, logically speaking, and Logic is an inherently mathematical function. It's abstract but answers to Occam, no?

    At another level David Bohm accounted for Determinism by introducing "local variables", the variables affecting the mathematics of the phenomenon. It's a physically evolutionary pattern.

    IMO, the most important question to ask the for origins (mathematical permissions/restrictions) which allow for mutations or "random variables". Quantum uncertainty?
     
    Last edited: Nov 28, 2018
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  5. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    From the bowels of MIT,
    —Prof. Brian Greene, physicist, author of The Elegant Universe and The Hidden Reality

    figure out what it all means. Here's how I've organized the book:

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    http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mathematical.html
    http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/pdf/nature_review.pdf

    David Bohm: Insight Intelligence
    Max Tegmark: Mathematical self-reference
     
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  7. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    I don't think anyone disagrees with this.

    What it has to do with the thread topic, I can't imagine.
     
  8. river

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    The thing about mathematics is , it can prove anything .

    And really has very little understanding of our Cosmos , our Universe .
     
  9. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Patterns?
     
  10. river

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    Sure patterns

    Which means ?
     
  11. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Watch the Tegmark clip , he is the expert. And nothing "magical".

    If you know what you are observing you can analyze and use the information contained in the patterns.

    And perhaps shed light on the possible expression of "free will".
     
  12. river

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    The expert ...what post#

    Is that not what our ansesters were doing , tracking , hunting , for instance , a pattern of behaviour ? It is
     
  13. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    None of those links provide any thing that resembles a proper response to the question.

    even using Tegmark is irrelevant to the question.
    try again..
     
    Last edited: Nov 28, 2018
  14. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    Sometimes a small detour can provide insight.
     
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  15. river

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    Indeed Quantum Quack , Indeed

    The detour never ends
     
  16. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    To the symphony of life no one has the score.
     
  17. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    That's a completely subjective assessment.
    Change the word "obeys the laws" and replace it with "follows the laws", and your argument does not hold because it is a symantic argument about the same universal mathematical function.
     
  18. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Patterns are not abstractions. They are concretely observable from atomic to cosmic patterns of behavior and their inherent mathematical potentials.
     
    Last edited: Nov 28, 2018
  19. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    Matter doesn't follow anything.
    It is not just semantics.
    It is reification.
    Most learned persons know this and use language accordingly.
     
  20. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Why cite the worst when for the same effort the best is also available for edification on Youtube.

    We don't complain that the internet itself has trash strewn all around. But we can try to use it with appropriate selectivity and like the overall objectively creative aspects.
     
  21. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    You really need to study up on the Pilot Wave theory which is deterministic in that all matter follows a physical guiding equation.
    Well, all I can say that the deBroglie-Bohm Pilot wave theory is pretty cool.
     
    Last edited: Nov 28, 2018
  22. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, indeed, the first scientific observations were of patterns and especially recurring patterns, by which we have structured our entire existence at both secular and spiritual levels.

    But perhaps you see "patterns" as a restrictive term, it isn't. All physical and metaphysical things are types of patterns. Except for chaos there are only patterns and even within chaos one may find patterns.

    Tegmark shows two beetles of the same brood, one dead, the other alive. He asks what is the difference between these beetles? ....?......
    There is no difference at all. It is just that the same components in the dead and live beetle are arranged in different molecular and atomic patterns, yielding one dead beetle and one live beetle.

    Living things have their constituent parts arranged in such patterns as to yield a living organism. When the constituent parts are rearranged into different patterns, the organism dies or gets ill or becomes disfigured. What is mutation but a rearrangement of the DNA pattern?

    This is really a new perspective for me and would guess to many others as well.
     
    Last edited: Nov 29, 2018
  23. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I do think that your fixation on mathematical metaphysics is a little obsessive, W4U. I realize that it excites you and I think that's great. But it doesn't excite me nearly as much. I find it interesting, but excessively speculative and a little fanciful. It isn't the Secret of the Universe in my estimation.

    I don't think that you are a nut. You seem to me to be an enthusiast, somebody excited by an idea who wants to run with it. I like that.

    The thing is, you omit the qualifiers that accompany your 'established scientists' speculations.

    Tegmark includes helpful little status descriptions of his chapters.

    He doesn't provide a status for chapter 1, "What is Reality?", despite it being the biggest question that one can possibly ask. (Way too big for one chapter.) He doesn't give us a scientific status for that one, probably because it isn't science at all. I'd say that what follows isn't really science either, it's philosophy. There's nothing wrong with that, I love philosophy and am an old philosophy major. It's what I studied in university.

    But we should recognize the book for what it is. It's metaphysics. Most of the most interesting problems that Sciforums loves to argue about, from scientific method, to the religion/science and pseudoscience/science distinctions, to this thread's determinism/free-will argument, aren't really scientific arguments at all. They dive deeper than science. They go into the kind of things that science presupposes in order to do whatever it is that science does. (Another question.) You like chewing on the 'what is mathematics?' and 'what is mathematics' relation to the rest of reality?' questions. (Science assumes things about those too.) So Tegmark is doing useful philosophical work by highlighting the issue.

    After addressing "what is reality" in chapter 1, Tegmark goes into a little account of cosmology that he labels 'mainstream', before veering off into material that he himself correctly labels 'controversial' or 'extremely controversial'. The latter. including the "reality is math" idea, would seem to simply be his own speculations.

    We see more and more of this these days, the science bookshelves at many bookstores are filled with "theoretical physicists" telling everyone else what Reality really is. I find many of their ideas fascinating and very good, but the hubris gets annoying after a while.

    My own view is that the Mathematics is Reality idea is widely held among theoretical physicists, though many of them wouldn't exactly admit to believing it. In my opinion it might be an artifact of how theoretical physicists are trained. From their earliest undergraduate years, physical problems are solved by scrawling mathematics on chalkboards. If you want to know something, go to the math. (We saw that with how RPenner used to behave here on Sciforums, whenever physical questions arose, a blizzard of mathematical hieroglyphs would follow that supposedly settled everything.) So the idea probably naturally follows that the equations must somehow be prior to to the physical reality that supposedly (in their belief system) must conform to the mathematics. Turn the crank and Tegmark's mathematical metaphysics plops out like a turd.



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    Last edited: Nov 29, 2018

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