On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 09:35:47AM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote: > LizR wrote: > >On 15 June 2015 at 10:41, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au > ><mailto:li...@hpcoders.com.au>> wrote: > > > > To summarise, there appears to be two quite distinct questions here: > > > > a) Given there are regularities in Nature, why is our mathematics so > > effective. As Brent says, this is not surprising - evolution would see > > to it that we would choose a mathematical system out of the many > > possible that would be effective. > > > >That isn't surprising, of course - but I assume Brent wasn't being > >quite /that/ disingenuous. What is surprising (if anything at all > >is) is that our world is amenable to description by maths. > > That isn't particularly surprising either. The anthropic answer is > that if there weren't such regularities, we wouldn't be here to ask > questions about them. > > This answer has force if you assume some form of plenum -- > everything that can exist does exist in some universe. It also > follows from some more recent speculative cosmological and string > landscape ideas. But these ideas really do not require that > mathematics, per se, be at the basis of anything. > > Whether an anthropic answer will satisfy everyone is, however, > another question.... >
It is plausible that regularities are a required feature of conscious existence, of course, but it does smack of a post-hoc justification. At this stage, it's no worse than assuming meaning generation is a necessary feature of existence, and that this can only take place by compression of regularities, which is the Solomonoff type answer... Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
