Everyone being happy is the same thing as everything being good.

One person being (continuously) happy is the same thing as everything being good for them. (Momentary happiness may not be good for them if it comes at the expense of later happiness).

But that's not the same as that happy person being good for everyone else.

I think Special Relativity provides a useful model here. Things can have different properties in different reference frames (and one can translate between reference frames). But there is no absolute reference frame for how things "really" are. — Andrew M

But even in relativity, there is still an objective truth. Space and time may distort relative to an observer, but a spacetime interval is the same for all observers. Simultaneity may be relative to an observer, but cause and effect are still the same for all observers. And the impetus behind all of that, the speed of light is the same for all observers: all the things that are relative are reasoned to be so because they must be in order to account for the speed of light being an objective, non-relative value.

For analogy think of a geometric shape that is circular in profile along the X-axis, square in profile along the Y-axis, and triangular in profile along the Z-axis (so a cylinder with two very slanty ends). Three observers looking at it along those three axes would "disagree about its shape", and they would each be correct so far as the 2D profile of its shape goes, but nevertheless it still has one single objective 3D shape, of which each 2D view shows only part. Relativity is like that, but 3D-to-4D instead.

You've talked of "the most" of both nothing and zero, as if there is a meaningful quantitative difference to be drawn between the most of nothing and the least of nothing; as if there is a meaningful quantitative difference to be drawn between the most of zero and the least of zero.

The most of zero is exactly the same as the least of zero. The most of nothing is exactly the same as the least of nothing. There is no distinction to be drawn here between the most of nothing(zero) and the least of nothing(zero) because they both have precisely the same numerical and/or quantitative value. — creativesoul

That's exactly the point. Out of a set of nothing, of zero things, there is no difference between the most of it and the least of it. But only in the case of a set of nothing, of zero things, an empty set. It is precisely because there is no difference between the most things from that set and the least things from that set that that all of it, everything from it, is the same as none of it, nothing from it. Any percent of zero is the same thing: zero. 100% of 0 = 0% of 0. In general, 100% of x ≠ 0% of x, except when x = 0. That is the only case when all of x is none of x, when x is an empty set.

Literally, something that is. “Entity” comes from ”ontos” which means “being”, and “to be” is the infinitive of “is”.

In the short term I am not pretending that mere ‘wealth’ solves any issues involving environmental pollution. — I like sushi

I was thinking of it more the other way around: environmental problems are detrimental to wealth. Everybody has reason to care about the environment for their personal dependency on it for their wealth and well-being. People who are wealthy already are the ones with the power to do something about it, and also the ones with the most to lose long term. So, for the sake of their own wealth if nothing else, they really ought to be paying attention to the problem, or else they're going to end up as poor as everyone else when everything that they depend on for their comfortable lives collapses.

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Simulating an electric field does not produce an electric field in the non-simulated world, but you can totally simulate an electric field that acts just like an electric field in the simulated world. You’re really mixing up concepts now.

In any case that’s besides the point of panpsychism. The panpsychist (at least the contemporary kind, a pan-proto-experientialist) would say that the computer running the simulation already had the kind of trivial fundamental phenomenal experience that all things have, and when part of it was programmed to function like a human brain, that part of it would begin to have a phenomenal experience like a human has.

It had SOME experience before already, it was just a tremendously simple and boring kind, just like its behavior was tremendously simple and boring compared to that of a human brain. But when you make something that DOES more interesting complicated stuff, built up out of the boring simple stuff its parts could already do, it also begins to EXPERIENCE more interesting complicated things, built up out of the boring simple things its parts could already experience.

The contemporary panpsychist like me or Galen Strawson is just saying that complicated interesting experiences like humans are capable of are built up out of boring simple experiences that the stuff we’re made of is capable of, in exactly the same way that the complicated interesting behaviors we exhibit are built up out of boring simple behaviors the stuff we’re made of exhibits.

The dualist, in contrast, thinks there’s some other kind of stuff that does interesting complicated experiencing to being with and physical stuff gets its apparent experience from that.

The emergentist similarly says that sufficiently interesting complicated stuff just suddenly starts having complicated interesting experiences out of nowhere at some point, not built up out of simpler more boring stuff, just appearing by magic.

The eliminativist says that nothing has any kind of experience, simple or complicated, interesting or boring; behavior is all there is to account for.

All of those sound far more absurd than “the complex and interesting experiences we have are just built out of the boring simple experiences everything already has”.

It says no such thing. It says that the mental/experiential is physical, nothing at all about it being anything like electromagnetism or gravity. You continue to just not understand what panpsychism, or the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness generally, is even about.

Yep. Glad I could help.

Nuclear weapons are mostly bad because of the climate change they would effect, which is in turn bad because of the poverty it would cause.

Russell and Whitehead began their Universe of Discourse with Set Theory as the foundation of Logic, but ended-up running into the impassible boundary (incompleteness theorem) of space-time limitations. — Gnomon

Logicism failed, but set theory is nevertheless the foundations of contemporary mathematics. That's not identical with logicism.

That sounds like emergentism. In any case you can not claim to be panpsychist without postulating there is sentience present within universe existing as additional fundamental physical property such as electromagnetism or gravity... — Zelebg

Tell that to Galen Strawson.

Fair. Would you be interested in doing the more detailed version I had in mind? — fdrake

I would be very interested in reading it, but I doubt I have the competence to contribute to it.

Your belief is called functionalism, not panpsychism. — Zelebg

I am both a functionalist and a panpsychist, and have been pretty explicit about that this whole time. There are two “problems of” or types of consciousness: the easy problem of access consciousness, and the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness. I am a functionalist about the first and a panpsychist about the second.

You seem to be conflating the two together and asking what function constitutes phenomenal consciousness, which is not a coherent question because phenomenal consciousness is definitionally about whatever is involved in consciousness besides function or behavior.

I don’t say that everything is access consciousness, which I think is the important kind of consciousness, precisely because it is what is different and special about humans compared to other things. I do say that everything is phenomenally conscious, because phenomenal consciousness is such a trivial thing that even rocks have it and that doesn’t mean anything important.

Maybe “libertarian” is a good place to start then. Originally, “liberal” meant the same thing that “libertarian” in the Rand sense means now.

That position was to the left of the status quo of the time, which was aristocracy and theocracy and such. So “liberal” was associated with “left”.

Then the aristocrats disappeared, and socialists appeared further to the left of those old classical liberals.

In most of the world, that meant that (classical) liberalism was now considered to be on the right side of the spectrum.

But in the US and apparently wherever you live, the word “liberal” kept being used as a synonym for the left, even as the leftmost positions became increasingly unlike the classical liberal position. That’s why in those places “libertarian” was coined as a new name for classical liberalism.

(Even though “libertarian” had already been the name for a kind if socialism before that.)

I finally snuck in enough time to read your excellent posts, though I’m still on a phone so my reply will have to be short. While your posts were a fascinating read that refreshed a lot that I’d half forgotten and maybe even taught me some things I never learned properly, I’m worried that the reason you initially found this project so intimidating is because you’re putting so much focus on proof, and expecting that we’re going to rigorously prove every step of the process. All I really intended us to do was to dramatically state the conclusions of each step. In my OP, for example, I did not even try to prove that the empty set and its successors behave isomorphically to the natural numbers and so can be regarded as equivalent to them: I just stated how to generate that set of sets of sets with the successor function (and how to build that function), and then asserted that that is the set of natural numbers, with a dramatic flourish.

It also says that ancient Greek philosophy didn’t even have separate words with which to make the distinction, which makes the whole thing seem like an oddity of theistic medieval philosophy. — Pfhorrest

Islamic philosophy, which distinguished existence (wujud) from essence (mahiat) in its radical revision of Greek ontology in light of a biblical metaphysics of creation

Yup.

I see no difficulty reconciling Aristotelian actualization of potential with eternalism (“b-theory”). It just means that things have more of their potential realized in the parts of them that are later in time than in the parts of them that are earlier in time.

I was torn between either climate change, poverty, or inequality, but ultimately chose poverty because the problem with inequality is that it leaves many people in poverty and the problem with climate change is that it threatens to plunge most if not all of humanity into poverty (because all wealth ultimately comes from the bounty of nature).

Panpsychism is exactly the opposite of that: whatever is metaphysically going on in human brains is nothing special, it’s just a normal facet of everything, and it’s only the functional differences between human brains and other things that account for the differences in their experience. Replicate the function and you automatically replicate the experience.

It’s the dualist and emergentist who say that human brains have some metaphysical difference from other things, though the emergentist at least says that that metaphysical difference “emerges” somehow from the functional difference.

The eliminativist, like the panpsychist, says that nothing besides functionality differs between rocks and brains, but rather than saying that whatever it is besides function that makes brains capable of phenomenal, subjective, first-person experience also exists in everything else, the elimanitivist says that there is no such thing as phenomenal, subjective, first-person experience at all, even in human brains.

I want to hear the best arguments how computers actually can simulate consciousness — Zelebg

Computers can simulate physical systems. Human brains are physical systems. Human brains are conscious. So a simulation of a human brain will be conscious, unless you think there’s some spooky metaphysical thing going on in real human brains that isn’t going on in simulated ones.

But it sounds to me like you don’t actually care about that metaphysical stuff, what you really want to know is what is the thing that human brains do that gives them the kind of conscious experience that they have. That’s a good question, but a different question than the metaphysical question, a better question than the metaphysical question, but an empirical question that needs to be answered by neuroscientists and software engineers, not one that we can speculatively answer on a philosophy forum.

In the US, liberal does mean leftist. Around the whole world, liberal USED to mean leftist too. Then the old (feudal) right largely lost, and a new (socialist) left rose up, to the right of which was the old liberal left. In most of the world that old position kept being called liberal, but was now the right side of the mainstream spectrum, with socialism to the left of it. In the US (and apparently wherever you are), the left side continued to be called “liberal” even though it had now shifted a bit toward socialism, and what had been called liberal before was now considered on the right. In both places remnants of the old right attached themselves to the new right, making it even more conservative than it already was in comparison to socialism. In the US, those who rejected those more socially conservative elements, but who could not call themselves “liberal” any more since that had come to mean “socialist”, rebranded themselves “libertarian”, disregarding the fact that that name was already in use by a little-acknowledged anti-authoritarian brand of socialism.

It says that most modern analytical philosophy now doesn't recognize the distinction - which is the point I'm making! — Wayfarer

It also says that ancient Greek philosophy didn’t even have separate words with which to make the distinction, which makes the whole thing seem like an oddity of theistic medieval philosophy.

But not all objects are subjects it would seem, unless you attribute to rocks conscious awareness, which I doubt anyone would. — Xtrix

That’s just panpsychism, and contemporary versions of it are a lot more innocuous than it might seem, being basically what is left over after you have ruled out all the even more absurd options (like we are all p-zombies, or there’s some metaphysical magic that goes on in humans but not rocks).

Feel free to intervene in the bits I've written to add further detail if you like. — fdrake

Will do once I have time to read them. When I’m away from home I only have brief moment like bathroom breaks to read and write short things like this.

Yeah basically the idea of this game is to start with as little as possible and then build everything up from there. You don’t have to limit yourself to using just NOR after
you’ve built all the other connectives, it’s just part of the game to show that you can start with just NOT and don’t need to start with anything else as given.

If we’re talking about functional definitions then those are roughly fine I guess, but then if were talking about functional definitions there’s no remaining question. If you simulate the function you’ve simulated the function. If you simulate what a brain does then you’ve simulated what a brain does, so if all you’re talking about is what brains do, there’s no question left. The question underlying qualia and phenomenal experience is whether or not just doing what brains do is enough to experience what humans experience, and why or why not.

Wow that’s a lot more detail than I was expecting! I’m away for the weekend now so I won’t have time to read up until a few days from now.

I thought it was supposed to build a play-dough universe of solid, unerring, unassailable, elementary numbers. Such as 1, or 2, or... or 3, for instance. Not any of those newfangled numbers like, i, e, or pi. — god must be atheist

No, we'll get to those eventually... if anybody actually plays the game instead of arguing about the premise of it. I mean, I can build you the integers, rationals, reals, and complex numbers in my next post if you like, though I'm not up to building arithmetic out of set operations alongside it, so I was hoping someone else would do that.

Do you know why this is needed? — alcontali

I don't, and if I'm reading them correctly, they together contradict my understanding of predicate logic, wherein "for all x, F(x)" does not entail "there exists some x such that F(x)", but only "there does not exist any x such that not-F(x)". Which makes me think I'm not reading that passage correctly.

They do not see zeroth-order predicate logic as something that needs to be mentioned separately — alcontali

According to Wikipedia, zeroth-order predicate logic is sometimes used as a synonym for propositional logic.

anything you can say in predicate logic you can say in first-order logic, which is what you need for PA or ZFC. Predicate logic is not sufficient. You need the universal quantifiers too — alcontali

This statement seems confused. First-order logic is a form of predicate logic: the first form of it, before you get to higher-order predicate logics. I think you may be confusing propositional logic with predicate logic.

In any case, you've both made the case that you at least need a quantification operation in addition to the truth-functional joint negation operation I started with, though since existential and universal quantification are DeMorgan duals of each other, you can start with just one (or its negation) and build all the others from that. So I guess to start with we need NOR (or NAND), and a quantifier (pick one; I would start with the negation of the existential, for aesthetic reasons, but logically it doesn't matter), and then we can say what a set is, and from the empty set proceed as previously described.

Of course, we'd better load the propositional-logic language-extension pack, along with first-order extensions (universal quantifiers). Language must of course be "pluggable". Still, if we load the propositional-logic language extension pack, we must also load its axiom pack with the 14 basic rules of propositional logic. Language packs and axiomatic packs are not entirely independent. — alcontali

Someone else please check this because I don't trust alcontali's word on this for various reasons, and my understanding is that from set theory you can build predicate logic, which serves as an extension of propositional logic (anything you can say in propositional logic you can say in predicate logic), so if you start with sets you don't need to "manually" include propositional logic, it's one of the things you can build along the way.

expecting to show how the entire universe works mathematically (what some people seem to be reading the thread as) — fdrake

Yeah no this thread is not supposed to be demonstrating mathematicism, it's just assuming it, and as I said in the OP you can instead assume we're building a simulation of the universe instead, if that makes you more comfortable.

The "derive cells from sets" goal is very silly, the "show what math goes into some simple physical laws from the ground up" goal is not — fdrake

Well the former is what I'm aiming for, but if you only want to play along up to the latter end that's fine with me. As I said in the OP, I expect mathematicians to contribute more to the first half of the project and scientists to contribute more to the latter half. (Or rather, people with extensive math and science knowledge, not necessarily professionals in such fields).

Also as I said in the OP, as I understand it QFT takes SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) to be the mathematical model of quantum fields, which in turn are where we can stop with the math and pick up with sciences instead. So for the math segment of the game, we're aiming to build up to special unitary groups, for which we need Lie groups, for which we need both groups generally, and differentiable manifolds, for which we need topoligical spaces, for which we need points, and so on. I'm probably skipping a lot of steps along the way, but that's generally the course I'm expecting this to take to get to the point where physics can take over. Then from quantum fields we can build fundamental particles, build atoms out of those, molecules out of those, cells out of those, and so on. I thought I already sketched an expected trajectory like this in the OP.

I'm not sure why NOR is important to you — fishfry

Because it's a sole sufficient operator. You can start with just that one operator and build all the others from there, so it's a great starting place. (NAND would work too, but I like the symmetry of starting with the empty set and joint negation). You can trivially build NOT(x) with NOR(x,x), then OR(x,y) with NOT(NOR(x,y)) and AND(x,y) with NOR(NOT(x),(NOT(y)), NAND(x,y) with NOT(AND(x,y)) obviously, IF(x,y) with OR(x,NOT(y)), ONLY-IF(x,y) with OR(y,NOT(x)), IFF(x,y) with AND(IF(x,y),ONLY-IF(x,y)), XOR with NOR(AND(x,y),NAND(x,y)), and so on...

Thank you, that article is very helpful in translating this language. I hadn't connected Wayf's sense of "being" with "essence", and though I was aware of the distinction between "essence" and "existence" I hadn't connected those to the distinction between "possibility" and "actuality" (thinking of them more as "form" and "substance", and not understanding why existentialism made such a big deal out of what seemed such an obvious point about them, being unaware of Thomism making a big deal of the opposite thesis, since medieval philosophy is my greatest weakness). As I read further and further on in the history section of that I found ideas sounding less and less like incoherent nonsense, finally coinciding with my own views when we reach modal realism.

(I also disagree with the prevailing Analytic claim that "existence is just what the existential quantifier asserts", though that is only because I think there is sense to be made of non-descriptive sentences. For descriptive sentences, it does work out that way. I prefer to read the so-called "existential" quantifier as "for some" -- for some value of x, [some proposition regarding x] is true -- and if the proposition is describing the world, then that amounts to an existential claim, but it might be performing a different speech-act than description, in which case it might not be saying anything at all about what does or doesn't exist.)

(In my logic, the assertion of existence is instead performed by the operator that denotes a descriptive assertion, so instead of "a wise man exists" or "some man is wise", you would say something more like "there is some man being wise", where "being wise" is the idea predicated of some "man", and "there is" indicates that that idea is a description of reality, in contrast to something like "be there some man being wise", where "be there" instead is an imperative or exhortation calling for there to be a wise man, i.e. "there ought to be some wise man". And we might simply want to talk about the logical implications of the state of affairs of "some man being wise", and the relationship of that idea to others, without either describing or prescribing anything; e.g. we can talk about how "some man being wise" and "Socrates being a man" don't entail "Socrates being wise", without saying anything at all about the existence of Socrates, men, or wisdom).

Something metaphysically strange did happen somewhere in the evolutionary chain from rocks to people, and that is self-replicating molecules, i.e. life. — Zelebg

That is not metaphysically strange. That is a notable development in the physical behavior of stuff, sure, but there's nothing philosophically, ontologically, metaphysically weird about it: it's just molecules doing a neat new thing, but that thing is just a combination of things molecules were always perfectly capable of.

Likewise for "an event [to] leave[] some kind of impression on the subject". There's nothing metaphysically weird required for that. All kinds of ordinary physical processes record impressions of events in the objects that are subjected to them. Fossilized dinosaur footprints in mud are not metaphysically weird, but they're a literal impression of an event on the mud.

If all you're talking about when you talk about "experience" is something the brain does, then you're just talking about uncontroversial physical behavior. A dualist, eliminativist, emergentist, and panpsychist will all agree that yep, brains behave in that way. Where they disagree is on:

- whether anything that behaves that way has the same first-person experience (dualist says no, others say yes)
- whether anything can have any first-person experience at all (eliminativist says no, others say yes)
- whether having this metaphysical property(?) of a first-person experience in the first place depends upon behaving that way (emergentist says yes, others say no)

So panpsychism is the only position that says yes, anything that exhibits that same physical behavior has the same first-person experience; and yes, at least some things do have a first-person experience; and no, nothing is metaphysically special about things with that physical behavior in that regard.

It's heartening that I'm not the only one here scratching my head about this supposed difference between "being" and "existing".

Wayf, we all get that there's a difference between subjective and objective, first person and third person, and so on, but "being" and "existing" just aren't the words for that difference.

I'm curious where you live that's not the USA and still uses "liberal" to mean "leftist".

Originally there was that association, which is why the left is still called "liberal" in the USA today even though they're no longer "liberal" in the classical sense still used elsewhere. But after (classical) liberalism largely won over its early enemies and socialism sprung up, socialism (originally libertarian socialism) became the new left and capitalist liberalism the new right.

And then most of socialism turned statist, and liberalism became virtually synonymous with capitalism , to the point that state capitalism, i.e. fascism, is now denounced as "socialist" by self-avowed liberal capitalists. And nobody even remembers anymore that libertarian socialists ever existed, so in the USA where the left=liberal association stuck around (despite their "liberals" becoming increasingly state-socialist), they appropriated the term "libertarian" to mean liberal capitalism instead.

I think you meant to quote the part where I wrote "And the complement of the empty set, all that is not nothing, is everything. The end." That part was a joke, and I immediately backtracked to get back to the actual point of that first post.

The part you quoted isn't talking about taking the complement of the empty set specifically, it's just talking about how joint negation (NOR) is a sole sufficient operator: you can build all the other logical operators out of it. Specifically, in that post, I trivially build OR out of it, which as I understand it is the equivalent of union, which I use to build the successor function. The thought that we can start out with empty sets and joint negation and with that build everything out of "negations of nothing" (operations built out of negation on operands built out of empty sets) was the inspiration for this little game.

I could use a little clarification though, because as I understand it the logical operations are all equivalent to set operations, and as I understand it complement is the set-theoretic equivalent of negation, but negation isn't quite the same as joint negation though it can trivially be made to function as such (just feed an operand into both arguments of NOR instead of the single argument of NOT), so I'm not entirely sure if complement can be treated as the set-theoretic equivalent of joint negation too, or just plain unary negation, and in the latter case, what actually is the set-theoretic equivalent of joint negation?

If by "experience" you mean some kind of mechanical thing happening in the subject, as you seem to, then there is no question. Simulate the mechanical stuff and you simulate the "experience". But then by "experience" there you mean a kind of third-person-observable behavior. There is still the open question of whether the thing exhibiting that behavior also has a first-person experience (I lack another word to use for this).

The eliminativist says "no", nothing has first-person experience.

The dualist says yes only if there is some immaterial mind connected to the material thing (substance dualism), or if some immaterial mental properties are attached to the same thing as the material properties are attached to (property dualism).

The emergentist says yes if the matter is arranged just right, it starts having first-person experience, in a way that mean something more than that it starts exhibiting the behavior you seem to be talking about, which to me looks tantamount to some kind of dualism: some new, metaphysically weird thing starts happening to physical things that behave certain ways.

The panpsychist says yes, anything exhibiting that kind of mechanical behavior has the same kind of first-person experience as a human brain that exhibits that behavior does, because everything has some kind of first-person experience and that's completely trivial, what matters is the kind of experience, which varies right alongside the mechanical behavior.

The panpsychist, emergentist, and eliminativist all agree with each other, and disagree with the usual kinds of dualist, that anything that exhibits that mechanical behavior has the same kind of first-person experience.

The panpsychist and eliminativist agree with each other and disagree with the emergentist in that they say there is nothing metaphysically different between a human brain and a rock, all that's different is the physical stuff going on there.

The panpsychist and the eliminativist disagree about whether there is any first-person experience ever being had by anything ever: the eliminativist says no, and the panpsychist says yes.

So to disagree with the panpsychist, you have to either deny that you and I have any first-person experience, or else postulate that something metaphysically strange happens somewhere in the evolutionary chain from rocks to people. Panpsychism is just what you get when you say that nothing metaphysically weird is happening, the only difference between me and a rock is the stuff my brain does that rocks don't do, but yeah, I do actually have a first-person experience, I'm not a P-zombie (and therefore rocks must also have some kind of first-person experience, which differs from mine in the same way and for the same reason as my brain's behavior differs from the rock's behavior).

That makes a good, analogous point. Simulated universes are not only necessarily younger, but also necessarily smaller, than their parent universes. So the higher up the stack you go, the more time and space there is, and assuming number of observers scales proportional to time and space for them to exist in, there are more observers in higher-level universes than lower-level ones.

At first glance I expected this to be an argument that we would notice time running more slowly if we were in a simulated universe, and was all gearing up to argue that because our perception would be slowed too it wouldn't seem slower to us... but instead of that argument I expected, you made a pretty good one. :-)

This seems closely related to the notion that a deterministic system may still be impossible to predict if it is chaotic (in the mathematical sense), because for a sufficiently chaotic system the time it takes to run a simulation of that system forward in time, even on an ideal, maximally-fast computer would exceed the time it would take to watch to actual system just evolve in real time. (There is a known upper bound on computation speed, because like you imply, all computational processes must be carried out by what we see as physical processes: physical stuff does the computing, and it can only do so much of it). Basically the only reason that prediction of non-chaotic deterministic system is possible to begin with is because the data describing those systems is highly compressible, so we can do faster computations on a smaller amount of data and then project the result of those computations (the future of a simulation) back into the real world faster than it takes the real world to process the evolution of the physical system itself.


If I may sum up your argument in my own way: there may be more worlds the deeper you go in the stack of simulations, but there is more time per world higher in the stack, so if our 14 billion year old universe is a deep simulation as some say is probable, then the real world is much, much older than 14 billion years old, and so probably has (had) far more observers in it than in any simulated world, making us more likely to find ourselves one of those real observers than a simulated observer.

What's the end game - something like Quantum Field Theory? — SophistiCat

If you read the OP you’d see that that’s just the midpoint. We build up to something like QFT, and then build from there to something like a human. I’m not specifying the exact route we must take or how far we can go but that’s the rough idea.

If you are aiming at some fundamental physics, such as QFT, that still leaves out every non-fundamental theory that is not reducible to fundamental physics — SophistiCat

I always forget that even among physicalists the reducibility of everything to fundamental physics in contentious. So I suppose that’s another presumption of this thread, and the thread itself can serve as the debate on that, as players put forward constructions of higher levels from lower ones and others challenge the accuracy of those.

there isn't a unique construction — SophistiCat

That’s fine. Any construction will do.

An approachable simplified story is what I’m aiming for. Something like the version I tell of it in my essay On Logic and Mathematics, but hopefully better. (I’m hoping to learn from this thread myself). The construction of numbers, spaces, groups, manifolds, Lie groups, special unitary groups, and then quantum fields from those, particles from those, atoms from those, molecules from those, cells from those, organisms from those, etc.