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I often entertain the idea that all the patterns we observe are merely things that match our capability of understanding. This could explain the "unreasonable e

I often entertain the idea that all the patterns we observe are merely things that match our capability of understanding. This could explain the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences". I have a similar but somewhat different take on this. The universe comes first, it behaves - for what ever reasons - in the way it does. Than we humans show up and invent logic, a set of rules that is useful to reason about our universe. It either rains or it doesn't makes sense in our universe. But the universe could potentially have been different, for example something like the many-worlds interpretation but where the inhabitants of that universe can experience all the branches. Their logic might say it rains and it doesn't. Other ideas like objects, properties, space, time, causation or countability might also be influenced by the way our universe works and how we perceive it and they might be far from universal or useful across different possible universes. On top of that we than construct mathematics and explore what all the things are that we can build from those ideas and our laws of logic. It should probably not be especially surprising that we can on the one hand construct things that are not realized in our universe and on the other hand find structures that are useful for describing and understanding our universe.

Nasrudith 3y ago
I suspect something opposite, that math comes before the universe because the universe needs math but math doesn't need the universe. Math only calls for internal consistency which radically does not depend upon the universe. It describe perfectly self-consistent realities that do not exist. Math could model say for instance a world of continuous matter as opposed to our mostly empty matter for instance. We have calculated numbers larger than the universe itself could render after all.
- smokel 3y ago
  I beg to differ. Math typically requires abstract thought, symbols, and humans to produce and enjoy it. Especially the latter is quite a dependency. We could reduce the requirements down to an implementation of a Turing machine, or something similar. (For the argument I simply ignore whether the machine is conscious -- that seems irrelevant in this context.) That still requires some kind of discrete switch, which may seem fairly minimal to a human observer, but in reality consists of tens of thousands of atoms to operate. Atoms used to be simple, but turn out to be quite complex as well. Representing, say, a circle in a fairly minimal system such as this would probably require the cooperation of millions of atoms.

Nasrudith 3y ago

I suspect something opposite, that math comes before the universe because the universe needs math but math doesn't need the universe. Math only calls for internal consistency which radically does not depend upon the universe. It describe perfectly self-consistent realities that do not exist. Math could model say for instance a world of continuous matter as opposed to our mostly empty matter for instance. We have calculated numbers larger than the universe itself could render after all.

smokel 3y ago
I beg to differ. Math typically requires abstract thought, symbols, and humans to produce and enjoy it. Especially the latter is quite a dependency. We could reduce the requirements down to an implementation of a Turing machine, or something similar. (For the argument I simply ignore whether the machine is conscious -- that seems irrelevant in this context.) That still requires some kind of discrete switch, which may seem fairly minimal to a human observer, but in reality consists of tens of thousands of atoms to operate. Atoms used to be simple, but turn out to be quite complex as well. Representing, say, a circle in a fairly minimal system such as this would probably require the cooperation of millions of atoms.