Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

He does make the rather blithe assumption that mathematics is somehow real, and not an idiopathic artefact of our cognition, as much as the apparently respectively static and dynamic nature of space and time that he notes most posess. Perhaps mathematics is also a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Me, I see the universe as information, and everything else flows from that. We are needles scratching out the tune from a hyperdimensional record. Our mathematical laws may well be encoded within that information, or are representative of symmetry within it, which is also reflected on the structures and strictures of our minds, but I see mathematics as effect rather than cause - not that there's really such a thing as causality, either, if you stop thinking of "the arrow of time" as being a thing other than how we experience spacetime. Causality is as human an invention as sunrise.

Then again, I'm assuming that information can exist.

Perhaps it's turtles^W simulations all the way down.

You can argue that Time is an illusion. You can argue that our intelligence allowed us to break free from the harsh laws of nature and evolution too soon, so we never acquired the necessary sensors and abilities. Maybe if we had to compete against multiple equally intelligent species, we would have acquired them. However, I think that using a "vision of Time as it really is" sensor correctly would require a far more complex and energy-hungry brain, so it's probably not "worth it" from an evolutionary perspective. Or maybe it's out of reach of carbon-based organisms.

However Mathematics are different. It's not a perception. It even allowed us to discover things we could not perceive, and explore things we cannot perceive. It is independent from us and the universe. And if you still want to throw away Mathematics, you'll also have to throw away logic, which is kind of an issue. The only thing one could seriously argue, is that something better than Mathematics exists, like General Relatively is "better" than Newtonian mechanics. But maybe that is out of our reach, too.

Meanwhile, repeat after me: I believe in modus ponens, set theory and monads.

>However Mathematics are different. It's not a perception. It even allowed us to discover things we could not perceive, and explore things we cannot perceive. It is independent from us and the universe.

You only say that as someone inside a universe with mathematics entangled with it. I don't think we can say anything about mathematics being "independent of the universe" just because we conceive them with our minds.

One could imagine another "universe" where even standard logic (A=A for starters) doesn't hold.

When you say "information" what do you mean exactly? I can see information as a set of constraints that arises in the system due to how it evolves, and that those constraints enable structure to emerge, and that with the law of conservation of energy no energy can be created or destroyed, it means that all those structures can only do what they can do, any deviation from the constraints will require new energy or removing energy from the system to alter the course.

I like your needles - hyperdimensional record analogy. I would say mathematics encodes for and predicts a certain set of constraints, but we can never be sure we have observed or found the most fundamental constraint, and so to us, an incomplete mathematical 'law' will look like it needs energy added or removed to fit with the real world, but in reality it's just a constraint somewhere that we haven't seen that will readjust the series. All of this is kind of written on a whim, I'm not sure I thought it through enough :

All that can be, is. A mathematical proof is a statement about what can be in a particular system. A system can be anything that can be dreamed, by yourself, or indeed by the universe. Therefore mathematics in it's widest definition is the study of what can be in the universe.

Its like this: If something is to exist, would it not be absolutely absurd that only this exists? This universe in this particular configuration, out of all the possible configurations? It cannot be. Either there is nothing or there is everything. If there is everything then all possible configurations of thing are. Some of those things have patterns within them that 'percieve' the world to be time like. When really the whole thing is timeless, it is like all configurations of thing saved onto one giant hardrive, your life in bits on a 2 dimensional substrate. From the outside its timeless. From the context of you at x,y,z it is timefull.

Is this not totally obvious? How can this not be obviously true to everyone?

> Me, I see the universe as information, and everything else flows from that.

I admire the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (by Giulio Tononi) a lot. It provides an impressive intuition pump towards the nature of consciousness and the necessary conditions for it to arise. It also goes much deeper than "consciousness is a complex pattern in space-time", by detailing "what does it mean to be complex?", what kind of complexity leads to consciousness and how can we compare various systems to see their degree of consciousness/complexity.

The IIT surely does not give a definitive answer on consciousness, it is not even able to compute an approximate complexity score for the human brain, and doesn't explain why complexity is linked to consciousness in the first place, but it helps us see in many directions where we could only stumble in darkness before.

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