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It's an interesting opinion. And just like the concept of beauty that it mentions, it is subjective. Math is a human language, written and interpreted by human

It's an interesting opinion. And just like the concept of beauty that it mentions, it is subjective. Math is a human language, written and interpreted by humans. Without human interpretation, math means nothing, just like any other language. And just like any physical model. We cannot separate ourselves from nature, hence we cannot "truly" state anything about nature in an absolute sense, only relative to us. I wish physics (and math for that matter), were a little bit more like computer science, in which usually there's an "interpreting machine" (a lot of times a Turing machine), which in a way acts as the explicit observer of the system, without which the system just doesn't make sense (literally, as sense can only be given to something by an interpreting-observer).

mrfox321 7y ago
Aren't measurements of some natural system objective? We just convert/summarize these measurements to representations that facilitate, to humans, a better understanding of Nature.
- ta1234567890 7y ago
  Who performs the measurements? What instruments are used to perform those measurements? If there's someone or something performing the measurements, then they depend on that someone or something to interpret them. You are right that measurements and models facilitate a better human understanding of nature/ourselves. However, it is important to keep in mind that these things are maps, not the terrain.
  - mrfox321 7y ago
    A measurement can be the interaction between two sufficiently decoupled subsystems. But I don't really understand why there needs to be some "interpreter." Nature could be some computer/system that is minimizing Action over all possible trajectories. Humans attempt to communicate an approximation to this truth by writing down nonlinear differential equations.
    - ta1234567890 7y ago
      > But I don't really understand why there needs to be some "interpreter." More than there needing to be, it's just all we have. It's impossible for us to know what the universe without us is like. All of our knowledge has been gathered and interpreted by us. Maybe there is a reality that doesn't depend on us, but how could we ever know that? We cannot remove ourselves from our experiences, so how could we ever know what those experiences/reality would be like without us? How could you ever know what truth is, if there is no you to know it (or approximate it)?

mrfox321 7y ago

Aren't measurements of some natural system objective? We just convert/summarize these measurements to representations that facilitate, to humans, a better understanding of Nature.

ta1234567890 7y ago
Who performs the measurements? What instruments are used to perform those measurements? If there's someone or something performing the measurements, then they depend on that someone or something to interpret them. You are right that measurements and models facilitate a better human understanding of nature/ourselves. However, it is important to keep in mind that these things are maps, not the terrain.
- mrfox321 7y ago
  A measurement can be the interaction between two sufficiently decoupled subsystems. But I don't really understand why there needs to be some "interpreter." Nature could be some computer/system that is minimizing Action over all possible trajectories. Humans attempt to communicate an approximation to this truth by writing down nonlinear differential equations.
  - ta1234567890 7y ago
    > But I don't really understand why there needs to be some "interpreter." More than there needing to be, it's just all we have. It's impossible for us to know what the universe without us is like. All of our knowledge has been gathered and interpreted by us. Maybe there is a reality that doesn't depend on us, but how could we ever know that? We cannot remove ourselves from our experiences, so how could we ever know what those experiences/reality would be like without us? How could you ever know what truth is, if there is no you to know it (or approximate it)?