This goes with a long running discussion across many threads, but I didn’t want to insert into any of those. Sara Walker is sometimes poetic in her way of imparting complex ideas. I set this at 20 minutes, after a couple of minutes she answers a question about what’s fundamental to the universe.
She states that maths describing reality is a “problem” in physics. They eventually get to free will, asking if it’s true that we can describe an initial condition, then predict any detail that occurs from that. On the way, she points out we’ve been building abstractions, learning and unlearning, reframing, and that physics professors don’t usually point out that all the laws they teach come out of the human mind.
I listened for a while and lost interest, She makes simple things sound complicated and complicated things sound simple
For instance, she advances that no one knows why mathematics work.
We certainly do. Generic mathematical mechanics are based on logic and the universe must be a logical object. If it were illogical it would not, could not exist.
Note that I say “generic” mathematics that deal only with the axiomatic logical processing of relational values, regardless of the symbolisms used to codify these calculations for human consumption. Humans did not invent mathematics, we invented human mathematics.
Then she posits that reality is a product of the mind and that is clearly a limited interpretation of objective physics that exist independent of human observation.
As Anil Seth posits: we create “OUR” reality from the inside out as much as from the outside in. IOW, reality exists, it is our perception that is dependent on our observational abilities.
Just think; certain animals and insects experience a completely different aspect of reality than humans do. Just because we cannot observe or experience their reality does not mean it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist for us, but who are we?
Should we ask if we exist???
I didn’t get that. She said that the laws of physics are presented to students as if they simply “are”. An observant student might be aware of the history of how those laws were developed, but it’s not in core curriculums. So, I think she agrees that it’s our perception, our observations.
Yes, I am not arguing that. My quarrel is with the human element in any assessment of universal mechanics. The Universe acts in strict accordance with ITS own rules and obviously, those rules are of a generic mathematical (logical) nature. Else we would not be able to make sense of any of it at all.
I really cannot understand the objection to the concept that all things happen in an orderly fashion based on prevailing relational “values” being processed via one of the four fundamenta mathematical (logical) processing functions.
There is no replacement for any of it. What could you replace maths with that would be more accurate in predicting the future outcome of a current condition?
And as far as averages and statistics, they are purely based on mathematical models resting on past recurring events.
How many organisms display a circadian rhythm? That is caused by the mathematical regularity of environmental conditions which allowed for plants to evolve and use the natural life cycles to the greatest advantage.
Today’s chaos experienced in our weather patterns is a disturbance of the natural mathematical order that has prevailed for centuries.
But if I had to give the most simple answer to the OP question I would pick “an initial dynamic condition”. The chaos theory of regular patterns emerging from chaos rests on an initial dynamic condition with generic universal mathematics as the “guiding principle”.
Just ran across this really interesting lecture by Sabine Hossenfelder
I like the concept that the quasi-intelligent functions of the universe rest on the logical-mathematical processing of informational values, the inherent potentials contained in the fundamental elements that already show the result of mathematically guided self-organization of atoms and molecules.
9:50 Ouch! No mention that the impactor blew away our existing atmosphere.
10:42 Another ouch, most of those other possibilities, have been eliminated, this is science history, not current understanding. See Nick Lane’s video for details.
15:00 I’m disappointed she failed to take the time to point out there are two significantly different deep sea vent systems, that have the significant different implication for molecule evolutionrererty7u8090-=098-7065847362514w.
21:15 If the universe were “brimming with life” why haven’t we found hide nor hair? I know, I know, because there’s cosmic sized quantum jumps between simplest metabolic life, to complex eukaryotic life, to complex evolving creatures that can do more than simply process chemicals.
No surprise there
As for Hossenfelder’s video it was a summary
Using Life as a Guide to its Own Origins | Interview with Prof. Nick Lane
Prof. Nick Lane’s team, based in the UCL Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment (GEE) is tackling one of biology’s most fundamental questions: the origin of life. Many hypotheses have been formulated on life’s origins, however most of these postulate that the first biological molecules were formed through mechanisms that bear no resemblance to the ones used by cells today. To circumvent these problems, Prof. Lane’s team is using “life as a guide to its own origins, studying highly-conserved metabolic pathways to build a plausible scenario for the origin of life.”
Their research can be divided into three chronological steps:
Primary carbon fixation in hydrothermal-vent like conditions
Intermediary metabolism
The emergence of the biological information: patterns in the genetic code
Or if one wants more than a quick summary check out
Oct 28, 2022
HARVARD SCIENCE BOOK TALK
Nick Lane, in conversation with Logan McCarty
“Transformer : The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death”
What brings the Earth to life, and our own lives to an end?
For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of life. In Transformer, biochemist Nick Lane reveals a scientific renaissance that is hiding in plain sight ―how the same simple chemistry gives rise to life and causes our demise.
Lane is among the vanguard of researchers asking why the Krebs cycle, the “perfect circle” at the heart of metabolism, remains so elusive more than eighty years after its discovery. Transformer is Lane’s voyage, as a biochemist, to find the inner meaning of the Krebs cycle―and its reverse―why it is still spinning at the heart of life and death today.
Lane reveals the beautiful, violent world within our cells, where hydrogen atoms are stripped from the carbon skeletons of food and fed to the ravenous beast of oxygen. Yet this same cycle, spinning in reverse, also created the chemical building blocks that enabled the emergence of life on our planet. Now it does both. How can the same pathway create and destroy? What might our study of the Krebs cycle teach us about the mysteries of aging and the hardest problem of all, consciousness?
Transformer unites the story of our planet with the story of our cells―what makes us the way we are, and how it connects us to the origin of life. Enlivened by Lane’s talent for distilling and humanizing complex research, Transformer offers an essential read for anyone fascinated by biology’s great mysteries. Life is at root a chemical phenomenon: this is its deep logic.
The point you miss time and time again is that your viewpoint concerns the inside of the cave so to speak. It never seems to occur to you that there might be more to it than what our little pea brains can conceive. Generic “maths” might be a tool humans use, but those concepts in and of themselves came from pea brained upright monkeys.
And your thinking is the scientific equivalent (sort of) of Christians who conceive of their god as a super-duper human. The thing they miss is that their god didn’t create stuff in a big room, he made the possibility of the room itself, and the possibility of the “rules/maths” that govern it. He could have made the “rules/maths” any way he wanted, or no rules at all, just rolled the dice so to speak. You, like them, anthropomorphize everything, including the way you think about the world. Does that make science wrong? Absolutely not, it’s amazing and I truly believe it will bring humanity out of the dark ages one day. But that doesn’t mean the way us pea-brains develop technology is THE way the universe actually works.
No, this is where you are wrong. There is no evidence of a god. But there is evidence of mathematical processes everywhere existing long before humans made a mark to indicate 1
Mathematics are not sentient or intentional. Mathematics is the inherent set of geometric spacetime rules that govern how things interact. It is all basic on “logic”, not human logic, but universal logic as axioms which are testable and falsifiable.
This is why I use the term “quasi-intelligent” when I speak of universal mathematical interactive functions that guide all self-ordering processes.
quasi- combining form
seemingly; apparently but not really.
Humans have recognized these guiding principles and symbolized them with “human mathematics”. Cosmologists admit that when they prove a universal law (functional equation), that they are only discovering what was already in place long before man started asking questions.
And make no mistake, if all humans disappeared the universe would still operate in a generic mathematical manner, as it did long before humans appeared on the scene.
Nature used mathematical principles from the very instant after the BB. (see Chaos Theory).
I don’t know why you equate this with a religion. It is the way things are . You don’t see me pray, wishing that mathematics make 2 + 2 = 4. It does so regardless of any human symbolism.
No, that is a limited perspective. All you need is to see where the Fibonacci sequence (named after the guy who “discovered” it) shows up in the rest of nature and the universe.
This natural ordering sequencing guide can be found everywhere in growing flora, and in spiral galaxies, where natural selection selected for the most “efficient” use of available resources in accordance with extant universal “forces”.
E = Mc^2 is not a human invention, it is a human symbolic code for what exists in nature. Humans did not invent the atomic bomb. Nature did, just consider what causes a super-nova.
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics with the major subdisciplines of number theory,[1]algebra,[2]geometry,[1] and analysis,[3][4] respectively. There is no general consensus among mathematicians about a common definition for their academic discipline.
IMO, the academic discipline that addresses the universe at its most fundamental level is Cosmology. All string , quantum, gravitational, and geometric theories are subdisciplines of cosmology, the study of the universe in toto.
Most mathematical activity involves the discovery of properties of abstract objects and the use of pure reason to prove them. These objects consist of either abstractions from nature or—in modern mathematics—entities that are stipulated to have certain properties, called axioms. A proof consists of a succession of applications of deductive rules to already established results. These results include previously proved theorems, axioms, and—in case of abstraction from nature—some basic properties that are considered true starting points of the theory under consideration.[5]
I’d suggest it goes back to recognizing the inside of the cave.
You don’t hear god fearing people praying & wishing for a god, to them God is already as real as 2 x 2 = 4, even if, for me, God is clearly a figment of our individual and collective imagination.
But, this seems irrelevant, since because without such internal super consistency and fractal patterning, none of the universe we experience would be have been possible in the first place.
But, it’s still science, which is certainly a construct of the human mind. Yes, sure, distally that would be evolution and the universe , but still a creation of our limited, fallible, mortal mind.
Yes, I agree. The universe does not “know” science. It doesn’t need to know.
It can only do what is mathematically permissible and cannot do what is not mathematically permissible.
patterns emerging from chaos is not an intentional process. It is mathematical in essence.
Right, and we can only know what we humans can know.
And we ought to respect that boundary.
I think it’s about explicit awareness of our limitations,
and dawning awareness that we are nature, products of evolution,
evolved biological sensing creatures of the highest order of cognitive awareness.
yet intimately connected to the web of Earth’s complexity and history.
Ed Yong in his final chapter drives home the point that we humans are the first species that has been able to extend its awareness beyond its natural sensing abilities. That’s big! (but I gotta go to bed, pick it up later - good night)
Sorry, I think I’ll just stop responding to you, though I do enjoy your thoughts. You miss my point pretty much every time. I wasn’t comparing religion to science, I was using an analogy. And then each time I do this you I think don’t realize it’s an analogy so then you argue the wrong thing. Sort of like this: “The ocean, like an orange, has many seeds”, and your response is “The ocean does not have seeds, because seeds need dirt and fertilizer to grow.” which misses the point entirely. Oh well.
See there you go again…and this was the point of my earlier religious/scientific analogy. You think because humans latched onto something we call math (your generic math) that somehow the universe is bound by that, bound by what is “permissible”. “Permissible generic math” is just your anthropomorphic way of trying to not use human-generated concepts. In the same way the religious folks try to describe their god in ways that seem universal, but in fact, like you, are really just anthropomorphic ideas in disguise. The difference of course is that, luckily, science ideas for the most part work. Religious ones don’t.
[quote=“cuthbertj, post:13, topic:9489”]
See there you go again…and this was the point of my earlier religious/scientific analogy.
I see no analogy between science and religion at all.
I urge you to listen to this little but irrefutable argument by Ricky Gervais.
You think because humans latched onto something we call math (your generic math) that somehow the universe is bound by that, bound by what is “permissible”.
Humans latched onto mathematics because we “discovered” that it is all around us and can be described and used for physical causation in practice.
“Permissible generic math” is just your anthropomorphic way of trying to not use human-generated concepts. In the same way the religious folks try to describe their god in ways that seem universal, but in fact, like you, are really just anthropomorphic ideas in disguise.
No, it is my logical way of explaining why human-generated symbolic mathematics work. They accurately describe the way things work naturally.
When they don’t, it is the human-generated mathematics that are wrong, not the generic universal mathematics.
Everything in the universe has a generic “value”. Values interact in a mathematical manner. This is why certain actions are mathematically perrmitted and some actions are not.
Try to place 2 magnets together with their plus ends. It cannot be done. It is not permitted by universal (mathematical) laws.
OTOH, H2O has 3 emergent states (solid, liquid, gaseous), depending on environmental conditions. Note that both hydrogen and oxygen atoms are “dry”. Mix them in large quantities at room temperature and “wetness” emerges as a property over and above the properties of the parts.
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.
The argument of taking away all the books is not the one Cuthbert is making. At least I don’t think so. The analogy is that both are mysterious. Gervais says so at 3:15, that we want to make sense of nature and science, and he starts to describe a bit of scientific knowledge, but Colbert goes with the “you don’t know” argument, which isn’t an argument. Gervais doesn’t claim to know anything either, just that things are discoverable.
Gervais is also wrong that all the science would come back in a thousand years, but I’ll give him a pass on that because he was trying to get his point in before the commercial break. We don’t know what order discoveries would happen, what mythology would get in the way, what culture would discover zero, and how each discovery would affect the power dynamics. All of that would change the landscape of knowledge and the values that are attached to it.
