The biggest challenge for anybody claiming that "math isn't real" is providing a plausible explanation for why math has been so incredibly successful at predicting phenomena in the real world. How can something that's not real still predict real things?
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Replying to @geomblog @kareem_carr
It's incredible that one of my favorite intellectual topics—not as something I will make a claim on, just one I like to ponder as one of the great, wonderful mysteries of the universe—has become source for a meme fight on Twitter dot com in 2020 in the middle of a pandemic.
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Replying to @zeynep @kareem_carr
Too much time and too much general annoyance at the world because of being cooped up?
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Replying to @geomblog @kareem_carr
But but but I want to read about the "unreasonable effectiveness" and the "math is isomorphic to the world" and the "oh hey, it's all axioms" stuff but all we get is meme wars about 2+2... Not fair! I feel cheated.
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Joshua Loftus Retweeted Joshua Loftus
My favorite explanation for "unreasonable effectiveness" is the same as the explanation for "intelligent design" -- we're seeing the result of a long evolutionary process, cultural evolution in the case of mathhttps://twitter.com/joftius/status/1298991259621580814 …
Joshua Loftus added,
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This goes to one of Hamming's responses to Wigner as documented here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences#Richard_Hamming …
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I love the first of those 4 points. I think my argument is a synthesis of the first two
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I was recently asked—in earnest, as kids do—why the universe exists. For us to wonder about, I found myself saying without thinking and upon reflecting, it is one of my answers. Still, we co-evolved with it and that's why math works is .. dunno. It feels like believing in magic.
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Also feels like the wrong direction. Copernicus and Darwin and the whole process that decenters humans in the explanatory structure of the universe—then we go back to put us in the center to account for math (and/or wave function collapse)? Sense of humor required for this one.
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I get why it feels that way, but I do believe there's an important difference between e.g. geocentrism as a doctrine and understanding that our observations occurring from the reference frame of Earth come with observation biases or relativity implications
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