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To: Alamo-Girl
As for me, string theory is only an alternative geometric for space/time and therefore corporeals, cosmology, etc. - the great meaning is in the universals, an interpretation that everything is a mathematical structure which exists apart from space/time dimensionality (the Max Tegmark Level IV universe, radical mathematical Platonism).

Reification of mathematics. The map is not the territory. Mathematics is a map and does not "exist apart from space/time dimensionality" (or apart from the mind of man, for that matter.) If it did it wouldn't matter anyway because, by definition, we could never know that. Such radical Platonism would be unknown and unknowable.


28 posted on 03/16/2005 11:48:46 AM PST by LogicWings
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To: LogicWings; betty boop
Thank you for sharing your views!

Mathematics is a map and does not "exist apart from space/time dimensionality" (or apart from the mind of man, for that matter.)

This is the tension between the Aristotlean worldview and the Platonist worldview with reference to math. The Aristotles would say that the mathematician invents the mathematical structures. The Platonists would say that the mathematical structures exist and the mathematician only discovers them, e.g. pi exists, it was only discovered.

Tegmark: Parallel Universes

According to the Aristotelian paradigm, physical reality is fundamental and mathematical language is merely a useful approximation. According to the Platonic paradigm, the mathematical structure is the true reality and observers perceive it imperfectly. In other words, the two paradigms disagree on which is more basic, the frog perspective of the observer or the bird perspective of the physical laws. The Aristotelian paradigm prefers the frog perspective, whereas the Platonic paradigm prefers the bird perspective....

A mathematical structure is an abstract, immutable entity existing outside of space and time. If history were a movie, the structure would correspond not to a single frame of it but to the entire videotape. Consider, for example, a world made up of pointlike particles moving around in three-dimensional space. In four-dimensional spacetime--the bird perspective--these particle trajectories resemble a tangle of spaghetti. If the frog sees a particle moving with constant velocity, the bird sees a straight strand of uncooked spaghetti. If the frog sees a pair of orbiting particles, the bird sees two spaghetti strands intertwined like a double helix. To the frog, the world is described by Newton's laws of motion and gravitation. To the bird, it is described by the geometry of the pasta--a mathematical structure. The frog itself is merely a thick bundle of pasta, whose highly complex intertwining corresponds to a cluster of particles that store and process information. Our universe is far more complicated than this example, and scientists do not yet know to what, if any, mathematical structure it corresponds.


33 posted on 03/16/2005 11:57:27 AM PST by Alamo-Girl
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