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One thing this hypothesis has going for it, from a purely armchair metaphysics perspective, is that it gives some kind of answer to the question 'why does anyth

One thing this hypothesis has going for it, from a purely armchair metaphysics perspective, is that it gives some kind of answer to the question 'why does anything exist'. If mathematics (or the underlying 'thing' that math describes) is objectively true or real, then it could have a platonic existence by power of its own self reference. It also explains why all physical laws are mathematical and all physical properties are quantifiable ('mathematics is the language of the universe' as Galileo said). I still don't believe in it for several reasons. But I believe that it is the only logical conclusion of a purely materialist worldview.

ben_w 3y ago
> If mathematics (or the underlying 'thing' that math describes) is objectively true or real, then it could have a platonic existence by power of its own self reference. Indeed; I managed to independently arrive at this part of the idea, I think even before the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis was published. It's even more cognitively unstable than Boltzmann brains, but maths is also the only thing I can think of that doesn't need to be caused in order to exist. https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/mathematical-universe-v-boltzmann-brains/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/mathematica...
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  > maths is also the only thing I can think of that doesn't need to be caused in order to exist I never understood this line of argument. Plainly, there is something at the beginning of the universe (or an eternal existence in some other way) which doesn't need to be caused in order to exist. So then, why do we take this notion that everything needs to have a cause to exist as some kind of rule, when it is self-evidently broken?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    The argument is "only X has property Y, therefore this other thing of unknown nature with property Y must also be an X". Well, except for the bit where X is cognitively unstable, and also for the other bit where I don't seriously believe the fact that I personally can't imagine alternatives means they don't exist.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
From [0]: "Something like this view is defended by philosophers such as James Ladyman and Don Ross in their book 'Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized', and by the physicist Max Tegmark. I have a lot to say about Ladyman and Ross’s project in the forthcoming 'Aristotle’s Revenge'[1], all of it critical. Suffice it for present purposes to note that this sort of view essentially identifies the physical world with a kind of Platonic abstract object. Ladyman and Ross try to deal with this problem by denying that there is a clear distinction between abstract and concrete. As I argue in the book, this position is incoherent and the arguments for it are entirely question-begging. Moreover, even apart from that it doesn’t really solve the problem at all, because (as the Aristotelian would argue) Platonism itself essentially blurs the distinction between the abstract and the concrete. For a Platonic Form is characterized both as a universal (and hence as abstract) and as a substance (and hence as concrete). To blur the abstract/concrete distinction is to fall deeper into Platonism, rather than to avoid it." [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/01/materialism-subverts-itself.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/01/materialism-subvert... [1] https://a.co/d/6JNDiCH https://a.co/d/6JNDiCH
danbruc 3y ago
If mathematics (or the underlying 'thing' that math describes) is objectively true or real, then it could have a platonic existence by power of its own self reference. My response would be, that math is not true. It is build on top of logic, which is not universally true. x && !x == false, sounds right, doesn't it? In one place at one time it either rains or it does not rain. But this is, I would argue, an observed fact about our universe, not some universal truth. Imagine a different universe, something like the Everett multiverse where all possibilities actually happen and where the inhabitants of that universe experience all the different branches. For them it could be raining and not raining at the same time in the same place, their logic might say x && !x == true.
- codebolt 3y ago
  Would you agree that an alien civilization completely separate from humans but equally intelligent would also be likely to discover Pythagoras theorem (with a different name and different symbolics)? To me that would imply that its truth is independent of human perception.
  - disconcision 3y ago
    i don't find this argument convincing. it depends, at minimum, on bounding 'aliens' to mean something reasonably close to humans. if we allow aliens to be arbitrarily different, than i don't see a reason to bound their abstract symbolic technical development any more than arbitrarily distant to human development. otoh, if we assume that aliens are significantly similar to humans in some specific respects, then it seems likely to me that their technical development will also have substantial similarities, including but not limited to their abstract symbolic development. the space of abstractions seems large, and our particular path through it is historically contingent in both obvious and likely non-obvious ways; likewise for the formal inferential constructs which we use to parameterize this space
  - danbruc 3y ago
    Math and logic are fundamentally some kind of game, you make up some rules and axioms and then you figure out the consequences. So the interesting question is which rules and axioms you pick and I would guess aliens in our universe would pick similar rules and axioms as we did because they will want to describe the same universe. And they would probably discover the Pythagorean theorem. But in a different universe without space dimensions or multiple time dimensions or discrete space dimensions or something completely incomprehensible to us for which we do not even have concepts and words, there I am not sure that they would certainly come up with the axioms of Euclidean space and discover the Pythagorean theorem, or it might be a very esoteric mathematical structure to them at best. So it seems there is still something universal in there, the idea of inventing rules and axioms and figuring out the consequences, which could maybe essentially boil down to computations or something like that. But even there I am not so sure that it is truly universal, the original idea of a Turing machine is an abstraction of repeatedly modifying some state over time, and can we not imagine a universe where updating state over time makes no sense?

ben_w 3y ago

> If mathematics (or the underlying 'thing' that math describes) is objectively true or real, then it could have a platonic existence by power of its own self reference. Indeed; I managed to independently arrive at this part of the idea, I think even before the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis was published. It's even more cognitively unstable than Boltzmann brains, but maths is also the only thing I can think of that doesn't need to be caused in order to exist. https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/mathematical-universe-v-boltzmann-brains/ https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/mathematica...

tsimionescu 3y ago
> maths is also the only thing I can think of that doesn't need to be caused in order to exist I never understood this line of argument. Plainly, there is something at the beginning of the universe (or an eternal existence in some other way) which doesn't need to be caused in order to exist. So then, why do we take this notion that everything needs to have a cause to exist as some kind of rule, when it is self-evidently broken?
- ben_w 3y ago
  The argument is "only X has property Y, therefore this other thing of unknown nature with property Y must also be an X". Well, except for the bit where X is cognitively unstable, and also for the other bit where I don't seriously believe the fact that I personally can't imagine alternatives means they don't exist.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

From [0]: "Something like this view is defended by philosophers such as James Ladyman and Don Ross in their book 'Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized', and by the physicist Max Tegmark. I have a lot to say about Ladyman and Ross’s project in the forthcoming 'Aristotle’s Revenge'[1], all of it critical. Suffice it for present purposes to note that this sort of view essentially identifies the physical world with a kind of Platonic abstract object. Ladyman and Ross try to deal with this problem by denying that there is a clear distinction between abstract and concrete. As I argue in the book, this position is incoherent and the arguments for it are entirely question-begging. Moreover, even apart from that it doesn’t really solve the problem at all, because (as the Aristotelian would argue) Platonism itself essentially blurs the distinction between the abstract and the concrete. For a Platonic Form is characterized both as a universal (and hence as abstract) and as a substance (and hence as concrete). To blur the abstract/concrete distinction is to fall deeper into Platonism, rather than to avoid it." [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/01/materialism-subverts-itself.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/01/materialism-subvert... [1] https://a.co/d/6JNDiCH https://a.co/d/6JNDiCH

danbruc 3y ago

If mathematics (or the underlying 'thing' that math describes) is objectively true or real, then it could have a platonic existence by power of its own self reference. My response would be, that math is not true. It is build on top of logic, which is not universally true. x && !x == false, sounds right, doesn't it? In one place at one time it either rains or it does not rain. But this is, I would argue, an observed fact about our universe, not some universal truth. Imagine a different universe, something like the Everett multiverse where all possibilities actually happen and where the inhabitants of that universe experience all the different branches. For them it could be raining and not raining at the same time in the same place, their logic might say x && !x == true.

codebolt 3y ago
Would you agree that an alien civilization completely separate from humans but equally intelligent would also be likely to discover Pythagoras theorem (with a different name and different symbolics)? To me that would imply that its truth is independent of human perception.
- disconcision 3y ago
  i don't find this argument convincing. it depends, at minimum, on bounding 'aliens' to mean something reasonably close to humans. if we allow aliens to be arbitrarily different, than i don't see a reason to bound their abstract symbolic technical development any more than arbitrarily distant to human development. otoh, if we assume that aliens are significantly similar to humans in some specific respects, then it seems likely to me that their technical development will also have substantial similarities, including but not limited to their abstract symbolic development. the space of abstractions seems large, and our particular path through it is historically contingent in both obvious and likely non-obvious ways; likewise for the formal inferential constructs which we use to parameterize this space
- danbruc 3y ago
  Math and logic are fundamentally some kind of game, you make up some rules and axioms and then you figure out the consequences. So the interesting question is which rules and axioms you pick and I would guess aliens in our universe would pick similar rules and axioms as we did because they will want to describe the same universe. And they would probably discover the Pythagorean theorem. But in a different universe without space dimensions or multiple time dimensions or discrete space dimensions or something completely incomprehensible to us for which we do not even have concepts and words, there I am not sure that they would certainly come up with the axioms of Euclidean space and discover the Pythagorean theorem, or it might be a very esoteric mathematical structure to them at best. So it seems there is still something universal in there, the idea of inventing rules and axioms and figuring out the consequences, which could maybe essentially boil down to computations or something like that. But even there I am not so sure that it is truly universal, the original idea of a Turing machine is an abstraction of repeatedly modifying some state over time, and can we not imagine a universe where updating state over time makes no sense?