I don’t think it’s quite right to say the idea of the universe being in some sense mathematical is purely a carry-over of Judeo-Christian heritage—what about the Greek atomists like Leucippus and Democritus for example?
From what I’m aware, the teachings of Greek classics in Christian schools made the two cultures rather closely aligned; the rationalist traditions have firm roots in Greek philosophy, including standards of evidence, court as argumentation, even democracy itself. Aristotle and the likes were required reading during the hundreds of years of the evolution of the Western university education system. I’m a bit ignorant of the details there in all honesty, but I think today’s beliefs have some interesting parallels with the Pythagorean maths cult!
In today’s age, most people haven’t read Greek philosophy, they hold values that come from their peer group and an establishment that was built by Christian scientists. Specific ideas come from across all the world’s influential cultures, it’d be an absurd anglocentric view to argue they didn’t. So my point isn’t that “Christians created it all” but more “the Christian tropes that aren’t obvious enough to be challenged still remain, and are responsible for cognitive biases that we hold today.”
The notion of “structure” might be a good starting point, since there are good cases for the structuralist perspective (where each part is defined wholly by its relation to other parts, with no purely intrinsic properties) in all three
I kind of agree here, but I prefer the process and interaction framing. As with the other things like determinism, laws or objective reality, structure can naturally emerge from simple processes but the reverse needs some other aspect or doesn’t say anything. This isn’t a good analogy because it’s about objects, but take Conway’s game of life as an example. It has structures on a higher levels due to the differences between cells, but all that really exists is the bitfield. The idea of structure gives us a way to reason about it; a glider is an us thing rather than an it thing.
I think structuralism puts the map first in a similar way. I do think the differences between things shape possibilities and at higher levels these give rise to very complex structure, and yes this could be said to “exist” or even be existence itself. But the framing makes the territory a kind of map, which leads to the kind of thinking that I object to.
… more a matter of how this has been a successful paradigm in science which continually expands the range of how many phenomenon can be explained
Absolutely. Success is what gave science the authority of truth. In order to make progress in it or to teach it, it helps to have a simple memetic framework that’s compatible with it and—perhaps more importantly—is compatible with the competition. It’s got to be robust and incorruptible, accessible so it can onboard new minds, be morally acceptable so it doesn’t get suppressed and so on. And that’s what we’re left with, memes that are extremely resilient to change, shaped by history rather than built from first principles.
I think the same can be said about the reductionist view that all physical behavior is in principle reducible to physics.
I have to object to that on weak and shaky grounds of ignorance! 🙂
Firstly we can’t really hope to simulate a molecule from quantum theory, we’d need way more compute than is possible. So whatever optimizations we make in order to understand stuff will be biased by our own beliefs. Secondly, we’re hairless apes trying to fit the “laws” of nature into squiggly lines that represent mouth sounds, as tiny bags of water on the skin of an insignificant blob of molten rock, it’s kinda hubristic to assume that’s even possible. If we consider that everything may be a sea of Planck length things sloshing about, there’s potentially 30 orders of magnitude more stuff under the scale of what we can ever hope to measure. Finally, I think the idea of “laws” in general is human and based on us living in a world of solid, persistent objects, while we can only measure aggregates, and most of the universe is actually unpredictable fluids.
I think the aggregate thing is most important. Having physical laws based on average tendencies of things that we can measure, then saying that the universe “is” those laws seems like false authority. IMO stuff simply is what it is. We can try to understand it and work out rough maps of it, and we make better maps over time, but to say there exists a perfect map that all things are beholden to seems religious to me. It seems so unlikely that if it was proven to be true then I’d have to start believing in a creator!
Thanks again for the feedback, unfortunately I can only post one message a day here due to Lesswrong not liking this post. So gimme a nudge on Twitter if I don’t reply!
Thanks for the decent criticism!
From what I’m aware, the teachings of Greek classics in Christian schools made the two cultures rather closely aligned; the rationalist traditions have firm roots in Greek philosophy, including standards of evidence, court as argumentation, even democracy itself. Aristotle and the likes were required reading during the hundreds of years of the evolution of the Western university education system. I’m a bit ignorant of the details there in all honesty, but I think today’s beliefs have some interesting parallels with the Pythagorean maths cult!
In today’s age, most people haven’t read Greek philosophy, they hold values that come from their peer group and an establishment that was built by Christian scientists. Specific ideas come from across all the world’s influential cultures, it’d be an absurd anglocentric view to argue they didn’t. So my point isn’t that “Christians created it all” but more “the Christian tropes that aren’t obvious enough to be challenged still remain, and are responsible for cognitive biases that we hold today.”
I kind of agree here, but I prefer the process and interaction framing. As with the other things like determinism, laws or objective reality, structure can naturally emerge from simple processes but the reverse needs some other aspect or doesn’t say anything. This isn’t a good analogy because it’s about objects, but take Conway’s game of life as an example. It has structures on a higher levels due to the differences between cells, but all that really exists is the bitfield. The idea of structure gives us a way to reason about it; a glider is an us thing rather than an it thing.
I think structuralism puts the map first in a similar way. I do think the differences between things shape possibilities and at higher levels these give rise to very complex structure, and yes this could be said to “exist” or even be existence itself. But the framing makes the territory a kind of map, which leads to the kind of thinking that I object to.
Absolutely. Success is what gave science the authority of truth. In order to make progress in it or to teach it, it helps to have a simple memetic framework that’s compatible with it and—perhaps more importantly—is compatible with the competition. It’s got to be robust and incorruptible, accessible so it can onboard new minds, be morally acceptable so it doesn’t get suppressed and so on. And that’s what we’re left with, memes that are extremely resilient to change, shaped by history rather than built from first principles.
I have to object to that on weak and shaky grounds of ignorance! 🙂
Firstly we can’t really hope to simulate a molecule from quantum theory, we’d need way more compute than is possible. So whatever optimizations we make in order to understand stuff will be biased by our own beliefs. Secondly, we’re hairless apes trying to fit the “laws” of nature into squiggly lines that represent mouth sounds, as tiny bags of water on the skin of an insignificant blob of molten rock, it’s kinda hubristic to assume that’s even possible. If we consider that everything may be a sea of Planck length things sloshing about, there’s potentially 30 orders of magnitude more stuff under the scale of what we can ever hope to measure. Finally, I think the idea of “laws” in general is human and based on us living in a world of solid, persistent objects, while we can only measure aggregates, and most of the universe is actually unpredictable fluids.
I think the aggregate thing is most important. Having physical laws based on average tendencies of things that we can measure, then saying that the universe “is” those laws seems like false authority. IMO stuff simply is what it is. We can try to understand it and work out rough maps of it, and we make better maps over time, but to say there exists a perfect map that all things are beholden to seems religious to me. It seems so unlikely that if it was proven to be true then I’d have to start believing in a creator!
Thanks again for the feedback, unfortunately I can only post one message a day here due to Lesswrong not liking this post. So gimme a nudge on Twitter if I don’t reply!