First, I am a hard atheist. There is nothing supernatural in the natural world.
Second, maps inform you about the terrain and features (properties) of the territory.
All human language is a map , all food recipes are maps, all instruction manuals are maps.
But logic and mathematical functions are not maps. They are inherent properties of spacetime, AKA “potential”.
Descriptive languages are the tools of maps. What that means is assigning symbolic values that allows for “knowledge” of the relational properties (the mechanics) under consideration.
Universal Logic is not a map, nor is it supernatural. It is a property of spacetime functions.
Generic mathematics is not a map, nor is it supernatural. Interactive mathematical values are a property of spacetime.
Human maths are the symbolic representation of natural interactive properties.
Space is an objective thing and that objective thing can be described with symbolic language based on subjective knowledge of the “object” and its inherent properties, What David Bohm called the “enfolded order”.
What we experience is part of the “unfolded order”/
The argument about maps and territories is just sophistry.
When you have an accurate map it will guide you to your destination by the shortest, most negotiable route.
With the new observational tools we can “see” what the map should look like, from the observable universe, all the way down to atomic structures, and represent that “knowledge” with descriptive symbolic languages.
Only religious metaphors are not maps and cannot be used to describe the actual territory and its properties.
That’s a basic human chauvinism or anthropomorphism. You can’t just declare that. Until we actually sit down with another being and “compare notes” that’s just a guess on your part. My guess is that your statement only appears to be correct because we are so limited in our understanding - i.e. we’re babies still.
As to supernatural, that’s a meaningless word. 1000 years ago probably half of modern technology would have appeared to be supernatural. That’s not to say anything goes, but it is to say we just don’t know what’s out there.
[quote=“cuthbertj, post:22, topic:10151”]
That’s a basic human chauvinism or anthropomorphism. You can’t just declare that. Until we actually sit down with another being and “compare notes” that’s just a guess on your part. My guess is that your statement only appears to be correct because we are so limited in our understanding - i.e. we’re babies still.
No we are not babies. That is assigning supernatural aspects. There is no divine “irreducible complexity”. Wherever we look we see generic forms of mathematics.
All great thinkers have asserted that mathematics is the language of the spacetime “geometry” and can be described with “chaos theory”.
I find it somewhat hypocritical to dismiss the greatest thinkers, because the term “mathematics” is a human symbolic description of a natural phenomenon.
The term mathematics does not negate or even approximates the actual state of affairs. It clarifies it. To assign a different form of dynamical mechanics is religion.
chaos theory
mathematics and mechanics
The study of apparently random or unpredictable behaviour in systems governed by deterministic laws. A more accurate term, deterministic chaos , suggests a paradox because it connects two notions that are familiar and commonly regarded as incompatible.
The first is that of randomness or unpredictability, as in the trajectory of a molecule in a gas or in the voting choice of a particular individual from out of a population. In conventional analyses, randomness was considered more apparent than real, arising from ignorance of the many causes at work. In other words, it was commonly believed that the world is unpredictable because it is complicated.
But except for the most abstract fundamentals (which we are still unable to observe) we do know what’s out there.
And now that we are able to look down at nanoscale mechanics and look up into the farthest reaches of space, we are getting a pretty good picture of the extant properties of reality itself.
Actually, the only thing that we are not clear about is the original causality of reality itself, but that is not required to unravel the state of affairs as they exist today.
We know that universal relational mechanics are of a generic mathematical nature. Human maths are the symbolic representations of that. This is how the notion of anthropomorphization comes about. But it is really the other way around. Mathematics is an abstract (emergent) property of spacetime physics. It is the “guiding principle” as defined by David Bohm.
The proof of this lies in the fact that all animals employ mathematics in their evolved adaption to their environment.
They are not anthromorphizing, they are practicing mathematics without being aware of this fact. Humans can anthropmorphize because we are aware of the mathematical nature of nature and how to purposefully manipulate the mathematical mechanics for our survival and convenience.
But if you look at the natural world, every species from insects to humans use mathematical techniques to cope with their natural environment.
And the reason that mathematics work is the fact that it is anexpression of inherent universal “logic” .
Logic and Mathematics
Philosopher Denis Bonnay on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”, logical inferences, and attempts to divide mathematics and logic
Logic and mathematics are two sister-disciplines, because logic is this very general theory of inference and reasoning, and inference and reasoning play a very big role in mathematics, because as mathematicians what we do is we prove theorems, and to do this we need to use logical principles and logical inferences.
If we just look at mathematical concepts, there is not enough in them to ground mathematical truths. He took a famous example: how do we know that 7+5=12?
And if you look at the concept of 7 and if you look at the concept of 5, and if you look at the concept of a sum of two numbers, then nothing is going to tell you that the sum equals 12. So you will have to produce, to generate the truth, for example, by counting on your fingers, and that would rely on some sort of intuition.>
The result of this was some sort of blurring of the lines between logic and mathematics, because in order to succeed we need to put axioms, principles in the logical systems which were not so logical anymore and which were a bit borderline themselves between logic and mathematics.
The problem of evil theists have is that they describe evil as that being against gods will, therefore whatever god wills, it is good. The problem now lies with this god being all powerful and all knowing and asking the theist could god have created a better world. If they say yes then there is a concession that this world is not perfect and the question of why didnt he create a better world must be answered and why would he create a world that goes against his will.
If they say no - what does that say about god being all powerful?
My point exactly. We may never know. But one thing we do know, is that no matter how you think it through, no matter how effective current physics appears to be, that doesn’t mean the way humans “do physics/math/logic” is THE way it’s done, or how the universe ultimately works. We’re like fish in a tank who don’t even know what they don’t know. My point of contention with write4u and others is this chauvinism that somehow humans are the standard, for all time, for everyplace in the universe.
write4u says he’s a hard atheist, hard line materialist. IMHO a better term would be unimaginative. I’m reminded of that fun scene in ST-NG, First Contact. Data and Picard are right next to Cochrane’s warp ship and they place their hands on it. Picard tells data about his boyhood memories, feelings, etc associated with the touching. Data OTOH rattles off some stats and analyses and says it’s no more real than before he touched it. That’s write4u and others. (though that’s not a bad way to be!)
Humans did not invent universal physics and mathematics. Nature did that long before man walked the earth.
Hence the term “Natura artis magistra” (nature is the teacher of arts (and science).
Humans do nothing more than observe and copy. Imagination only has its uses for implementing natural mechanics in accordance with natural mathematics.
Numbers and equations are useless in and of themselves. It is the application of natural generic values and generic mathematics that are useful in the real world.
To imagine mathematically unsound scenarios will always end in failure. It is only when the mathematics is done correctly that universal physical mechanics grant permission for successful application.
The Higgs boson cannot exist in our expressed reality. As soon as it is manifest it decays into simpler particles. It cannot be observed as an object.
Yet through the proper application of mathematical physics at Cern, the boson was created for an instant (on demand) and its momentary presence was observable .
New Higgs Boson Observations Reveal Clues on the Nature of Mass
For the first time the scientists have observed the famous Higgs boson, responsible for imparting mass, interacting with the heaviest particle in the universe
When scientists announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, it was a huge triumph for the Standard Model of particle physics, the leading theory of subatomic matter. The particle had been predicted to explain why other particles have mass. But finding this particle was not the end of its story—rather, it was a beginning. Additional measurements were needed to prove the particle scientists discovered was the same one predicted by the Standard Model and not something similar, but different. Furthermore, many details about how the Higgs works to bestow mass on other particles and why it has the properties it does remain mysterious.
Imagination is useless unless it is supported by sound physics and its mathematical mechanics. Moreover, what you seem to ignore is the fact that algebra is the most imaginative product of the human mind.
Algebra offers the perfect analogies for interactive universal relational mechanics.
All imaginary interactive scenarios must be based on this generic algebraic equation, or else it becomes religious fantasy.
In context of the OP, evil is that which is contrary to the laws of nature, and as far as we know only man can and does break the natural order and as is obvious today, is destined to “reap the wind” (imaginative analogy)
But science also needs imagination. I don’t think you can conceptualize this from only one of those perspectives. Einstein talked about this. It’s in the history of discovery. Without curiosity, without the freedom to explore, science would be what the thing that far-right conservatives say it is, an ivory tower that can’t be questioned. I know you don’t think that Write4U, so it makes it hard to understand what you are arguing for sometimes.
Yes, but most discoveries are accidental in the pursuit of some other research that follows sound science.
The point is that all natural patterns are based on some underlying ordering process This process always rests on some equation such as a “differential equation” or the mathematical equation contained in natural selection of the Fibonacci sequence as the “preferred” organizing guide in vertically growing organisms.
This is why we have the Platonic solids as the idealized versions of naturally occurring varieties on a theme (equation). This process is not restrictive in any sense other than that it must be logical in essence.
The assumption that mathematics is in any way restrictive to the imagination is completely misplaced. On the contrary, mathematics allows for the most exquisite physical expressions “imaginable”.
A most persuasive example can be found in fractal structures which are based on a very simple generic mathematical equation of say a triangular pattern.
Fractals are found all throughout nature. I believe the Fibonacci sequence produces a fractal pattern.
Electrons in bonding (left) and non-bonding (right) Sierpiński triangles; scale bar 2nm. (Figure: Kempkes et al., Nature Physics, 2018)
Electronic wavefunction
The results from the study show how bonding (left image) and non-bonding Sierpiński (right image) triangles are separated in energy, yielding nice opportunities for transmitting currents through these fractal structures. In the bonding case, the electrons are connected and can easily go from one place to another (high transmission), whereas in the non-bonding case they are not connected and need to “jump” to another place (low transmission). Also, by calculating the dimension of the electronic wavefunction, the researchers observed that the electrons themselves are confined to this dimension and the wavefunctions inherit this fractional dimension.
Interestingly there is an alternate quantum gravity spacetime model proposed by Renate Loll, et al.
CDT (causal dynamical triangulation)
Causal dynamical triangulation (abbreviated as CDT) theorized by Renate Loll, Jan Ambjørn and Jerzy Jurkiewicz, is an approach to quantum gravity that, like loop quantum gravity, is background independent.
> This means that it does not assume any pre-existing arena (dimensional space), but rather attempts to show how the spacetime fabric itself evolves.
There is evidence [1] that at large scales CDT approximates the familiar 4-dimensional spacetime, but shows spacetime to be 2-dimensional near the Planck scale, and reveals a fractal structure on slices of constant time. These interesting results agree with the findings of Lauscher and Reuter, who use an approach called Quantum Einstein Gravity, and with other recent theoretical work.
But none of that, not a single thing, is without curiosity first, and THAT does not come from an arrangement of atoms. You keep putting the math horse before the reality cart. The very concepts all those posts presume come from the mind first.
I truly understand how scary it can be that there’s something beneath and beyond our ability to know, but if you let your mind open a bit, get it out of the dirt so to speak, and look around mentally, not with a ruler, but with your unencumbered mind and imagination, you’ll start to see there’s more to things than what can be measured. That’s not to say science is bad. It’s the most wonderful tool we have, and I truly believe technology is the answer. But there’s more to the world than what it can address. It’s okay, put down the ruler, take a look - sometimes a rose actually IS more than just a rose!
No, that is looking at it from the human perspective.
The point is that an apparently logical order existed before curiosity made us investigate. During our investigation we found that the extant ordering processes can be represented with mathematical language.
Humans don’t invent reality, reality invented humans. And it could do so because there is a logical ordering process that creates regular patterns from chaos.
Chaos Theory
No, pick up a ruler and “measure”. You will find that there is a logical order to the universe that can be decribed with symbolic mathematics.
Human symbols represent the generic relational values that permeate the spacetime geometry. That is what lies beyond the obvious.
It is remarkable that in a dynamic environment where everything is in motion, durable patterns can emerge, revealing an underlying guiding process.
If you do away with universal mathematics, there is only chaos, which is the original state before it began ordering itself, a process that is ongoing.
First-order patterning transitions on a sphere as a route to cell morphology Maxim O. Lavrentovicha, Eric M. Horsleya, Asja Radjaa, Alison M. Sweeneya, and Randall D. Kamiena,1a
Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104
We propose a general theory for surface patterning in many different biological systems, including mite and insect cuticles, pollen grains, fungal spores, and insect eggs. The patterns of interest are often intricate and diverse, yet an individual pattern is robustly reproducible by a single species and a similar set of developmental stages produces a variety of patterns.
We argue that the pattern diversity and reproducibility may be explained by interpreting the pattern development as a first-order phase transition to a spatially modulated phase. Brazovskii showed that for such transitions on a flat, infinite sheet, the patterns are uniform striped or hexagonal. Biological objects, however, have a finite extent and offer different topologies, such as the spherical surfaces of pollen grains. We consider Brazovskii transitions on spheres and show that the patterns have a richer phenomenology than simple stripes or hexagons.
We calculate the free energy difference between the unpatterned state and the many possible patterned phases, taking into account fluctuations and the system’s finite size. The proliferation of variety on a sphere may be understood as a consequence of topology, which forces defects into perfectly ordered phases. The defects are then accommodated in different ways. We also argue that the first-order character of the transition is responsible for the reproducibility and robustness of the pattern formation.
It is clear that human observation is not causal to pattern formation but instead is measuring the extent of ordering taking place.
In a gravitational environment, evolution by natural selection eventually results in an adaption to environmental stresses that can be analyzed and represented with mathematics. It turns out that almost everything we see follows a fixed pattern organization that results in an approximation of an ideal pattern, not because there is a flaw in the ordering equation but due to the dynamical environment that prevents the ideal representation.
Consider that DNA contains a mathematical ordering code.
Brazilian researchers use equations to show similarities between the genetic code and digital systems operation
The same mathematical logic, say the researchers, is found in the formation of DNA—the deoxyribonucleic acid whose cells carry the genes and all instructions for development and survival of living beings.
In the study, they compared algebraic equations of error-correcting codes with certain DNA sequences, attributing a numerical logic to the nucleotides that make up the genome: thymine (T), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and adenine (A). In doing so, they discovered that there are patterns that link the nucleotide to a number. Thus, depending on the type of sequence, A is represented by 0, C is 2, G is 1 and T is 3. In digital language, which consists of bits, the information is translated into 0s and 1s.
“We have shown that DNA has sequences that follow the same mathematical structures and rules as digital communication,” says Márcio de Castro Silva Filho, from the Genetics Department of the Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture (ESALQ) at USP. “The DNA sequence is not random; it follows a pattern,” he says.
This is where Penrose, Hameroff, and Chalmers are so keen to see if a quasi-intelligence ordering process can start at the quantum level.
After all, the first instant of the Universe was a chaotic quantum field (plasma) from which the first patterns emerged in the form of elementary particles and eventually, the entire Table of Elements.
The formation of these atoms required a guiding equation and that guiding equation is mathematical in essence.
I think this is what we are finding out. I don’t know how we would know if we reach our limits. I imagine there will always be those who say we don’t have limits. But I’m sure we’re better off with these methods than without them.
I think we may have the correct “tool” to unlock every universal secret that is accessible from our perspective. Max Tegmark claims that there are just 31 relational mathematical values (numbers) and a dozen mathematical equations (functions) that will allow us to describe a TOE.
If that sounds simplistic, it IS!!! It seems impossible that the universe began as an irreducible complexity. That just doesn’t make any sense. Complexity is an emergent result of interacting values by individual objects.
I like the singularity model, which is the simplest possible object that could possibly emerge from nothingness, which must have been the default state in some inaccessible past.
So, if we can prove a singularity, we don’t need to go back any further. For us that would be the beginning (of time) and what came before is irrelevant.
Once again, you’re being anthropomorphic. “Beginnings” and “Endings”, “Before” and “After” are simply limited concepts created by limited beings. As for describing a ToE…“describing” again is a limited concept, something us wee humans do (quite well), but it’s still just another thing cooked up to deal with what’s in the cave so to speak. And as I said, inside the cave, technology and science are the best tools we have. But we can also get glimpses of what’s outside the cave. And that’s important too, but in a different way.
Oh and just for your own time and effort, no need to post a thousand links and articles. I appreciate your effort but it’s just more of the same…looking/discussing the inside of the cave.
I am quite aware of a tendency to anthropomorphize. I complain about that all the time. I already stipulated that we can only measure what we have access to.
The rest would be purely theoretical without ability for proof.
But I believe that your allegory of Plato’s cave is somewhat misplaced. It demonstrates what is not.
Actually, Plato’s proposed model for the universe is a dodecahedron where the opposite walls reflect an inverted 3D image of this, our cave.
So, you may want to read this article anyway.
Platonic truths
Data from an American satellite suggest that the universe is a dodecahedron
Oct 9th 2003 |
Share
THERE are five Platonic solids of perfect symmetry. Three, the tetrahedron, octahedron and icosahedron, have triangular faces. A fourth, the cube, has square faces. The fifth, the dodecahedron, has pentagonal faces. Plato believed that the first four corresponded to the elements of which the Greeks thought the material world was composed: fire, air, water and earth. The dodecahedron, however, corresponded to quintessence, the element of the heavens. As Plato put it, “God used this solid for the whole universe, embroidering figures on it.” And if the arguments of a paper in this week’s Nature stand up, Plato will have been proved right. For Jean-Pierre Luminet, of the Paris Observatory, and his colleagues believe that the universe is, indeed, a dodecahedron.
more … Platonic truths
What is outside of our universal dodecahedron is irrelevant to us.
You’re assuming “proof” is what’s most important. It definitely IS important obviously, but what if there’s an entire world out there so to speak where proof, and measurement, etc etc are not important at least in the sense of making progress scientifically.
As far as Plato’s Cave goes, I take it as more of an analogy in a sense. He was a product of his times, thinking of simple shapes as having reality and working that into his cave. The basic idea though, IMHO, is that things are just like I’ve mentioned a few times. There are the things that can be measured, poked, prodded, do “science” on. That’s the inside of the cave. And then there’s what makes all that possible - the outside. And that we can only glimpse though not through “rulers”. A good analogy is a dictionary. A dictionary can contain everything a speaker needs to make sense of a language EXCEPT its actual meaning. A dictionary is self-referential and in order to actually understand it you need to get outside of it so to speak. We all do this by learning to speak and generate meaning by interacting with others, not by consulting a dictionary.
I almost agree with all of that. There is one common denominator in all of these analogies and that is “language”. But where you cite a linguistic dictionary, I use a mathematical dictionary.
The universe does have a language but that language is mathematical in essence.
Universal mathematics are the guiding equations on which Chaos Theory is based , for one. Else regular repeating patterns could not stochastically self-organize from the fundamental chaos.
All we need to do is learn the mathematical dictionary of the universe and we will be able to speak the language of universe. We have learned a lot about the universal mathematical dictionary and it helped us create all the technical marvels we currently enjoy.
A perfect example is the Higgs boson, a particle that cannot exist in our spacetime dimension. We asked the universe to produce the particle and because we used the correct mathematical language, the universe responded by producing the particle for just an infinitely small instance, before it decayed into simpler constituent parts and disappeared.
Let’s continue the analogy. Imagine an alien trying to figure out how earthings communicate. They land in the US and find a dictionary. They figure it out, observe some Americans, and report back that they’ve cracked the problem - earthlings combine words into sentences and paragraphs using something they call letters. The alien scientist wins a prize for discovering “The Earth’s Dictionary”.
Except that he’s wrong.
What he failed to realize, or discover, is that there are all kinds of dictionaries, some of which do not use letters and sentences. And even so, they represent sounds in a very arbitrary way. There’s nothing inherent in the dictionaries that captures the sounds humans make.
Now this is a little artificial in that I’m assuming the only way this alien scientist seeks to understand human communication is by looking for a dictionary. But to the point of the analogy, his looking for dictionaries as THE clue to human communication is equivalent to human scientists only using math. Dictionaries are useful, obviously, but they’re not the only way to understand humans. Similarly math is obviously useful in explaining the universe, but the form of human math is arbitrary. Other civilizations could use other means to explain/understand the universe that we might not even recognize as an actual means of investigation.
One more point about math being the way. Think of the electron. Physicists used math to tell us it’s a ball orbiting the nucleus, until others realized it wasn’t. Then they used math, much of it the same math, to tell us the electron is really a cloud of sorts, until others realized it wasn’t. And they used a slightly different kind of math to tell us an electron is really just a set of probabilities for finding certain measurements in certain regions. To me, that means they’re realizing the “maps” they use actually are arbitrary. Useful, but arbitrary. Their maps are not the territory.
No, that’s wrong. Mathematics is a universal language. The human symbolic numerals would be different but would not change the actual mathematical functions.
On earth, it makes no difference if you use latin numbers or modern numbers or an abacus. The mathematical equations remain algebraically correct.
The Latin numerals are the words used to denote numbers within the Latin language. They are essentially based on their Proto-Indo-European ancestors, and the Latin cardinal numbers are largely sustained in the Romance languages. Wikipedia
If we had a function for everything, I’d agree, but we don’t. The example given was protons, not the representation of quantities with symbols. We might be having so much trouble with spacetime because our math is based on some flawed concept.
