Mark Balaguer - Why the ‘Unreasonable Effectiveness’ of Mathematics?
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- Опубликовано: 16 сен 2024
- What is it about #mathematics that it can describe so accurately the world around us? From quantum physics, the very smallest features and forces of the foundations of matter and energy, to cosmology, the very largest structures and forces of the beginning and evolution of the universe, mathematics is the language of description. Why does the physical world follow so faithfully equations of abstract symbols and variables?
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Mark Balaguer is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics and Free Will as an Open Scientific Question (MIT Press).
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Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Balaguer is flat-out wrong about this. His excursion into temperature and real numbers shows he has no idea what the "unreasonable effectiveness" is. He has never had any education in the historical development of modern physics, either what de Broglie did, and later the Standard Model contributions by Wigner. General Relativity was also developed mathematically PRIOR to any particular empirical measurement. While there are enormous successes in the purely empirical approach, (where math is brought in as a post hoc descriptive device,) there are too many examples where the mathematical intuitions were developed first. We might even point at the invention of the programmable computer here.
One of my favorite philosopher of math his 2009 article about fictionnalism is amazing
loved it. this is the real stuff, more of this please
Bravo . . . Finally - I imagine this to be a quite important realization for the series .
wow Robert, I really admire your work on this channel
Remember - "Its just a name"
Excellent
Wow! Can't get clearer
If math was merely a naming system, then you could eliminate it from scientific practice. While philosophers will continue to awkwardly stumble around trying to nominalize scientific theories, actual scientists will continue to use mathematics in practice.
I'm puzzled why Balaguer says this, because it really collapses into a physicalist position--which he rightly rejects because so much of mathematics is neither motivated nor mappable onto the physical world.
Mathematics might be describing the unity of the physical reality or even a force of physical reality.
Related pages I wrote :
About the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
settheory.net/fqxi
antispirituality.net/skepticism3
About Balaguer's view :
settheory.net/philosophy-of-mathematics
100%
Love this guy. 😊
yeah. that sort of intelligence coupled with his matter of fact way of speaking is way cool. he's very humble too.
Personally, I don’t see anything unreasonable about it whatsoever.
What are the chances that physical reality would be structured in a way that's similar to the structures that are so well describable by our mathematics, particularly when there was no evolutionary reason for this to be the case and when our mathematics isn't pure logic.
So basically answer is that it is stupid question
According to neuroscience, the human brain distinguishes ideas based on the reward system and based on the concept of value, which differs from person to person and yours. The word "absurd" is associated with the word "faith in God" not because of the objectivity of the question. This was a good attempt to convince yourself of what you believe in.
See Sam Harris atheism and deception in the name of freedom
This is not a black or white issue. Some mathematics is clearly a product of human mind, but no all math was invented.
For example, positive integers clearly exited before any human was able to comprehend them. The same applies to basic rules of logic
@Psychiatrysts Well, there must be another reality. Perhaps positive integers a a portal to that reality.
We don't discover anything nor we invent.. ! We just try to copy from nature. There's no meaning to the universe. Meaning is in our minds.
"Clearly existed before any human was able to comprehend them" thats Clearly uncorroborateable. Explain.
Clearly gills existed before oxygen. Clearly stomachs existed before food. Clearly cd players existed before music. Clearly a existed before b. Clearly Adam had a penis before God created Eve and her vagina. In order for a to come before b there has to be either an evolutionary link (biological or physical precursor) or a dependency. But not a co-dependency ...maybe.
The more I think of it the notion of a coming before b may be more fundamental than it seems. It may define causality and therefore time. It may be a flawed, human aspect of reality and have nothing to do with reality itself, which would still make it key to apprehending human understanding. Perhaps placing human understanding in its proper place as a part of reality itself.
Cognition of reality produces sensation which leaves an impression (good or bad) in the brain. Re cognition of these sensations produces experience. Experience is the re- cognition of impressions within the brain: memory. Memory is the arbiter of reality. Memory in coincidence with reality survives, memory in opposition to reality fails but may still survive with correction.
Science has replaced memory with spacetime or other conceptions. The co incidence of these measurements with reality will lead to advances because of successes. The failure of these measurements to coincide with reality will lead to failure which may still be corrected given the intractable nature of reality.
If reality is more malleable at a certain scale then these measurements may not serve so well to co inside with it.
Why don’t you ask why the English language is so useful in describing the physical universe? Isn’t that a coincidence?
If this is the case, why don't animals speak English?
@Tracchofyre Logic and math are only useful after the physical universe has be operationalized into some set of values. That operationalization is always using some natural language (English, Arabic, Latin etc) which is outside the language of mathematics.
Speaking of languages that have too many words with many different meanings let's look at mathematics and logic. Consider all the different meanings there for 1. There's 1m, 1c, 1f, 1kcal, 1sec, 1¢ ect. Then consider how many numbers there are.
Mathematics would be meaningless if it didn't have some natural language to help it along.
Equations and solutions are the same as propositions and conclusions.
@@kallianpublico7517 In fact, all languages are made up of two basic components: Consonants
and vowels.
, and we have added the motions of numbers 1 and 0, so numbers 1 and 0 will be converted into a mechanism to describe reality.
@@mustafaelbahi7979 1 and zero are unity and nothingness
It is concerning and depressing to read the deceptive title of the show, closer to truth. This show can only make people dumber and more hidebound.
How much of this show have you watched? The only way I can imagine someone coming to that conclusion is if they are making a premature assumption about it.
It makes more sense to ignore this comment..
“Dumber and more hidebound--you mean, like you?
@Joe Davis
It would be nice if you could elaborate, because this remark is quite confusing, and does not bring me closer to truth..