Torco wrote: ↑Thu May 07, 2026 5:00 pm
i agree that pi is a concept from physics. because it is a concept, it was conceived. i also agree that "something in the material universe must be causing it" leads obviously to the question "okay what", which man, i don't know. I can tell you the thing with parallels has to do with spacetime being flat, or flat enough, but i don't know if pi would be different for different shapes of space.
Thanks for being honest about the "I don't know". To me "I don't know" should also lead to "I could be wrong", but whatevs. I'd note that math is well aware of non-Euclidean geometries and handles them just fine.
what i am not doing is begging the question: i posit that abstracts are functions of matter because of a series of reasons, though of course they're all inductive. i've given them but since you say i'm begging the question, i mustn't have communicated them effectively. i'll list them here, along with some new ones.
I do thank you for making an effort to answer. I hope you recall that induction is famously not a proof and easily goes wrong— again, a reason to not be so certain in your proclamations.
these immaterial-but-real mathematical objects have no physical properties, location, or any of those things. how do they then interact or impinge on the material? how's Doom determine the functioning of the particular arrangement of magnetized iron filings [or whatever they are] in my hard drive that make up my copy of doom.exe.
You're only confusing yourself by pretending that mathematics is supposed to be made of souls, or enforced by demons, or something. Travis and I are computer people, and that is a far better place to start. How is it that a deterministic computer calculates things correctly, and responds to the real world? Why doesn't it just give the random, meaningless behaviors caused by the molecules composing it, like a gas or a rock? Why does your character in Doom move the way you tell it to, not the way the computer wants it to?
Well, I can't give you a whole course in electronic engineering; all I can say is that you
can make a machine that runs an abstract algorithm correctly (on multiple substrates), does math correctly, responds to user input or other real-world data correctly. And it remains absolutely deterministic. We can explain every step, if you like, at the level of voltages and atoms. We just don't, because it's completely irrelevant. We explain the behavior at the algorithmic level.
That's good news for programmers, but also for philosophers, because it's a model for how brains can do
at least the same thing. A lot of the worries of philosophers (we're completely controlled by our own brain states!) turn out not to preclude correct reasoning, knowing about the world, etc. If computers can actually calculate pi correctly, so can humans.
(Two big caveats. Computers are deterministic, the universe is not. If quantum weirdness made your computer behave differently, we'd consider it a glitch. And: neither computers nor brains are guaranteed to respond to world data correctly; they can be fooled.)
Edit: I'm purposely using words like "correct" and "true", because math is not a matter of being approximate, or just "useful" but somehow wrong. We don't want the computer, adding two numbers, to come up with one that makes us feel good, or makes the elite happy, or is holy, or pretty. We want the right answer, the mathematical one. I feel like that should be obvious, but you keep talking about math as if it's some sort of cultural tool that doesn't actually reflect reality. That's as much of a weird, unnatural supposition as invoking gods.
on that line, what does it even mean for an immaterial actual thing to exist? i know what it means for a cigarrette to exist: i pick it up, i see it, i look away and look back and there it is, i smoke it and it smells and tastes a certain way, it has weight, blabla.
Sure, things made of matter on a human scale behave a certain way. These intuitions have to be thrown out when you're dealing with the atomic scale. Problem of induction again: electrons are not cigarettes. You can't pick up a quark; photons have no mass; you can't touch a neutrino. Pi isn't a cigarette either, and I don't know why you'd expect it to be.
Math does have at least one of the traits you want: you look away and back and there it is. You can deny it exists, define pi as 3.2, call it names like "solipsistic" and hope it's some kind of approximation or cultural artifact and yet pi continues to be pi, still exists in all the equations needed by physicists, is the same here and in China and in Andromeda. Other posited entities, like God or vital spirit, turn out not to be necessary, aren't rigorously defined, can't be measured or calculated, don't appear in physical equations. One set of concepts— math and logic— is not merely useful but we can't do any science without it. The other turns out to be unnecessary. Pretending that they're the same is just rhetoric.
because mathematics makes no reference to observable objects, that is to say, because it is substrate-independent, it's not arrived at through observation but through reasoning alone. this suggests it's a fictive entity based on manipulation of symbols, not an observation of what happens to things in reality: it's useful, but it's not *about* anything in particular, so it's more correct to say that it works than that it is true, in a way.
Sure, when something works, that's a good reason to throw it out. Since we need it, it must not be real! Do you apply this logic to anything else in the universe?
More gently, I'll freely admit that why math works so well in physics is a mystery. And this is inductive too: so far we've never run into a problem of physics that math can't solve, or where math is wrong. It gets more complicated, but that in itself doesn't seem surprising: the universe is pretty complex, there's no a priori reason that we should be able to use arithmetic alone.
Ironically, your uber-materialist worldview is something you can maintain
only because math is so fundamental to the universe. It's easy to
imagine a much more whimsical universe, one where demons and godlings, or even lumps of matter, behaved as they want, lawlessly. It's the world of magic, folklore, and primitive theology. If we actually lived in that world, math wouldn't work to describe the universe. But hey, it turns out we don't.
(Another caveat: relativity means that, strictly speaking, there are parts of the universe we can never reach or investigate. We can't
prove that physics works the same way there. As I've said many times, we can't know everything.)
would the math of the andromedans then be quite different? possibly. i mean, i'd expect it to still work, but it probably wouldn't be the same. is ours the true one? is theirs?
No, it's the same. 2 + 2 = 4 is true in Andromeda too; pi is still the ratio of circumference to diameter. Their quantum mechanics looks just like ours.
If you think differently, go work out a different math for them. I like conworlding projects, but I don't think this one is possible. You can only have 2 + 2 = 1,721 by not thinking it through, or mislabeling things, or making a mistake somewhere.
Obviously the
understanding of math differs over time, just as science does. At some point we didn't have calculus, or irrational numbers, or Hamiltonians, or non-Euclidean geometry.
I hope you understand that "physics is the same all over" is a
basic assumption of science; it also happens to be compatible with everything we know. If you want to deny it and create local bubbles of different physics, have a party but know that you're venturing into crank-land. (If it turns out there are anomalies... we'll deal with them when we find them. Scientists
love anomalies, it's where new physics is found.)
if i'm wrong about call i call the map-territory inversion [that is to say, if the universe works how it does because math is what it is, instead of math being what it is because the universe woks how it does] then we'd expect the universe to match math very closely. instead, what we see is that none of the mathematical entelechia we find useful, that is to say, that work, actually match things in reality: in reality, in the reality i live in at least, there are no points, no straight lines, no spheres, just things that kiiinda look like circles and lines if you squint hard enough.
Do they not have lasers in Chile? Do cameras and lenses not work? Are the equations for electron clouds different there?
Every time you want to appeal to material reality, it's a cigarette or a heap of sand or something. You're not Plato, limited to the stuff he could see in his study. Your intuitions about physical objects are
wrong, because they're limited to everyday things. When your expectations about quarks and neutrinos are wrong, I can't put any faith in your expectations about pi.