4 ms·

I think it’s mostly a case of the drunk looking for his keys under the lamp post because that’s where the light is. We have no idea how much there is to know a

I think it’s mostly a case of the drunk looking for his keys under the lamp post because that’s where the light is. We have no idea how much there is to know about reality. We do know how to describe some parts with mathematics, but who knows how much there is out there which is not possible to describe with mathematics. We may just be discovering infinitesimally small part ls of reality which math happens to describe well.

MaximumYComb 7y ago
Math is a description of our reality. If we discovered something that math couldn't explain we'd expand math to explain it.
- ses1984 7y ago
  How does that square with something like godel's incompleteness therom?
  - 613style 7y ago
    Don't confuse the terrain with the map. The formal systems which underly mathematics describing the universe are incomplete (containing true but unprovable statements), but that is not a statement about the universe.
    - ses1984 7y ago
      I'm not sure I see the point. Or rather, I see The tautology. We discover something math can't explain. By definition, you can't expand math to explain it. You can try, and if you succeed you were wrong all along, in that your discovery could have been explained by math you just couldn't prove it at the time.
      - lidHanteyk 7y ago
        That's not exactly what Gödelian incompleteness means; it means that there are gaps within each formal system. Arithmetic is still there, beyond reality, beyond each formal system's ability to describe in full.
      - ska 7y ago
        That's not what Godel showed.
- disconcision 7y ago
  We know about lots of things that math doesn't explain. AFAICT there are reasonable information-theoretic grounds for suspecting that many if not most things we might want to ask about won't yield the the kind of explanations we find satisfying. Irreducible complexity is a thing, at least apparently, and among documented phenomena there is a spectrum of amenability to formal modelling. Statements expositing an 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics' or TFA's aesthetic rendition don't seem to amount to more than 'some phenomena admit simple explanations'. Much more often the best effective mathematical explanation is a lukewarm admixture of awkward cludges, or is simply non-existent.

MaximumYComb 7y ago

Math is a description of our reality. If we discovered something that math couldn't explain we'd expand math to explain it.

ses1984 7y ago
How does that square with something like godel's incompleteness therom?
- 613style 7y ago
  Don't confuse the terrain with the map. The formal systems which underly mathematics describing the universe are incomplete (containing true but unprovable statements), but that is not a statement about the universe.
  - ses1984 7y ago
    I'm not sure I see the point. Or rather, I see The tautology. We discover something math can't explain. By definition, you can't expand math to explain it. You can try, and if you succeed you were wrong all along, in that your discovery could have been explained by math you just couldn't prove it at the time.
    - lidHanteyk 7y ago
      That's not exactly what Gödelian incompleteness means; it means that there are gaps within each formal system. Arithmetic is still there, beyond reality, beyond each formal system's ability to describe in full.
    - ska 7y ago
      That's not what Godel showed.
disconcision 7y ago
We know about lots of things that math doesn't explain. AFAICT there are reasonable information-theoretic grounds for suspecting that many if not most things we might want to ask about won't yield the the kind of explanations we find satisfying. Irreducible complexity is a thing, at least apparently, and among documented phenomena there is a spectrum of amenability to formal modelling. Statements expositing an 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics' or TFA's aesthetic rendition don't seem to amount to more than 'some phenomena admit simple explanations'. Much more often the best effective mathematical explanation is a lukewarm admixture of awkward cludges, or is simply non-existent.