The question is whether or not maths exists independently of the material universe. Some people think it does (that it's true in all worlds, regardless of their laws of physics) while others think that it's a human invention approximating to physical phenomena. Personally I'm inclined to think that maths is true regardless of which universe you're in, or indeed true whether or not any universes exist. This is Max Tegmark's view, for example, as described in his book "Our Mathematical Universe". His idea (which is in the same ballpark as Bruno's, but approaching it from, as it were, the opposite direction) is that maths is necessarily true, and therefore makes a foundation on which to build an ontology that gets "somethig from nothing".
I'm not sure how one can test this, however. On Wednesday 11 September 2024 at 08:53:55 UTC+12 John Clark wrote: > On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 4:44 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote: > > *>* *Given any sequence of states you can label them so as to represent a >> computation. So I think the physics is really incidental to the >> computation.* >> > > *You need to make the labels, and making something involves a change, and > a change cannot happen without the involvement of matter and the laws of > physics. * > > John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis > <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> > uwx > > > > >> -- 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/974abc0d-9144-4507-9f93-5161d83432cen%40googlegroups.com.
