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Comment by syki | Hacker News Reader

You sidestepped the question about what rules of logic are intrinsic to the universe. There are different versions of logic. Is Law of the Excluded Middle intrinsic or not? A great many physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians don’t believe logic is intrinsic to the universe. Is ZFC intrinsic to the universe? Do large exist as a deduction from the math that is intrinsic to the universe?

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The law of the excluded middle is also known as the “sandwich theorem” because it drives directly from a physical observation. I happen to agree with the constructionists that mathematics is better formulated without it, but it is most definitely a rule derived from analogy to the physical world.

As a physicist myself, I’ll tell you that there isn’t a single one which believes that the universe doesn’t operate according to knowable rules. That’s kinda the definition of what it means to be a physicist.

Statisticians have a saying, “all models are wrong, some are useful”. What we have is that math is useful for modeling physics. But it is just that, a model in so far as we know. Believing that math or logic is intrinsic to the universe is not all necessary to using math and logic for modeling physical phenomena. There are quite a few physicists and mathematicians who don’t believe math is an intrinsic part of the universe.

It’s not at all clear that the Law of the Excluded Middle is an intrinsic part of the universe.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.10127

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=701

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/25227/using-the-multivers...

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