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This (the universe is 'made' of math) seems to me like the most egregious error in the general outlook of contemporary scientifically-minded people—and one I ma

This (the universe is 'made' of math) seems to me like the most egregious error in the general outlook of contemporary scientifically-minded people—and one I made myself for many years. If you really consider the issue closely, you'll see it depends on not overlooking certain dark corners of it which you can sort of ignore and assume to not contain contradictions—but they're there! And once you see them, it's hard to unsee them: what in the world would it mean for a desk to 'made' of mathematics—it's nonsensical. I think programmers are especially susceptible to this mistake because they're used to using mathematical descriptions to generate things, but even there, the idea that the math is doing any generating is a bias of our perspective since we're focused on the math; what's actually going on is a physical process involving silicon and plastic and metals etc., which can also be described mathematically, but the leap to being math is an unfounded step which could probably be predicted by the fact that that's where our focus lies. It also begins to look kind of silly when you consider how human math is: it's an outgrowth of an evolved mental faculty. Cognition is certainly impressive relative to the other things we and various animals are able to do—but it's probably still in the same category of our other faculties like the olfactory, visual, tactile etc.—and unlikely to be involved in the literal fabrication of the universe.

gfodor 9y ago
Have you read the paper or the author's book? Because you're distilling a rather rich and refined argument down to a simplistic description. The author doesn't argue the universe is "made" of math.
- westoncb 9y ago
  I read 75% of the article, until he'd made enough unfounded statements that there was no point continuing with his inferences from them. Also, his assertion is as simple as I've suggested, although I won't bother with a detailed rebuttal of it (I've dealt with several others, and generated my own in the past), largely because the blog my previous reply was about already handles that. Some excerpts from the article: > I advocate an extreme “shut-up-and-calculate” approach to physics, where our external physical reality is assumed to be purely mathematical. > Here, I will push this idea to its extreme and argue that our universe is not just described by mathematics — it is mathematics. > Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you. Here's one mistake he makes: he doesn't account for qualia, the fact that people have subjectivity. Here is the one sentence where he glosses over it: > In this example, the frog itself must consist of a thick bundle of pasta whose highly complex structure corresponds to particles that store and process information in a way that gives rise to the familiar sensation of self-awareness. This is a pretty big assumption to make: processing something gives rise to sensations? Just because the processing is mathematically describable, is the sensation also? What would the mathematical description of the experience of a fever chill look like? And what about the 'system' that carries out the transition from process to sensation? Could it even be called a 'system' or is it more on the order of the fever chill itself? Edit: I clarified a few things a couple minutes after posting.
  - gfodor 9y ago
    Thanks for clarifying your thoughts. I actually just finished Tegmarks new book Life 3.0, which touches on consciousness and qualia in the context of understanding AGI, and I think he'd actually argue that qualia is an "emergent property" of certain categories of information flow, much like waves are an emergent property of certain types of phenomena. I'm don't think that is a sufficient argument to explain subjective experience, but it's an interesting train of thought and would provide clearance for having his argument about a mathematical universe being consistent with qualia -- the qualia is an emergent property of information flow, several layers of abstraction detached from the underlying media of the multiverse. In other words, citing qualia as incompatible with the MUH would be much like citing waves as incompatible with the theory of atoms -- two totally different domains. Under this theory, you could arguably get qualia to emerge in other media, like a bunch of logic gates, without having anything to do with what those logic gates were composed of.
    - westoncb 9y ago
      Hey gfodor, I actually do agree with your line of thinking all the way up to and including logic gates with qualia—however, when you say: > I'm don't think that is a sufficient argument to explain subjective experience, —I have to agree with that, and I haven't seen anything which makes me think a better justification might be forthcoming (from anyone, not just Tegmark), so I kind of stop there. My personal view on it is that qualia/subjectivity are just what it's like to actually be a thing ('on the inside' is kind of an approximate way of saying it). Considering the sorts of things that go on in human subjectivity (this time referring to objects appearing in it, not the medium itself), I suppose it is what it's like to be the part of the reality where a human brain is (actually I think it's only certain parts of human brains, probably related to executive function). In that case, I think a bunch of logic cates linked together in certain ways could end up having interesting 'internal aspects' (of course 'interesting' here is human-relative: who's to say the the parts of reality comprising trees aren't internally more interesting in some objective measure? (not that I think there is an objective measure for that.) But I qualify the above as just how I guess that things are, not an assertion that it's really the case or anything.
naasking 9y ago
> If you really consider the issue closely, you'll see it depends on not overlooking certain dark corners of it which you can sort of ignore and assume to not contain contradictions—but they're there! And once you see them, it's hard to unsee them: what in the world would it mean for a desk to 'made' of mathematics—it's nonsensical. What does it really mean to "exist" at all? It's equally undefined. This question is either problematic for every metaphysics, or none of them. A desk is not "made" of mathematics any more than the words you're reading right now are "made" of electrons. What matters for existence is the relationships between mathematical structures. In this case, the relationship of your mind perceiving a desk is identical regardless of whether your mind and the desk are mathematical structures or some non-mathematical matter. And once you accept that isomorphism, it's an easy step to a type of Platonism/mathematical monism because it's so unproblematic as a philosophy of mathematics. And once you're there, you have the mathematical universe.
- westoncb 9y ago
  > What matters for existence is the relationships between mathematical structures. Well, that's what Structuralism is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism_(philosophy_of_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism_(philosophy_of_s... —but it would be running in circles to say that Structuralism is the correct approach here since it would only be the correct approach if the universe is in fact made of mathematics (in other words, it would be assuming your conclusion in your argument).
  - naasking 9y ago
    > (in other words, it would be assuming your conclusion in your argument). To be convincing, it's not necessary to claim that any particular position is definitely true, I should only need to demonstrate that said position solves open problems that have not or cannot be solved by other positions while being of comparable complexity, conceptually. This is indeed the case for something like the mathematical universe over naturalism. There may yet be a comprehensive, unproblematic account for mathematics in naturalism, but we certainly don't have it yet. That's a huge, gaping wound in our fundamental knowledge. The mathematical universe, by contrast, easily grounds mathematics and matter by encompassing both in the former.

gfodor 9y ago

Have you read the paper or the author's book? Because you're distilling a rather rich and refined argument down to a simplistic description. The author doesn't argue the universe is "made" of math.

westoncb 9y ago
I read 75% of the article, until he'd made enough unfounded statements that there was no point continuing with his inferences from them. Also, his assertion is as simple as I've suggested, although I won't bother with a detailed rebuttal of it (I've dealt with several others, and generated my own in the past), largely because the blog my previous reply was about already handles that. Some excerpts from the article: > I advocate an extreme “shut-up-and-calculate” approach to physics, where our external physical reality is assumed to be purely mathematical. > Here, I will push this idea to its extreme and argue that our universe is not just described by mathematics — it is mathematics. > Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you. Here's one mistake he makes: he doesn't account for qualia, the fact that people have subjectivity. Here is the one sentence where he glosses over it: > In this example, the frog itself must consist of a thick bundle of pasta whose highly complex structure corresponds to particles that store and process information in a way that gives rise to the familiar sensation of self-awareness. This is a pretty big assumption to make: processing something gives rise to sensations? Just because the processing is mathematically describable, is the sensation also? What would the mathematical description of the experience of a fever chill look like? And what about the 'system' that carries out the transition from process to sensation? Could it even be called a 'system' or is it more on the order of the fever chill itself? Edit: I clarified a few things a couple minutes after posting.
- gfodor 9y ago
  Thanks for clarifying your thoughts. I actually just finished Tegmarks new book Life 3.0, which touches on consciousness and qualia in the context of understanding AGI, and I think he'd actually argue that qualia is an "emergent property" of certain categories of information flow, much like waves are an emergent property of certain types of phenomena. I'm don't think that is a sufficient argument to explain subjective experience, but it's an interesting train of thought and would provide clearance for having his argument about a mathematical universe being consistent with qualia -- the qualia is an emergent property of information flow, several layers of abstraction detached from the underlying media of the multiverse. In other words, citing qualia as incompatible with the MUH would be much like citing waves as incompatible with the theory of atoms -- two totally different domains. Under this theory, you could arguably get qualia to emerge in other media, like a bunch of logic gates, without having anything to do with what those logic gates were composed of.
  - westoncb 9y ago
    Hey gfodor, I actually do agree with your line of thinking all the way up to and including logic gates with qualia—however, when you say: > I'm don't think that is a sufficient argument to explain subjective experience, —I have to agree with that, and I haven't seen anything which makes me think a better justification might be forthcoming (from anyone, not just Tegmark), so I kind of stop there. My personal view on it is that qualia/subjectivity are just what it's like to actually be a thing ('on the inside' is kind of an approximate way of saying it). Considering the sorts of things that go on in human subjectivity (this time referring to objects appearing in it, not the medium itself), I suppose it is what it's like to be the part of the reality where a human brain is (actually I think it's only certain parts of human brains, probably related to executive function). In that case, I think a bunch of logic cates linked together in certain ways could end up having interesting 'internal aspects' (of course 'interesting' here is human-relative: who's to say the the parts of reality comprising trees aren't internally more interesting in some objective measure? (not that I think there is an objective measure for that.) But I qualify the above as just how I guess that things are, not an assertion that it's really the case or anything.

naasking 9y ago

> If you really consider the issue closely, you'll see it depends on not overlooking certain dark corners of it which you can sort of ignore and assume to not contain contradictions—but they're there! And once you see them, it's hard to unsee them: what in the world would it mean for a desk to 'made' of mathematics—it's nonsensical. What does it really mean to "exist" at all? It's equally undefined. This question is either problematic for every metaphysics, or none of them. A desk is not "made" of mathematics any more than the words you're reading right now are "made" of electrons. What matters for existence is the relationships between mathematical structures. In this case, the relationship of your mind perceiving a desk is identical regardless of whether your mind and the desk are mathematical structures or some non-mathematical matter. And once you accept that isomorphism, it's an easy step to a type of Platonism/mathematical monism because it's so unproblematic as a philosophy of mathematics. And once you're there, you have the mathematical universe.

westoncb 9y ago
> What matters for existence is the relationships between mathematical structures. Well, that's what Structuralism is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism_(philosophy_of_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism_(philosophy_of_s... —but it would be running in circles to say that Structuralism is the correct approach here since it would only be the correct approach if the universe is in fact made of mathematics (in other words, it would be assuming your conclusion in your argument).
- naasking 9y ago
  > (in other words, it would be assuming your conclusion in your argument). To be convincing, it's not necessary to claim that any particular position is definitely true, I should only need to demonstrate that said position solves open problems that have not or cannot be solved by other positions while being of comparable complexity, conceptually. This is indeed the case for something like the mathematical universe over naturalism. There may yet be a comprehensive, unproblematic account for mathematics in naturalism, but we certainly don't have it yet. That's a huge, gaping wound in our fundamental knowledge. The mathematical universe, by contrast, easily grounds mathematics and matter by encompassing both in the former.