Re: math, is it just physics? (just mathematics)

Op 29/01/2025 om 01:56 schreef Ross Finlayson:

On 01/28/2025 04:10 PM, sobriquet wrote:

Op 28/01/2025 om 23:46 schreef FromTheRafters:

sobriquet wrote :

We often hear claims that math has nothing to do with reality and is
just something that exists in our imagination or some platonic realm
of idealized forms.
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For instance in the intro to this recent yt contribution:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzuDSTamzrE
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On the other hand there seems to be mounting evidence that the
patterns in physics match up in intriguing ways with abstractions on
a conceptual level.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OxVsVUesSc
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So in a way one could claim that concepts like integers and their
properties and relationships can be more or less empirically observed
in the behavior and properties of things like elementary particles
such as electrons or fields.

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There's also this:
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https://math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html

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I'm learning german and french, so I ask chat gpt to pronounce every
sentence in english, german and french. It does so with a very strong
english accent. I tell it to get rid of the accent. it does so and it
sounds pretty good. However as soon as I paste the next paragraph, the
strong english accent is back. I remind it that I want it to pronounce
the text without an accent and it complies. However, as soon as I go
to the next paragraph, the strong accent returns.. AAARRRRggh!!!!

 I often say that a strong mathematical platonism arrives at
numbers are quite concrete and that there's a theory with
both a strong mathematical platonism, AND, a strong logicist
positivism, quite all scientific with an ontology for the
empiricist mind, yet still fundamentally founded by a continuous
thread of a theory of logical and mathematical truth.
  Consider something like Derrida on Husserl's pre-geometric
and pre-scientific world, with regards to why these quite
logicist-positivist minded thinkers have it very strongly
so that mathematics is always present, then also as with
regards to "the ubiquitous success of mathematics in physics".
 Then, the mathematical universe hypothesis of a sort,
also has that physics is just mathematics.
 

But we don't want to confuse the map with the territory.
It's a bit like arithmetic and the claim that computers are not really
doing arithmetic, since only biological organic beings like humans can do real arithmetic and computers are only simulating doing arithmetic, but they are not really doing arithmetic. So only a human actually is able to add 5 and 7 and produce the sum of 12 and if you use a calculator or computer, it looks like it's doing the same thing and it even comes up with the same result 12, but it's not really doing addition, just simulating the mental process of addition that only a human being can perform.
This seems a nonsense claim, but that is similar to nonsense claims that computers can't really be conscious or subjectively experience things, even if they end up with exactly the same results as a human claiming he's conscious and not a philosophical zombie like a computer that can only behave like it's conscious without actually being conscious or having a subjective experience. So what is the difference between simulating addition and actual addition if we end up with identical outputs for a given combination of inputs?
Can a simulation or model be identical to reality? I would say yes.
You can do a simulation of the formation of ice crystals with actual water as a model where you control the circumstances to simulate nature outside the laboratory. As opposed to doing a computational simulation of water with some kind of math that models certain aspects of water to explore the way water undergoes a phase change from liquid to solid.
In any case, if we unify math and physics, it would just be two sides
of the same coin.. so it's kind of like claiming everything is energy, since matter is just a form of energy or claiming that everything is matter, since energy is just a form of matter.
Regarding the unreasonable effectiveness of math in the natural sciences I would say.. well, you wouldn't have expected that, would ya? We abstract from reality to obtain math and lo and behold, the math is very suitable to model reality.