/sci/ - Science & Math

I believe the platonic world exists just as the physical world does, and every time you think about abstract objects, you travel in it.

I believe that every being capable of abstract thinking can travel the platonic world. This contradicts obviously with philosophic materialism, which is common in the sciences.

Platonism is stupid. The world is: the narrative is not. If it were, then simply by naming things over and over we could create mass/energy.
Semantics only is recognizable if you use names for things, and things of things, otherwise you would never see "reason" behind change.
Yo can't see the whole world at once. You have to break it up and sew it back together. You as a social animal also can adopt the narrative of others. This is called the narrative process. Your brain activity is the token that you name. This is the feeling of meaning.
The problem with Platonism is that it gets it backwards: The world trains your ability to see the world which you can only corroborate through the narrative, not the other way around, but too many narratives are dependent on viewpoint, making foundationalism impossible.

Look, you cannot corroborate your existence with others without some way to point to the same things. Our brains can make up stories that point to the world, but they can also point to other narratives and that leads to bullshit.

The only saving grace is that the same world trains everyone's feeling of inference pretty much the same, and if you can avoid the feelings of emotion and instinct, your inference can allow your brain to fill in the blanks.

>>7547272
(cont)
Look at it this way: when you drive a car, you become the car. You feel the road, and know when you can fit between parked cars.
How is that possible? Because you have a picture of the car in your head called the narrative, and you are looking at the picture while you add little bits of information to keep the picture updated.
But you can't close your eyes for long without the picture getting out of sync with the world. You have to constantly check.

Science and math are the same thing. There is a picture you have of some aspect of the world that you are looking at, but if you don't check that picture against the world through experimentation, it gets out of whack.
How many theories have been revised? How many narratives have you changed.
The problem, the paradox that arises is that you cannot "know" in the sense of corroboration anything about the world without the narrative. All it would be was a bunch of sense information all jumbled together. You have to have a story that puts it all together. That is the narrative. That is your consciousness.
It does not exist beyond the sense feeling of the dynamic process that knits sense and memory and feelings together.

>>7547288

But do not despair: Pragmatism has your answer.
Pragmatists ask themselves, "what is useful to believe?" and in answering it, never confuse the narrative with the world, but use the narrative to get the best view they can.
I find it useful to believe in many narratives, including the one that answers the Pragmatic Paradox of how can you know that the narrative and the world are separate, if you can only know the world through the narrative? Because it is useful to believe that the only way I can know the world is through the narrative.
I don't need purpose, or cause and effect, or statistical inference to be real to be able to use them to fill in the blanks of my picture of the world. I don't need concepts like semantics, or information, or configuration to be able to take different viewpoints as needed.

The only test are:
1. is the narrative consistent with the feeling of inference?
2. does the narrative point to something in the world?

Then you just play with the chicken and the egg paradox of belief until you have a story that you can compare to the world through experimentation.

Every mathematician is going to have her own views on this matter, but I suppose I will share mine as well:

I (!!)believe(!!) that our universe and our entire existence is merely a highly complex dynamical system, and that the Platonic realm is in fact where all consistent abstract objects exist, identified up to semantic isomorphism. This Platonic realm does not contain itself because it is /not/ consistent as an object. I believe that every inconsistent object admits a monomorphism into this Platonic realm, much how every ordered field admits a monomorphism into the surreals.

Because I (!!)believe(!!) that our reality is consistent, it is contained as a dynamical system within the Platonic realm, and that we are merely self-referential subsystems within this object.

I am a strict Platonist.

>>7547246
That's a silly argument because it all hinges on what the word "exist" really means. Mathematical entities only "exist" in the sense that they are used. A thought only "exists" as the material representing it. There is no magic realm in which concepts are separated from physical representation.

>>7547272
>>7547288
The physical world is only an abstract platonic object with very specific properties. The physical laws, "narrative", and meaning, don't exist in the platonic world.

You may not be able to see the whole world at once, or predict where your car is going, but that is only because your brain is unable to simulate the world to such a degree - not because a simulation is impossible.

The bottom line is - you don't need the physical world for the physical world to exist! You can derive it from mathematical formalism alone.

>>7547303
Prove it.

>>7547310
Physics already "proved" it empirically. Everything in the physical reality obeys mathemtical laws.

>>7547302

The key to understanding the fallacy of Plato comes from Heraclitus. " all is flux" and " you cannot step in the same river twice.
Heraclitus didn't have modern neural biology to show him, but the argument is the same:
to hold anything static requires us to dynamically bring up the "image" of that static thing in memory. Memory is the screen upon which we project the narrative. There is no now for humans; we are on a delay. It is very fast, but it is a loop - a constant past to less past loop that we feel. That feeling, and the slowness of the flux in the world conspire to make us thing things can be static.
But nothing is ever static. Not really.
Making things static - making thing real in the narrative - is the first of the narrative processes.

>>7547313

That is patently false and is a religious belief.

>>7547313
>Physics already "proved" it empirically.
"Physics" did not prove that, and it can't prove it empirically because it's not an empirical statement.

>Everything in the physical reality obeys mathemtical laws.
No, every model we create to explain physical reality obeys mathematical laws because all our models have to follow our logic. It's like saying that physical reality "obeys English" because the only language you know is English.

We don't understand or know of everything in physical reality and our understanding is not the same thing as the reality.

>>7547313

That is circular logic. The world trains you feeling of inference. Logic "works" because you feel it must. That feeling is bound by the world in which you live where small things can fit in big things, and no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time, and an object cannot be in two places at the same time.
If you didn't have a world that trained that they syllogisms wouldn't work the same. If you lived in a space that wasn't conservative then object permanace wouldn't have trained your induction the same.
Therefore: the world gives you logic that you use on the world. Circular.

The ability you have to apply logic to the world means that the narrative of logic "points" to the world, and is useful to believe. It doesn't however prove that the nonsense your narrative can come up with that makes pigs fly and creates impossible fake worlds, and is - wait for it - WRONG many times is somehow the thing that is real. That is really backwards.
Lastly, your weird world is unfalsifiable. I can corroborate the world. You cannot corroborate mathematics. All mathematics deconstructs into paradox or "the endless why" of unfalsifiability.
There is no paradox in the world: it only shows up in the narrative of the world.

>>7547323

That English thing was much more succinct then my "logic is trained by the world" thing.
Good job!

>>7547323
Of course it's an empircal statement. "Every event that I can observe will follow certain rules" - that's what physics is all about, no? Physics can only ever make empirical statements.

The mathematical models have worked 100% at predicting the outcome in physical reality. And it is safe to say they will continue to do so. It follows, that physical reality obeys mathematical rules. It doesn't matter if it was "imposed by us" or not, what matters is that with our mathematics, and enough computing power, we could create a physical reality that is in all measurable regards identical to the one we have.

>>7547335
>Logic "works" because you feel it must.

That's false! Logic works because of axioms and rules of inference. It is formal and rigorous, it has nothing to do with the real world!

>I can corroborate the world.

No you can't. You can't corroborate a single thing, unless we both agree on axioms. You think the real world "axioms" are given, such as "when you can touch it, it exists", but they are not. By the same token, you can agree with me on the platonic reality, or not. One in not more real than the other, one is only more abstract.

>>7547341

What about random events? What about stochastics and quantum mechanics and correlations, and entropy, and chaos theory? None of that is predictable in the sense that your math could ever simulate any world, let alone one that looked like ours, and that leads to the question: how could you ever hold the world in your head without it being the world, in which case you wouldn't need to hold it in your head?

The very idea that

>>7547351

Inference is a feeling. It is easily shouted down by emotion. Without the feeling of inference you would never know whether something is valid. That's why we start with plane geometry. That's why we invoke the feeling of inference with pictures and graphs. That's why projective geometry is hard. In projective geometry and hyperspaces we have to translate our inference to small veiwpoints we can verify with inference, then tie them together with the same feeling and come up with answers that don't feel right at all, but are backed by layers of feelings that connect.
If your inference is trained badly or was trained by a different world, you would come up with narratives that either are inconsistent, or don't point to anything in the world - i.e. cannot be verified by experimentation.

>>7547341
>Of course it's an empircal statement. "Every event that I can observe will follow certain rules" - that's what physics is all about, no?
Well first of all, I was talking about the statement that the physical world is only an abstract platonic object. Physics, or any empirical science, cannot prove any metaphysical statement. It presupposes a physical reality giving us information to study.

Second, you are putting the cart before the horse. The rules are just how we describe reality, what we've found out about reality.

>The mathematical models have worked 100% at predicting the outcome in physical reality.
What are you talking about? You must not know much about modern physics if you think our models describe everything perfectly. But regardless, there should be no surprise that the models we have work, because we CHOSE them on the basis of their working. There is plenty of mathematics we have not found any application for and plenty of models that worked until we found they didn't and discarded them. Reality doesn't follow physics, physics follows reality.

An argument for platonism is that, in a logical system, all theorems are tautologies. We must do research to see these things, but the things found out to be true have been and will be so for ever. To keep it consistent, they couldn't all lie in the same world, thus a solution would be a platonic multiverse where there exists a world for each axiomatization.

>>7547525
>We must do research to see these things, but the things found out to be true have been and will be so for ever.
There is no such thing in science. This is not an argument for platonism.

>>7547529
That was not the argument, theorems being tautological was.

>>7547246

The arguments in your picture are absolutely terrible. They assume the platonism through the back door in P2 because their conception of "existence" and "mathematical entity" is distinctly platonist.

>>7547377
Inference is not a feeling. It's a formal rule. A computer can check if the formal rules of a proof are satisfied, without ever having an idea what "euclidian geometry in the real world looks like".

>>7547354
>>7547390
Classical mechanics is perfectly well understood and 100% accurately represented by mathematical models. Sure you can always claim that "the actual truth" is beyond the frontiers of science - quite silly but viable. However what you can't deny is that the things that are fully explored, fully obey mathematics.

Newton pulled his laws of out his ass hundreds of years ago - nobody has found a counterexample even today.

>>7547313

You're going to have a pretty hard time proving the link "obeys mathematical laws" (if that is even true, by the way) --> "Can be derived from mathematical formalism".

>>7547841
>Newton pulled his laws of out his ass hundreds of years ago - nobody has found a counterexample even today.

You are literally a moron

since when was /sci/ continential memers?
can't no nuffin' reality is a mental costruct maymay

>>7547850
But a pretty easy time constructing a sufficiently accurate simulation that is isomorphic to the human-perceived universe.

>>7547858
It is perfectly true. If you are going to argue "but nuclear fusion broke the laws, we just had to reformulate them", consider that things could have happened where saving the model would have been impossibile, like a perpetuum mobile.

>>7547876
What the fuck are you talking about, do you not know anything past 1st year algebra-based Newtonian mechanics? Newton's laws have trillions of counterexamples happening at literally every moment in the known universe.

You are all degenerate rationalists

>>7547841
>Classical mechanics is perfectly well understood and 100% accurately represented by mathematical models.
And classical mechanics is wrong. Ever heard of relativity? Quantum mechanics?

>However what you can't deny is that the things that are fully explored, fully obey mathematics.
Only something which fully obeys mathematics can be fully explored, otherwise we wouldn't understand it. Again, you have it backwards. You are not saying anything about physical reality, just our understanding of it. The map is not the territory. That's all platonism is really, the confusion of the map for the territory.

>>7547557
I understand, I'm saying that tautology is not an argument for platonism. Also, theorems are not tautological, they are axiomatic.

All mathematicians have access to are proofs and constructions which they themselves built.

If some platonic realm of mathematical entities exists independently of our physical universe, why do we have epistemic access to it?

Wildberger is right, OP.

>>7547246
the rationalist has faith in that the reason/mind be more than a sixth sense. the rationalist believes that the reason is connected to the world, without being able to motivate his stance. Mathematics-logics being the the most extreme, the extreme rationalist believes, without being able to prove it, either
-that the world is mathematical
-or the that there are mathematical entities existing in another realm

the problem is that we have several formal logics wherein we do mathematics with theorems holding depending on YOUR CHOICE of logic. So if the world is mathematical, with some mathematics not relevant to the universe, these rationalists must explain why there are mathematics which are not relevant in a mathematical universe.

the rationalist is led to his stance because he cannot bear what he calls the contingency of the world.
He thinks prejudicially that the world is ordered and whines when he fails to prove that he makes sense out of it.
He invented the ''causation'' in order to ''explain'' an event X: behind X, there are many other little events that we miss. He says X is caused by Y, Y is caused by Z, ...and stops sooner or later.
Naturally, he has no clue what a cause his; and he prefers to call cause what is correlation to better sell and to mock those who have no faith in his scam.
The rationalist claims to be rigorous because he bases his stance on empirical grounds through the faith in induction. The rationalist says that '' induction works more or less, so let's jump quickly into rationality to ''explain'' the world and stop being an infertile empiricist ''.
But since he has no idea what a cause is, he must return to the empiricism in claiming that '' since some guy in lab claims to be able to perceive event W which is caused, according to me, by Z, then my causal chain X, Y, W, Z'' is true.

>>7548068
Since the rationalist has faith in induction, we can use this same induction on his sterility to produce truth. But the rationalist being weak, he refuses to hear this and call every body not having faith in him, either a blind sheep following some cult or some degenerate sceptic.
So far, the rationalist remains unable to dispute the nihilism/relativism/scepticism/solipsism which was his initial goals.

A few rationalist still whines over their misery and try to save the day in claiming that, sure they have failed to give the humanity any objectivity, but at least there remains what they call inter-subjectivity. They claim that there are objective standards in order to judge of something. For instance, the rationalist full of despair claims that there is at least one method to grade the various scientific theories. Of course, since the rationalist despises the plurality, he hopes that there is one and only one method to grade the theories. For instance, he hopes that there is only one method which says ''automatically'', without any human intervening, that general relativity is better than Ptolemaeus cosmology. Too bad for him that even this fails.
We see with this shift from ''science touches upon the reality through the objectivity'' to ''science offers a few solutions to what can be considered as problems [but not considered by every body, sinking the rationalist into deeper despair]''.

Science is now about efficiency of solutions towards what is seen as problems, instead of being about truth.

>>7547246
quine is a pleb

both math and saying "god has put an angel in charge of each star" are ways to describe the world
both aren't "true" and the only difference is that maths describes the world in a way more usefull to us

truly believing that a platonic world with eternal ideas exists is not better than religion, tbh
same with physicalism/scientism
it's all metaphysics, unfalsifiable, unscientific
it's interesting to think about though

>>7547338
>mfw this might be the first intelligent /sci/ discussion in months

>>7548550
claiming to be an undergrad

>>7549001
Maybe you should learn to add before you criticize other peoples' fields; 10+80+15=105, dumbass.

>>7547246
Being committed to an idea doesn't mean you take that idea to be reality. Substance needs form just as form needs substance. All efforts made to segregate reality are masturbatory.

>>7547303
>you can have ideas without substance
>It's all programming, like in this comic
>where all the programming is made of rocks
>substance

back to Plato's cave

mathematicians make memes. calculus is a highly advanced and widely applicable meme. it's so universally understood because it builds on processes that seem more or less inherent in human rational thought rather than magically existing in some magic realm.

>>7550515
>it's so universally understood because it builds on processes that seem more or less inherent in human rational thought
yes, this is what the liberals believe

>>7550654
inherent in people capable of rational thought if you prefer it

>>7547246
> philosphers
> playing vacuous word games since Socrates

Meanwhile science marches on without their help.

>>7550685
dat picrel =D

>>7550685
And...nothing happens, sure we exchanged gladiators for soccer and mma cage fights, we developed greater medicine so we could start drinking more, we developed a very quick way to exchange and store and access information and so-far gathered knowledge so we could spend most of our time on facebook, twitter, let's play videos and twitch, etc.
Our technology advanced, our tools for gathering information from the world around us developed greatly, mentally we are still on the level of a rock, humanity sure has marched, in a circle.

>>7551522
SCATHING CRITIQUE of MODERNITY, 14 year old edgerton! I bet you also lament modern anti-intellectualism, scoff at the simpletons who don't believe global warming and support Bernie Sanders

>>7550515
Only because you don't understand Analysis doesn't mean "Calculus is a highly applicable meme".

Engineers from shit-tier unis sure are embarrassing.