clear, if one fades out all unpleasant things like illnesses, war, murder, torture, destruction, disasters, man-made climate change, atomic bombs, hunger, greed etc., one could come perhaps on such an abstruse thought. The earth was ok - without the human being. With the human being also the destruction of our earth began and nothing looks at all after a divine plan.

 

They are the Devil's plans.

BTW, why was the Devil created? So that all misfortunes will be blamed on him and God will be free from all evil deeds? God is really intelligent in this matter...

 

Math is just an abstraction if math was nature we wouldn't have cheats like constants in physics or biology. Constants are just a way of saying, the math just will not work unless we alter everything by this much and they are all over the place. I am not as mathematically inclined as many of the people who have been around me in my life but I am well versed enough to know that models are just our pretty serviceable approximations of the observable and that it is a very good tool, but that like unlike most other things there are no limits (literally) in math and that is our best tool in trying to understand how things around us work, but it can not on it's own define anything that we can not ourselves understand.

You can pretty much model anything you want with math, it doesn't always correlate which is why we experiment and verify. 27 Dimension fractal string theory works supposedly, according to the 20-30 people on the planet that can even mildly wrap their brains around it, but until it can be tested, make predictions and those predictions verified it's just math and nothing else. We also have some issue with declaring tested theories as laws as of late, but that's a different issue.

You can use math to make people fly in video games by changing the constants and creating a simpler cosmos with different rules. Math is just a tool for abstraction.

 

The answer to purple vs blue is a couple of posts up.

TLDR chlorophyll and nitrogen are why we are green and blue today and the over abundance of success or Archea was stopped dead in tracks by a evolutionary rival cyanobacteria that was toxic to the prevalent purple life that as around at the time. This oxidized the ammonia and other nitric gasses in our atmosphere and supplanted it all with nitrogen and free oxygen turning us green and blue.

That's the mathematical model and it checks out versus surviving halobacteria/archea and modern chloroplast photosynthetic organisim genomes.

 

I might be misattributing and misremembering this quote, but it has stuck with me so here goes:

"I find it hard to believe in just one god since to me the world looks like it was designed by a committee."
-- H.L. Mencken

 

Given that "is it all maths?" seems to be getting an airing...

2 parts to this
(1) Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered?
and then the nicer broader context
(2) What Things Really Exist?

For both, below is some intelligent discussion from Sir Roger Penrose.
This is intelligent reflection on enduring philosophical puzzles.
Note how Penrose (with a deeper understanding of these issues than all of us put together) is just humbly describing the puzzles, just carefully exploring and considering the "what if's" of different perspectives.
As a thoughtful philosopher, scientist, mathematician, he makes no wild claims about having answers.
i.e., He's doing exactly the opposite of the confidence-based-on-ignorance garbage that we see here too often.
You won't find any shallow, falsely comforting 'my favourite supreme being did it' answers from Penrose.

(1) Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered? - Video Conversation

Spoiler: Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered? - Video Conversation

(i.e., where does maths fit into reality)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujvS2K06dg4

(2) What Things Really Exist? - "3-worlds 3-mysteries" - Book Extract and Video Conversation

Spoiler: What Things Really Exist? - Book Extract and Video Conversation

In the spoiler below - a 2-page extract from Penrose's book 'The Road to Reality' containing a diagram that poetically-visually summarises the puzzles being discussed here. It's worth looking at the diagram below before or while watching the video.

Spoiler: Penrose - 3 Worlds - 3 mysteries

Spoiler: Video - Roger Penrose - What Things Really Exist?

(2) Roger Penrose - What Things Really Exist?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9Q6SWcTA9w

Further comments

The "3-worlds 3-mysteries" diagram.
Because that diagram summarises unanswered philosophical puzzles, it has been hijacked countless times by many woo woo nutters wishing to promote their own doolally mystical views of reality. Be prepared to find vandalised embellished versions of that diagram all over the web which try to falsely garnish credentials by being based on Penrose's thoughtful diagram - but which Penrose (and any other sane person) would almost certainly vomit at.

The videos
They are from a 'Closer to Truth' conversation. There are several other videos available from the same conversation.
e.g.,

Spoiler: More Penrose Videos from Closer to Truth

Roger Penrose - Why Explore Cosmos and Consciousness?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlv8DVb6e0Q

Roger Penrose - Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life and Mind?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDqny7UzyR4

 

I cannot deny that God exists.
But neither say yes!

 

Penrose is a goddamn genius, we all know that. But he's just not one of those mad scientist types, he's a very "feet on the ground" kind of a person.

I keep bringing this book up, but again, read "The Emperor's New Mind" by RP. It's a challenging book but it really reconfigured my mindset about consciousness.

 

Re: discussions of colours (purple skies, etc)

Seriously people - it is embarrassing to think that these (21st Century!?!?) discussions seem to be just hopelessly unaware of intuitive knowledge from the Ancient Greeks and formal knowledge from the 17th Century.
For literally hundreds of years it has been very well understood that colours exist ONLY INSIDE BRAINS.
This is not doolally woo woo! - Of course there is a physical world external to our brains with amazing physical properties, which impact upon us via our equally physical sensory apparatus, but only at the end of the physical-perceptual chain does a phenomenon like COLOUR get generated as a mental phenomenon.
Prior to that, it's all just transduction of oscillatory patterns in various physical media - IT IS NOT COLOUR!
The universe is a DARK and SILENT place outside of brains. read - and read again - and read again!

It is no use just shrugging your shoulders at that, as though it's just a weird or inconvenient or tricky complication.
This is old absolutely well established conventional CORE knowledge required to underpin all discussions that have anything to do with perceiving colour.
At the end of the day, statements like "The sky is blue and grass is green" mean little more than "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder".
Replace with memes like "sky has physical properties, light interacts with them, light smashes into eyeballs, all gets converted into neuro-electrical impulses; brains say 'what the f*&k am I supposed to do with all of that? - aha - I invent colour!"
Repeat similar story for sound and music!!!

Please, suck it up, or just stop talking about imaginary features of the external world.

 

Personally as far as I was talking about purple earth vs blue earth it has nothing do with the color but things have names so people will use those names to communicate. BEAT16 said 'why isn't the earth purple' and I replied that at one time it was because it was. The Archea (not quite bacteria) that gave rise to halophillic anaerobes that still thrive in some exotic and hostile environments here on earth were using photosynthetic pigments that took advantage of the greatest amount of energy broadcast by our closest star and reflected what they could not use or would do them harm, so they sucked up everything from just beyond infra red to just bellow ultraviolet (that includes the color green) and therefore reflecting all the left over deep blue, violet and red back into a low oxygen atmosphere dominated by Ammonia, methane and carbon dioxide the skies and the planet itself were a light to deep shade of violet or purple. This has nothing to do with the name but it is a physical phenomena, the wave function of photons that we perceive as whatever is just the result of a chemical process that allows us differentiate between different wavelengths of light.

Colors of light or more succinctly radio-astronomy (which includes light as well x-g- and other em bands), along with it's Doppler shifts and lensing are actually quite useful in the hard science & cosmology about things beyond our little ball of rock. These large opto-cabale telescopes aren't really out there to give us pictures of stuff but because that part of EM band that we refer to as light is a useful physical phenomenon even in it's absence. Curved space time was verified by light bending around our local star. The mass of our local star is approximated by the Doppler shift that light exhibits as we see objects behind our star and the difference in measured color (nm) as those objects move away from the lensing effect of our local star gravity. I know Relativity is full of holes, but that doesn't mean it's all holes and colors are just what we call some of those phenomena because we have to call them something to converse about them with each other in a meaningful way.

I have no preference for any color either on this planet or an other, but outside of what we call them, the wave state functions of photons is not imaginary. You might as well have been going about flat-earth for all I could understand.

The Universe might be somewhat dark but even that darkness actually has a color as heat even though we can not see it is visible to some creatures and things and that cosmic background radiation is pretty much homogeneous throughout our observable universe.

I agree with about 95% of everything you write but on this one I am going to dodge that brow beating, because all of that is a one way line to solipsism, which if we are going to be philosophical about things is a logical dead end.

It's fun to go for a piss take, I don't know where you are coming or going with that one. When there are no more brains, and no more earth there will still be a Universe and beyond that a Cosmos and it is neither dark or silent. The more dead it gets the louder it gets until all that will be left is a hummm, or maybe not... we haven't gotten to that part yet.



If you like Cosmology I think the entire PBS SpaceTime hosted by overly whispery Dr. M. O'Dowd is online on youtube.


Edit: Just looked for it and included a link, it's fun stuff and it has some education value even if it is dumbed down a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g

 

Last edited: May 14, 2022

I love your response; I enjoyed the pushback and the overt frustration.
I know where its coming from, but I'm obliged to constructively push back.
(apologies for inevitable repetition - don't have time to repair or tidy up forum improvs)

The TL:DR response (itself also too long) is just to say that...
My post had zero piss-taking, and zero controversy. There's not even anything new in there.
Like I said, this is established knowledge since at least 17th century and utterly taken for granted by every contemporary neuro-scientist or cognitive scientist or philosopher of mind, or non-naive physicist.
I am sincere about all of the above (and non-arrogantly well informed)

Core of the problem
Confusion over 'our world' and 'our internal perceptual and cognitive models of our world' is to be expected. We are 'day-to-day' locked inside our mental models of the world. Even the superbly exquisite models generated by science. maths, and some philosophy, cannot allow us to escape that. But it's a life long mission to chip away at seeing the vast difference.
Just because a brain can invent 'blueness' - and clearly experience blueness every single day - and agree with every other human that we all experience it - does NOT mean that there is any actual blueness in the world 'outside of brains'.
It is sobering to eventually realise that the above truth for 'blueness' applies to a scarily large part of what we assume is real.
Our total dependence upon thinking in spatio-temporal-causal terms leaves us steeped in blindness.
As a metaphor - we can regard our sentience as being constructed from spatio-temporal-causal components - we're locked in there!
Never forget that the awesome experience you call 'being awake and aware and sensing' is being constructed on the fly by a biological machine. Even the 'mental you' that you think is doing that experiencing is constructed by that same biological machine.
Your mental life is, at best, in contact with only its own model - not directly with the real world being modelled.
Remind yourself that when you are looking at a map you are really not seeing the terrain!
The physical world is real (only idiots think otherwise) but for all of us, our grip on that reality is just a personal virtual reality game - we live with it and inside it - we have no choice.
Must repeat yet again - this is both old news (centuries old) and as hot a topic as it gets in contemporary studies of consciousness.

Even longer response (to points you raised)

Spoiler: Gasp! 8-)

You said...

No part of my rant was advocating or endorsing something as silly as solipsism.
(old joke: "Solipsism is such a good idea, I can't understand why it doesn't have widespread acceptance")

You said...

Absolutely - my post had no shred of naive endorsement for Bishop-Berkeley-style idealism.
i.e., the truly crazy (but worthy of exploration) idea that reality exists solely within consciousness, etc, (or worse - in the mind of God)

Ditto - nothing I said contradicts the magnificent pursuits of physics exploring our real physical world.
Note my serious but ultra-brief philosophy-of-science stance, i.e., I said..."Of course there is a physical world external to our brains with amazing physical properties, which impact upon us via our equally physical sensory apparatus".

Much of your commentary (that I liked) was fleshing out and agreeing with that. You were providing further science detail but not actually contradicting any of the philosophy, i.e., we both agree in "naturalism-physicalism" (without getting into all the nuances of unpacking those two related words)

I fully agree with your important sentence "and colors are just what we call some of those phenomena because we have to call them something to converse about them with each other in a meaningful way."
BUT it's more than that. We share not just a vocabulary but also a commonality of mental experiences. We share perceptual models of the world. My brain generates blueness; your brain generates blueness; we both point at the sky and say "let's call 'THAT' 'blue" and then we're good to go. BUT just because the entire human species performs that same mental trick does NOT mean that the 'blueness' is itself a physical feature of the sky. And we now know, as fact, that colours are properties of mental sensations and NOT properties of physical objects.
Which is why I will (and must), in my day-to-day life, (just like every human), rely on the model of the world that my perceptual brain gives me. I have no choice but to live inside my internal model of the world, so I will see grass as green and refer to the sky as blue, etc. But I still know (as truly common knowledge in science and philosophy) that the greenness and the blueness are ONLY mental constructs. They are features of (properties of) my brain's model of the world - not features of (properties of) the world outside of my brain.

When you said... "The Universe might be somewhat dark but even that darkness actually has a color as heat".
That is missing my point again. The Universe does not have a colour (outside of brains) - it has phenomena which we describe as radiation in our scientific models and if and when our brains use a slice of that radiation to generate mental phenomena, then and only then, colour sensations are constructed.
So let' stay closer to home rather than the remote universe. I claim that immediately outside of your head, 'on planet Earth', we are saturated in physically real 'electro-magnetic radiation (EM)' (or streams of photons if you will) - but it is still DARK.
Yes - it is bristling with EM that impacts upon your eyes. Your eyes can react to a narrow band of the EM frequencies and that reaction (eventually) generates neuro-electrical impulses comprising patterns that are based on features of that EM radiation. But NONE OF THAT is 'in reality' the sensation of blueness or greenness. ALL of the blueness, and greenness (and perhaps more disturbingly - even the 'lightness') is constructed further along the perceptual chain, and created solely within the brain. The greenness and the blueness and the lightness, is not a property of any part of the EM radiation. Photons can do whatever dance they like, but they still do not have colours; and here's a step further just to be pedantic - ALL LIGHT IS ACTUALLY INVISIBLE. Light is of course DETECTABLE, but visibility is a mental phenomenon that your brain constructs - and your brain subjectively decides how much of the detected light will contribute to its internally manufactured sense of 'visible light and shade',

Some other extra-terrestrial species may have utterly different apparatus with which to respond to that EM radiation. That species may have 'as much', or 'less'. or 'more', sensory capability as the capabilities of our sensory apparatus and yet still have absolutely no sensation whatsoever of 'what we call colour'. Their brains may have evolved to construct some utterly different and utterly incomprehensible inner sensations. Consider how impossible it is to describe vision to a blind person, or hearing to a fully deaf person, or try to 'really describe' the difference between red and blue to someone with monochrome vision. Just telling them about frequencies tells them nothing about the experience.

But why invoke extra terrestrials. We can't even be sure that our cousins on earth, with similar biology, aren't playing very different games with their perceptual apparatus. There's no reason why a brain 'had to' use photon streams as the preferred info to generate mental visual sensations. A bat might be generating visual imagery from info received in its ears. Note it would be very naive to regard that as a 'translation of audio into vision'. From a brain's perspective, sitting inside a dark silent skull, receiving ONLY neuro-electrical impulses, it makes no absolute difference whether the upstream impulses originated from the ears or from the eyes, it's still all just neuro-electrical impulses. The brain could choose to build a visual sensation from the impulses originating from the ears if it wanted to - neither is 'more real' than the other. Read about people who experience synesthesia to observe that stuff like this does actually happen in healthy humans. And if you care to explore the right kind of audio-visual illusions (but illusion is the wrong word) it is easy to demonstrate that your normal healthy brain often generates audio sensations based on info arriving from your eyes. Those audio sensations are indistinguishable from what you normally regard as hearing because they are exactly the same processes that generate hearing from info arriving from your ears.

Enough - I could go on forever.

 

Last edited: May 14, 2022

i was just stating the definitive case of this:

in order to make a critique. it looked absurd, so i thought that was enough. an actual critique would be something like:

the use of an abstract language to describe a thing and relationships between things, is different to the actual observed thing itself. physics and astronomy do not say the universe is based on mathematics, they use an applied mathematics to describe and record the observation of the object(s) -- applied mathematics adapts to it, it is not mathematics. it could argued that it does not do a good job, but it is the best thing we have. it does a good enough job.

we can not observe any entities, and none are predicted or required by the current model. we will not get into zero mass at limits or inter-dimensionality. we have to stick to what is provable -- not speculative.

although it is not necessary -- because we are part of, and have the subject of our observation experiential available at any given moment. we then have to move into analogy or analogical thinking. not scientific or definitive, but it could be consider interesting if it produces results. given, "projected, programmed and implemented", and moving to a micro level "a matrix" could be the scalar field (higgs bosons) -- analogical pixel type thing. the interactive directional field (e.g. photons and other zero mass) as they move through the medium creating the discrete observable static and moving forces (quanta) -- an analogical scanline type mechanism. the mathematics describing the fluctuations of energy levels, appear to be non-linear functions (curves) over time and what ever dimensions are needed to fulfill the effect, and cyclical in nature moving through the required energy levels -- analogical scanrate. the calculus would only be useful for after-the-fact analysis.

where or what is the computer -- i don't know. maybe it is suppose to be the sum total of all interactive things or the mind of the 'creator entities'. this experiential phenomena makes us who make computers -- this could soon become a tautological nightmare. we (observers) could end up being the computers and the creators, unconsciously projecting on our own senses and measuring devices. as stated, "something that functions similar to a computer simulation", so we do not really need a computer, but there is no real need for a simulation either. how far do we need to stretch "similar" in this analogy?

i do not know enough about cybernetics in this context to comment, but i do not think it is required given the proposal.

what are people proposing this is a simulation of? for what or who's benefit?

why bother? there is already a working model that is accessible and consistent.

none of this points to or suggests any conscious director or process worker. the fallout from from an event model is much more consistent with what we observe. granted we may only be observing one phase of a regenerative cycle.

i do not know how old this speculation has been around, i have known about it for maybe something like 20 years. as a thought experiment or work of fiction -- fine. the problem is some groups adopt these modes of thinking as some sort of gnosis or justification for anti-realism and some horrible consequences that can bring and have brought.

it seems like a bad attempt to integrate the emerging pattern of getting knowledge and entertainment from devices into a broader science-fiction, semi-mystical unified theory, without doing the necessary work.

calling these or this proposed entitie(s) god, while perfectly acceptable, is not what is traditionally suggested by the originators of the concepts behind terms like that. the older cultic gods, including creation myths, seem to provide some embodiment of metaphysical principles as mnemonic devices -- i do not exactly know, i wasn't there. the more assertive contemporary fundamentalist mystic cults want a retributive force to enforce some sort of personal and social subjection. some an undefined, benign thing that is larger than the whole. is this a good fit in that pantheon?

 

I think our whole universe is probably just some kid's science project, and his universe is some other kid's science project ad-infinitum.

 

Math does not exist as a physical entity, but rather as a part of human knowledge (based on experience of structure and functioning of physical entities (- it's origin is empirical, as it is with any knowledge).
Math concepts do not change or interact among themselves. In order for any numerical changes (output) to happen to some existing numerical entity (input), we have to use physical entities shaped as numerical sets and physically connect them - addition/aggregation (throughput) [that happens in our heads too].
Math is derived from physical reality, so reality should be of numerical nature.
But since numerical values need some form of processing (physical aggregation), the everchanging world based on numerical structures is possible only thorough some cybernetic entity ('machine') capable of calculating/computing.
And that brings us to source of that cybernetic entity, and it is very probable that that source is of cybernetic nature too. That source can be named the Creator (of the world).

 

That line is a pure logical fallacy. The 1st half clearly DOES NOT lead to the 2nd half.

You could just as easily say...
Consciousness is derived from reality. so reality should be of a conscious nature.

But why stop there?
Fiction is derived from reality, so reality should be of a fictional nature.

OR
Cockroaches are derived from reality, so... blah blah blah, nonsense knows no bounds.

After that logical fallacy was interjected the rest of the arguments were just downhill all the way.
Just one non-sequitur after another until we ended up squarely in cloud cuckoo land.

Your "And this brings us to..." is worthy of a Vegas stage magician's fanfare "Ta Dah".

This is called post-hoc rationalisation - utterly different from rationality.

Post-hoc rationalisation is when you have a target conclusion that you insist on reaching and then all previous pseudo-logical steps are just manoeuvres and hand waving in an attempt to justify reaching that conclusion.
Nicely demonstrated - leads to total bunk.

Would it really hurt to check out the views about maths expressed by Penrose.
You may find he knows a thing or two about maths.
A real learning opportunity - but only if someone actually wants to explore and discover and learn.

 

According to Bostrom, in such a reality the odds of being in a simulated universe greatly exceed the odds of being in a 'non-simulated' universe. Not too difficult to fracture those arguments - but a fun idea to contemplate.
Either way - while we're figuring it out - DO NOT PISS OFF THAT KID! - some of us quite like it here.

 

In modern physics, over 90% is mathematics. Every idea must be mathematically expressed, understood and verified. And it even enables us to predict.
So the being [each quantum of substance] must at least have a mathematical [numeric] form.
The progress of being (evolution of the Universe) is given in form of successive addition/integration (cause-consequence ~ input-throughput-output).
Quite like cybernetics.
And practical cybernetics is always a means to achieve a goal. The goal might be establishing something that Plato called "moving images, controlled by numbers" (Theaetetus), or the 'World'. So the idea of 'simulation' or a 'projection' is 2.500 years old and is advocated in present time by some theorists.

 

The term God is usually used to describe a supernatural being who possesses
a great and transcendent power that cannot be described in scientific terms.

 

Last edited: May 14, 2022

I think your first few sentences here are fine. But then you say "So" and we're immediately downhill again via logical non-sequiturs.

I think those comments appropriately praise the predictive and explanatory power of using mathematics to accurately describe the models of reality proposed by physics. Easy to agree with all of that.
BUT none of that logically leads on to, or justifies, your next statement that physics, or the world being modelled by physics, is somehow 'physically made of mathematics'. All it means is that maths is a bloody good device for describing stuff. That does not justify the fantasy of believing that physical reality is actually physically made of maths at all!

If no sentient beings ever existed and none of their (invented or discovered) mathematical descriptions ever existed, the universe would still just carry on doing its thing regardless.

Speculations about how the universe works using a cybernetics metaphor just seem like fantasy. Trying to prop up that fantasy with discussion about maths (rather than any actual mathematical descriptions of physics models) just seems like a nice script for Star Trek.

 

Let's face it, religion is nuts with no basis in reality. It's just about money and control. People are just extremely gullible and will believe anything. I'm so happy that I found Scientology.