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[Travis B.]

this is exactly what i mean when i say dualism depends on an inversion: math is a thing people do, and does change: what doesn't change is what math is describing, namely the motions of planets etcetera etcetera, that is to say, reality qua such. the planets don't move around the way they do because of math, but rather, the math is how it is because the planets move like they do, and because we mean what we mean by the numbers we use and whatnot. it is we who come up with physical laws to describe how reality operates, they're maps, and so it is a mistake to ask "well, since reality operates governed by these laws, the laws must be prior to the universe itself, where did they come from?" they're not prior to the universe, and they came from us. this is why i don't find useful to posit imaginary things and then use them to prove things, as happens with the kalam ontological argument and stuff like that.

Note, though, that there has been quite a few occasions (e.g. tests of relativity) in which we predicted the math first and only confirmed that physics precisely matches the math from observation later. If math were only an imperfect human representation of the world and did not have a special link to the workings of the universe, then one would not expect to be able to do this.

Math does not change regardless of whether you are doing it in your head, with a computer, or with an abacus. Math does not even need a human agent -- computers can readily do it completely independent of human intervention.

the bible is also the same whether you write it down on paper, wood or a pdf: does that mean the bible is also part of a dualistic realm of forms? how about the zompist bboard? presumably we agree we're both looking at the same forum, you in your computer and me in mine. and the times the board, the server has migrated from one computer to the next (which if it's hosted in some cloud presumably it does all the time) it keeps being the same board. all sorts of things operate with some degree of substrate-independence, that's not that remarkable or unique.

Yes.

[bradrn]

this is exactly what i mean when i say dualism depends on an inversion: math is a thing people do, and does change: what doesn't change is what math is describing, namely the motions of planets etcetera etcetera, that is to say, reality qua such. the planets don't move around the way they do because of math, but rather, the math is how it is because the planets move like they do, and because we mean what we mean by the numbers we use and whatnot. it is we who come up with physical laws to describe how reality operates, they're maps, and so it is a mistake to ask "well, since reality operates governed by these laws, the laws must be prior to the universe itself, where did they come from?" they're not prior to the universe, and they came from us. this is why i don't find useful to posit imaginary things and then use them to prove things, as happens with the kalam ontological argument and stuff like that.

Note, though, that there has been quite a few occasions (e.g. tests of relativity) in which we predicted the math first and only confirmed that physics precisely matches the math from observation later. If math were only an imperfect human representation of the world and did not have a special link to the workings of the universe, then one would not expect to be able to do this.

a.k.a. ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences’

[Torco]

this is exactly what i mean when i say dualism depends on an inversion: math is a thing people do, and does change: what doesn't change is what math is describing, namely the motions of planets etcetera etcetera, that is to say, reality qua such. the planets don't move around the way they do because of math, but rather, the math is how it is because the planets move like they do, and because we mean what we mean by the numbers we use and whatnot. it is we who come up with physical laws to describe how reality operates, they're maps, and so it is a mistake to ask "well, since reality operates governed by these laws, the laws must be prior to the universe itself, where did they come from?" they're not prior to the universe, and they came from us. this is why i don't find useful to posit imaginary things and then use them to prove things, as happens with the kalam ontological argument and stuff like that.

Note, though, that there has been quite a few occasions (e.g. tests of relativity) in which we predicted the math first and only confirmed that physics precisely matches the math from observation later. If math were only an imperfect human representation of the world and did not have a special link to the workings of the universe, then one would not expect to be able to do this.

why not though? this happens with a bunch of other areas of knowledge that aren't math: we predicted... i don't remember, was it neptune or uranus? because our model that described the motion of the planets had some systematic error that made sense if there were an additional planet, and dicho y hecho, they found an additional planet. we hypothesized that there probably was some half-dinosaur-half-bird kinda animal, and then we go and find archaeopterix. this kind of thing is common to knowledge, it doesn't make math special.

minor quibble: math is indeed only an imperfect human representation, but it does very much have a special link to the workings of the universe: we do it in order to capture certain regularities we observe in it after all. it's kinda cool that we can build mathematical entelechia and then sometimes we find a use for them, and probably suggests something neat about reality, but it seems more parsimonious to accept that as a brute fact than to go "oh, therefore there has to exist this whole nother realm of entities"

[Travis B.]

this is exactly what i mean when i say dualism depends on an inversion: math is a thing people do, and does change: what doesn't change is what math is describing, namely the motions of planets etcetera etcetera, that is to say, reality qua such. the planets don't move around the way they do because of math, but rather, the math is how it is because the planets move like they do, and because we mean what we mean by the numbers we use and whatnot. it is we who come up with physical laws to describe how reality operates, they're maps, and so it is a mistake to ask "well, since reality operates governed by these laws, the laws must be prior to the universe itself, where did they come from?" they're not prior to the universe, and they came from us. this is why i don't find useful to posit imaginary things and then use them to prove things, as happens with the kalam ontological argument and stuff like that.

Note, though, that there has been quite a few occasions (e.g. tests of relativity) in which we predicted the math first and only confirmed that physics precisely matches the math from observation later. If math were only an imperfect human representation of the world and did not have a special link to the workings of the universe, then one would not expect to be able to do this.

why not though? this happens with a bunch of other areas of knowledge that aren't math: we predicted... i don't remember, was it neptune or uranus? because our model that described the motion of the planets had some systematic error that made sense if there were an additional planet, and dicho y hecho, they found an additional planet. we hypothesized that there probably was some half-dinosaur-half-bird kinda animal, and then we go and find archaeopterix. this kind of thing is common to knowledge, it doesn't make math special.

minor quibble: math is indeed only an imperfect human representation, but it does very much have a special link to the workings of the universe: we do it in order to capture certain regularities we observe in it after all. it's kinda cool that we can build mathematical entelechia and then sometimes we find a use for them, and probably suggests something neat about reality, but it seems more parsimonious to accept that as a brute fact than to go "oh, therefore there has to exist this whole nother realm of entities"

It goes beyond this, though, because in many cases there are mathematical concepts that were dreamed up by mathematicians simply because they thought the concepts were cute, and then later they were pressed into the service of hypotheses of physics, and then later than that these hypotheses, based on what were originally just mathematical toys of sorts, were demonstrated to be entirely accurate. If there was not something special about mathematics these concepts would have remained what they originally were, i.e. mere toys.

[alice]

Amusingly, it's possible to simulate electronics using gears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrkiJZKJfpY

Ha!!! That led me to this, which is just begging for a conlang equivalent in which you put phonemes in at the top and get words, inflection tables, and so on out at the bottom.

[Torco]

It goes beyond this, though, because in many cases there are mathematical concepts that were dreamed up by mathematicians simply because they thought the concepts were cute, and then later they were pressed into the service of hypotheses of physics, and then later than that these hypotheses, based on what were originally just mathematical toys of sorts, were demonstrated to be entirely accurate. If there was not something special about mathematics these concepts would have remained what they originally were, i.e. mere toys

but in non-dualism math doesn't have to be a mere toy, it's more natural to conceptualize it as a tool, and tools can be dreamed up before a use case is found for them without them being a form to access like a transcendental realm: i don't know if this has happened but it's perfectly possible that people can dream up, say, a type of roof truss simply cause they think it'd be cute, and then someone else can go "omg that's exactly what I need for this one niche application"... lasers started up as kind of a pure science thing, if i remember correctly. and wasn't there a buckminsterfuller architect person that came up with geodesic domes just for the fun of it? now there's people living inside them (though i'm not sure that's such a hot idea, i like my walls straight but to each his own, they're labour intensive to build but light and low on material costs). tools don't care what they're for , they do what they do and are what they are such that we can find uses for them even if they were created as pure intellectual exercises.

[bradrn]

Even within pure mathematics it’s interesting how often people find peculiarly deep and beautiful connections between concepts which at first seemed completely unrelated: e.g. the modularity theorem (between number theory and algebraic geometry). I don’t believe anyone really knows what to make of such things as yet.

[zompist]

I guess you really really want to reduce everything to matter and energy and somehow deduce all of epistemology from that.

guilty, yeah, i'm biased towards naturalism. but not just matter and energy, space and time and stuff like that as well, but yeah, i kinda want to keep my system lean and hopefully clean of outlandish things like an entirely different realm where self-existing forms drink from the light of the pure idea of good or stuff. plus, material reality you can see and touch and operate on, they show themselves to us. possible worlds and realms of forms only appear to us through speculations, thorough language, through phrases like "it must then be the case than" and like... i don't know, people used to say that obviously orbits have to be perfect circles, cause it is the purer form and how can the sky not be pure? these things, they only appear in the map, see, so it's probably the painter's brushmarks, rather than real features of the territory.

I think your view is just as much an idealistic abstraction as the one you're parodying. "Matter and energy, space and time" is an invented abstraction, and the declaration that nothing else exists is pure ideology. "Material reality you can see and touch and operate on"— you are a 3-pound mass of tofu-like meat suspended in a bony prison and you cannot see or touch anything. Yes, there are nerves coming in, but you are not seeing with light in your skull. Yes, there are nerves going out, but for 2000 years philosophers have been trying to tell you (and all of us) that our brains are easily fooled, and yet they are all we have. We don't see "reality" directly. We infer it; to a large extent we construct it.

The web of byzantine mechanical connections, plus suppositions, inductions, deductions, and broad theories between your brain and your picture of "matter and energy, space and time" is dizzyingly large and worrisome. Yeah, you hope (as we all do) that the picture is reasonably accurate, but you're simply pretending that you know it's real, indeed more real than the web of reasoning that makes you think it's there.

Brains are fallible, but "reasoning exists" is a lot more directly supported and observable than "quarks exist".

I grant that our knowledge is incomplete and will always be, but i don't think that's a problem. no more than it's a problem that you can't, i dunno, find the last digit of pi.

Oh, that one is easy. There are many algorithms for calculating pi. Make a machine that calculates each digit in half the time as the last and displays the last digit calculated. Say the first digit takes half an hour; the machine shows 3. Next one, 1/4 hour; the machine displays 1. This is a converging infinite series, so the machine will be done after precisely one hour. The machine then shows you the last digit of pi.

(Not my example; this comes from Labyrinths of Reason by William Poundstone.)

[Ahzoh]

Well, it looks like my mum has (early stage) breast cancer. It seems there is not a year where misfortune does not befall those I love.

[Travis B.]

Well, it looks like my mum has (early stage) breast cancer. It seems there is not a year where misfortune does not befall those I love.

Sorry to hear that. At least it was caught early, if that's anything.

[Torco]

Well, it looks like my mum has (early stage) breast cancer. It seems there is not a year where misfortune does not befall those I love.

maan, that sucks, sorry to hear it. at least it's early stage, and breast cancers tend to have better prognosis than other sorts. an aunt got it a few years ago and, though the process was pretty unpleasant, the sorts of chemo they use today are less harmful than some older ones and now she's okay, hopefully it will be like that for your mum.

"Matter and energy, space and time" is an invented abstraction...

yes, yes, matter, energy, everything that we can say or think about is an entelechy, a concept, something we come up with. the dao that can be talked about is not the real dao and all that, but that doesn't mean we get carte blanche to posit and believe in any and all entelechies we can come up with. or at least, i don't give myself such carte blanche: if we're gonna do the solipsistic uberskeptical thing then I'm not even a brain in anything, brains are as conceptual as space, time, or real mathematical objects in the realm of forms. all i can say for sure from your recently-turned-solipsistic perspective is that experiences feel like something and that my experiences are somewhat random but seem at least to some degree influenced by what i perceive to be my actions, I can't even say that there is an I experiencing them or acting those actions. the buddhists have an interesting epistemology that stems from this point, but I find it useful and clarifying to assume some things, such as that you and this board and the computer i'm sitting on exist, and that the plastic little keys i'm touching with what i take to be my fingers will not turn into rainbow-feathered gods and spawn a trillion little tadpoles in the next few seconds.

this doesn't override the desirability of keeping one's ontology clean of unnecesary things. there's a lot of reason to think experiences and reasoning exist, but there's very little to believe that they're not functions of material things: outside the uberskeptical realm, only brains seem to think, and only matter arranged in very just-so ways seem to be able to do math and so on, so we conclude that those things are a function that matter, arranged just-so, is performing. there's a lot of convincing reasons to think material things exist, not so much with the realm of real mathematical entities that aren't material, especially because of the map-territory inversion i'm talking about.

[xxx]

mathematics, which are visions of the mind,
only offers a quantitative view of the world,
when theorists create models that more or less fit their observations,
and then a technical view,
when engineers use them for entirely human constructions...

however, these constructions hardly satisfy
the most human aspect of our being:
the meaning of it all, the part that drives us to chase a truth,
we imagine we find outside of our language,
of which formal languages ​​are only a subset and cannot provide it...

language remains our most precious tool
for understanding the world and its truth...
conlanging, another subset,
is even closer to the truth that is most personal to us,
provided we persevere...

[WeepingElf]

Well, it looks like my mum has (early stage) breast cancer. It seems there is not a year where misfortune does not befall those I love.

Sorry to hear that. Puts the mildly bad day I had today in perspective...

[Ahzoh]

It's not aggressive but caused by hormones, so my mum might have to be put on hormone blockers for 5-10 years. Which is gonna worsen issues she was having that she hoped to resolve with hormone therapy. Also gonna make her gain weight which she already tryna lose and is having problems with.

Also I can tell she resents me for not having a full driver's license to drive her around places because someone will have to drive her around. Grandma offered so Grandma gonna come down here, but no doubt I can sense the resentment.

[zompist]

"Matter and energy, space and time" is an invented abstraction...

yes, yes, matter, energy, everything that we can say or think about is an entelechy, a concept, something we come up with. the dao that can be talked about is not the real dao and all that, but that doesn't mean we get carte blanche to posit and believe in any and all entelechies we can come up with. or at least, i don't give myself such carte blanche: if we're gonna do the solipsistic uberskeptical thing then I'm not even a brain in anything, brains are as conceptual as space, time, or real mathematical objects in the realm of forms. all i can say for sure from your recently-turned-solipsistic perspective is that experiences feel like something and that my experiences are somewhat random but seem at least to some degree influenced by what i perceive to be my actions, I can't even say that there is an I experiencing them or acting those actions. the buddhists have an interesting epistemology that stems from this point, but I find it useful and clarifying to assume some things, such as that you and this board and the computer i'm sitting on exist, and that the plastic little keys i'm touching with what i take to be my fingers will not turn into rainbow-feathered gods and spawn a trillion little tadpoles in the next few seconds.

Ah yes, Samuel Johnson's response to Berkeleyan idealism: he kicks a rock and declares "I refute it thus." I don't agree with either party there, but all Johnson did there was possibly hurt his foot. What you call solipsism is what I'd call philosophy, or neuroscience... you can't get a much grimmer view of the brain than by reading people who study it. For everyday life, sure, we all ignore philosophy. But we're not indulging in everyday life here, we're talking about the nature of reality, and you just can't refute philosophy by saying "hurr durr when I kick a rock I feel it, therefore my entire ideology is true."

Despite your insinuations, I'm not an idealist— my view of the world and science is pretty close to yours. I just think you reify this huge mass of assumptions and simplifications and grand theories into a Single Reality you can use as a stick to beat up other theories, and that's a bit silly. Also not as interesting as what we actually find out there. Really, read up on quantum theory, why we think there are quarks though they can't be observed, why determinism is impossible, the absolute refusal of QM to supply a model of how it works— it's fascinating stuff and does not at all support Johnsonian rock-kicking.

this doesn't override the desirability of keeping one's ontology clean of unnecesary things. there's a lot of reason to think experiences and reasoning exist,

They're the only things that we can be sure do exist, and the only things that allow you to construct your uber-materialist worldview.

but there's very little to believe that they're not functions of material things

Well, we haven't budged on the basic point and probably never will. Travis has already made the point that programs, like reason, use silicon as a substrate but that just about any substrate will do. You can use reason to establish the existence of quarks; you can't use quarks to establish how reason works.

Your uber-materialism is about 2000 years out of date. We're not positing Eternal Forms; there is no god of math or reason; numbers are not creatures living in a special world. I think it's you that is imagining unseen and unnecessary processes: somehow electrons and spacetime produce pi. It doesn't seem different to me than the Indiana legislature attempting, back in 1897, to define pi as 3.2. Good enough for government work, I guess! But we don't derive pi from measuring things made of electrons to increasing levels of precision.

[Torco]

What you call solipsism is what I'd call philosophy, or neuroscience... you can't get a much grimmer view of the brain than by reading people who study it. For everyday life, sure, we all ignore philosophy. But we're not indulging in everyday life here, we're talking about the nature of reality, and you just can't refute philosophy by saying "hurr durr when I kick a rock I feel it, therefore my entire ideology is true."

solipsism is *an* philosophy, but it is not philosophy itself. plenty of philosophy, Hume's for instance, does the rock-kicking thing, and plenty of philosophers don't enjoy this distinction of "for everyday life i believe X, for philosophy i believe Y". I agree that we have better evidence for experiences existing than we have for the material world, but i'm not saying they don't exist, i'm saying they look like one is a function of the other. sure, the cartesian demon might be manipulating my mind into believing in rocks that can be kicked, like

They're the only things that we can be sure do exist, and the only things that allow you to construct your uber-materialist worldview.

who knows right? maybe i don't construct it, maybe it's fed into me by the demon. but if so, he could be manipulating all of our minds into figuring that pi is not what it actually is, as well. i prefer to just bite the bullet and take that risk.

Also i'm not beating other theories with sticks that may or may not exist: dualism and idealism are interesting theories which, i mean, i don't buy, but they're not dumb either: you'll remember this started as travis going "i'm not dualistic, i just believe in real mathematical objects", to which i replied "seems dualistic to me", and then he asked "but how do you reconcile this and that" and i proceeded to outline my view. I'm just saying if you believe in real abstractions, that's kinda dualistic, and also that as far as i reckon it's not strictly necessary to posit them.

our uber-materialism is about 2000 years out of date. We're not positing Eternal Forms; there is no god of math or reason; numbers are not creatures living in a special world. I think it's you that is imagining unseen and unnecessary processes: somehow electrons and spacetime produce pi.

since pi is not a Thing, there's no way that they produce it. more like, pi is what is it because of some feature of spacetime or of what we mean by pi or some combination thereof: i gran that it's not a great explanation, but neither is "since pi is the same for circles of any materiality, there must be a Pi that exists independently of material reality"

[Travis B.]

Also i'm not beating other theories with sticks that may or may not exist: dualism and idealism are interesting theories which, i mean, i don't buy, but they're not dumb either: you'll remember this started as travis going "i'm not dualistic, i just believe in real mathematical objects", to which i replied "seems dualistic to me", and then he asked "but how do you reconcile this and that" and i proceeded to outline my view. I'm just saying if you believe in real abstractions, that's kinda dualistic, and also that as far as i reckon it's not strictly necessary to posit them.

There are multiple different kinds of dualism, and I reject Cartesian mind-body dualism because it posits the mind as being a special quantity divorced from the physical substrate (and if this is true, how do you explain the ability of psychoactive substances, part of the physical world, to influence the conscious mind?).

our uber-materialism is about 2000 years out of date. We're not positing Eternal Forms; there is no god of math or reason; numbers are not creatures living in a special world. I think it's you that is imagining unseen and unnecessary processes: somehow electrons and spacetime produce pi.

since pi is not a Thing, there's no way that they produce it. more like, pi is what is it because of some feature of spacetime or of what we mean by pi or some combination thereof: i gran that it's not a great explanation, but neither is "since pi is the same for circles of any materiality, there must be a Pi that exists independently of material reality"

That's just a special case of what we've been saying all along!

[Torco]

That's just a special case of what we've been saying all along!

what is, the "since pi is the same for circles of any materiality, there must be a Pi that exists independently of material reality" or the "pi is what is it because of some feature of spacetime or of what we mean by pi or some combination thereof" ?

[Travis B.]

That's just a special case of what we've been saying all along!

what is, the "since pi is the same for circles of any materiality, there must be a Pi that exists independently of material reality" or the "pi is what is it because of some feature of spacetime or of what we mean by pi or some combination thereof" ?

"since pi is the same for circles of any materiality, there must be a Pi that exists independently of material reality"

[Torco]

does that apply to all things that function more or less independently of substrate? for example, doom, which can run on -in principle- a computer made out of anything? is there a Doom that exists independently of material reality?

now if we found a Doom that can run on no material substrate, then that'd make me a dualist, since that'd be really independent of substrate, as opposed to merely.... promiscuous? i mean accepting various substrates