Is your claim that because the mind is itself physical, any idea stored in a mind is necessarily reducible to something physical?
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ETA: minds can contain gods, …
No, I’m claiming that the idea of god exists physically.
In our universe, the map is part of the territory. So the concept of god which a human stores in his mind is something physical. God himself might not exist, but the idea of god, and the rules this idea follows, exist, despite being inconsistent. And these rules which the idea of god follows can be represented in many ways, all of them physical.
For example, in the human mind, in computers, in mathematical logic (despite inconsistencies), etc. All these ways of representing god are done using completely different configurations of molecules. What is the common ground between them? Certainly not that the idea of god and it’s rules are some special thing with special properties. So what do the hard drive and the human mind have in common when representing the idea of god?
By my theory, what they have in common is abstraction. Ignore all the specific details about how hard drives and human minds work, and just look at the specific abstract rules which we define as “god”. These are complex, so we can’t easily visualize this removal of details. It’s much easier when talking about apples and numbers. You can see that when you have 2 apples, you can get the idea of 2 by ignoring the fact that it’s apples, and that they’re in a bag, and that gravity is affecting them. It’s also easy to see when talking about balls. You get the idea of a ball by taking a sphere of matter, forgetting what it’s composed of and forgetting it’s radius. This abstract idea of a “ball” fits many things, because it’s just ignoring details which vary from ball to ball.
So my claim is that the idea of axiomatic systems exists in the physical universe. In fact, all the ideas we ever have, and there rules, exist in the physical universe. But if we take PA as an example, the idea of PA exists in a mathematician’s mind, and numbers emerge inside this idea of PA, because numbers do emerge inside PA. So by removing the details of how PA is stored in the mathematician’s mind, we obtain numbers, which is just like getting numbers by removing the details about apples.
This still leaves the question of why numbers emerge in so many places. My best guess is that they do because the universe is built upon simple and universal laws of physics, so it’s only natural that the same patterns would be appear everywhere.
No, I’m claiming that the idea of god exists physically.
In our universe, the map is part of the territory. So the concept of god which a human stores in his mind is something physical. God himself might not exist, but the idea of god, and the rules this idea follows, exist, despite being inconsistent. And these rules which the idea of god follows can be represented in many ways, all of them physical.
For example, in the human mind, in computers, in mathematical logic (despite inconsistencies), etc. All these ways of representing god are done using completely different configurations of molecules. What is the common ground between them? Certainly not that the idea of god and it’s rules are some special thing with special properties. So what do the hard drive and the human mind have in common when representing the idea of god?
By my theory, what they have in common is abstraction. Ignore all the specific details about how hard drives and human minds work, and just look at the specific abstract rules which we define as “god”. These are complex, so we can’t easily visualize this removal of details. It’s much easier when talking about apples and numbers. You can see that when you have 2 apples, you can get the idea of 2 by ignoring the fact that it’s apples, and that they’re in a bag, and that gravity is affecting them. It’s also easy to see when talking about balls. You get the idea of a ball by taking a sphere of matter, forgetting what it’s composed of and forgetting it’s radius. This abstract idea of a “ball” fits many things, because it’s just ignoring details which vary from ball to ball.
So my claim is that the idea of axiomatic systems exists in the physical universe. In fact, all the ideas we ever have, and there rules, exist in the physical universe. But if we take PA as an example, the idea of PA exists in a mathematician’s mind, and numbers emerge inside this idea of PA, because numbers do emerge inside PA. So by removing the details of how PA is stored in the mathematician’s mind, we obtain numbers, which is just like getting numbers by removing the details about apples.
This still leaves the question of why numbers emerge in so many places. My best guess is that they do because the universe is built upon simple and universal laws of physics, so it’s only natural that the same patterns would be appear everywhere.