They want more, they want to turn math into a kind of God. — JerseyFlight
The irony and/or paradox for some (atheists, etc.) is that they rely on objective reasoning, yet deny the significant implications of Platonism/mathematical truth's. — 3017amen
This is a non-sequitur. "rely on objective reasoning" is your own confusion, false premise. Clearly you have an agenda bent in the direction of some form of supernatural idealism. Plato's desire for a spiritual world is not significant, it is psychologically common and primitive. Bottom line is that human's, in general, cannot handle the contingent nature of reality. I challenge you to be a serious thinker and forgo the temptation to retreat into the comfort of idealism. — JerseyFlight
So I would say non-sequite this... how do you reconcile your paradox? — 3017amen
yet you use similar objective reasoning — 3017amen
it is a general feature of mathematics that whatever we find things in reality to be doing, we can always invent a mathematical structure that behaves exactly, indistinguishably like that, and so say that the things in reality are identical to that mathematical structure. — Pfhorrest
One may be tempted to say that that does not make the description identical to reality itself, as in the adage "the map is not the territory". In general that adage is true, [...] But a perfectly detailed, perfectly accurate map of any territory at 1:1 scale is just an exact replica of that territory, and so is itself a territory in its own right, indistinguishable from the original; — Pfhorrest
But whatever model it is that would perfectly map reality in every detail, that would be identical to reality itself. — Pfhorrest
perfectly accurate models of people like us would find themselves experiencing it as their reality exactly like we experience our reality. — Pfhorrest
There necessarily must be some rigorous formal (i.e. mathematical) system or another that would be a perfect description of reality. — Pfhorrest
"To make a faithful picture, come as close as possible to copying the object just as it is". This simple-minded injunction baffles me; for the object before me is a man, a swarm of atoms, a complex of cells, a fiddler, a friend, a fool and much more. If none of these constitute the object as it is, what else might? If all are ways the object is, then none is the way the object is. — Nelson Goodman: Languages of Art, p6
Fine to gloss description as map or model, but not map as working model or replica or simulation — bongo fury
If you were to make a truly complete map or model of something, you could not help but replicate its function, and so build a replica, a simulation. — Pfhorrest
That is, you will be pushing against recent thinking. — Banno
Haldane [in the 1930s] can be found remarking, ‘Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.’ Today the mistress has become a lawfully wedded wife. Biologists no longer feel obligated to apologize for their use of teleological language; they flaunt it. The only concession which they make to its disreputable past is to rename it ‘teleonomy’.
Most post-Darwinian approaches attempt to naturalize teleology in biology, in opposition to nineteenth-century viewpoints which grounded it theologically.
I am explicitly endorsing the equivalence of physical reality and a mathematical object, — Pfhorrest
[*] an abstract mathematical structure in the sense of model theory. Potentially instantiated: in which case, a piece of the world; but otherwise only fiction [/possibility etc.]. — bongo fury
so pointing to that as an absurdity is unpersuasive. — Pfhorrest
All maps, models, etc, are effectively descriptions, — Pfhorrest
even if they are not descriptions in human-readable verbal languages — Pfhorrest
A visual map can be encoded in binary on a computer, and a human could read off those ones and zeros, even if they didn’t understand what they were reading. All the information in the picture would be retained in the sound of the human voice. — Pfhorrest
If that picture were to be perfectly detailed down to the subatomic level, it would have to be animated — Pfhorrest
or at least include temporal information in it like momentum, and all of the structural details that give a complete picture of its function, — Pfhorrest
and contain within it all the exact information that the physical thing the “picture” it is of does. — Pfhorrest
Whatever you can do in real life but can’t do with the map, it’s because there’s some detail that’s been left out of the map. So a map that did include absolutely every detail would just be a replica of the territory it is a map of. — Pfhorrest
Whatever you can do in real life but can’t do with a description, it’s because there’s some detail that’s been left out of the description. So a description that did include absolutely every detail would just be a replica of the territory it is a description of.
So a “map” of reality that includes every detail down to the most fundamental physical level would be a replica of reality. And it would thus include humans like us in it, who would function just like we do, and experience that “map” as their reality. — Pfhorrest
There is thus no reason to think that maps and territories are ontologically — Pfhorrest
Only if you assume maps are meant to be replicas. — bongo fury
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