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Indeed, when I say life has no meaning, I don't mean that it is devoid of rules. Quite the contrary is true, since our modern life revolves around mathematics.
by scalio 10y ago
Indeed, when I say life has no meaning, I don't mean that it is devoid of rules. Quite the contrary is true, since our modern life revolves around mathematics. In that sense, the universe is exquisitely meaningful, it's full of mathematical meaning, but that's not massively useful for us humans trying to figure out how to spend our time.
- CuriouslyC 10y agoAt the small scale, the world is unpredictable. As the scale grows, for well behaved linear systems the law of large numbers kicks in, and you get predictable, mathematical behavior. For complex nonlinear systems, however, the unpredictability of the small scale can "propagate up" and render the system at the large scale completely unpredictable. Remember that mathematics is just a model, not the territory. For starters, you have incompleteness; for any formal system you can make true statements that are unprovable. Additionally, two constructs which are central to mathematical analysis, infinity and truth, don't exist. For hundreds of years epicycles were used to model the orbits of the planets. Now we're elevating grand theories that embed the universe in an 11-dimensional manifold.