h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi UnC

Is there room on that wall for another head?

I take it, then that the consensus is that maps and territories are not of sufficient interest to the assembled throng?

So what's the next topic for discussion, or must I...







Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

I would join in too, but my head's spinning too much to actually hit the wall.


Well, I think it's a wall, but I can't *prove* it.

Yes, indeed...there is a danger that the angels on pins are dancing in ever-decreasing circles.

But...before we move on...there's something in here which it seems to me is relevant to the whole religious/atheist divide.

At the mystical end of religion, there seems to be a notion that god or the spirit or the soul or nature or whatever are somehow 'other', some kind of thingummybob that is in this world, but not of this world. That's pretty much what P-C is saying about maths, no?

For the atheist reductionist, it's pretty damn clear that all these things are products of the human mind, and that the mind resides nowhere other than in our neurobiology. This will have Matholwch spiting feathers...but that's never worried me . So the various maps aren't abstract phenomenon. They're imprinted on a combination of our spongy jelly and various bits of paper.

Now...that's not to say that we can understand the map - or even find it - with a putative future brain scanner. Our thoughts about it are at a higher level of abstraction. But that abstraction, as god and other religious concepts, is only repeat only generated by brain processes.

Not in PC's view, no, Not even close.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

You've lost me then.

OK, Ed, I'll shout, and you'll have to try to ignore that sound of heads banging on walls.

I didn't intend to address anything mystical at all. I thought that the map-territory thing was well-known, if not well understood. In general, a map is a representation of something that assists you in navigating the thing it's a representation of. The territory is was the map purports to represent.

Take a specific example, where the map is the world-model in the mind of some human, and the corresponding territory is the real world.



Now a mountain, say Everest, is in the territory. It might be *represented* on a map of some sort, but Everest itself is in the territory.

Arithmetic, in contrast, exists only in maps. There is no arithmetic in the territory, the real world. There *are* processes in the real world which resemble certain arithmetic relationships. This is to be expected, as arithmetic is a good and useful contributor to many maps. But no digits (1, 2, 3...) exist in the real world, nor any other components of arithmetic.

That's it really.



Nothing mystical that I can see. The only possible confusion is that there are in the real world, the territory, maths books, which might confuse matters. Maps (in this example) are man-made or man-derived tools to help understand the real world. All of science is a map, or contributes to maps. And it does it very well indeed.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

: "The territory is *WHAT* the map purports to represent."

What about something like pi, then? In the 'real world', we don't see a symbol (which I don't know how to type in here), but still, whenever circles are measured, this damned ratio pops up *every single time* we measure the relationship between a circle's radius and its circumference. Is this not maths existing in nature?

In a certain sense, I'll give pi much more claim to existence than I give Greenland, or Mt Everest, or myself. It's well-defined, and none of those other things are. We're all grey around the edges. Pi is precisely what it is. It's a concept, and they're very amenable to logic. Now, if you treat existence itself as a logical concept, then concepts are gonna be real good at existing.

On the other hand, Greenland and Mt Everest and I (brrr ), we have a nice solid, rocky, snowy... flesh-and-blood kind of existence, and that feels like it should count for something. The problem with that type of existence is, if you try to analyze it into a bunch of concepts, you have to ignore the fact that reality is messier than concepts, and that everywhere you draw a line on your map, it should be a grey area. So you end up with a map that has the built-in error that reality is made up of nice and simple objects.





So, is there math in reality? I can only make a faith statement that math is universal, and therefore has some kind of transcendent existence.

Then I'll deny that I ever said that, and affirm that the only reality is the same old Tao-that-cannot-be-spoken, as is my usual tune.




GTB

Hey, who's been putting dents in my wall, eh?

>>On the other hand, Greenland and Mt Everest and I (brrr ), we have a nice solid, rocky, snowy... flesh-and-blood kind of existence, and that feels like it should count for something.>>

Counts for nothing at all, I'm afraid. All those things are *definitely* map symbols. If the territory consists of anything at all, it consists of rules. This is why it's so amenable to maths.

Noggin

"All those things are *definitely* map symbols. If the territory consists of anything at all, it consists of rules."

Surely that's a faith statement, no?

Nice one, P7: thanks. I think it's true to say that there are no perfect circles in nature, but I'd rather not just rely on that as a 'get-out', as this is interesting (to me ).



Oh their poor heads must be ringing!

Even if there are no perfect circles, let's assume that we can measure lots of imperfect circles, and use statistics to derive pi from the soup of measurements.

I imagine, if we were clever enough, we could also discover other universal constants like "e" (as in natural logarithms) and "G" (the gravitational thingie) in the natural world too.

So nature itself seems to encapsulate this ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle. Not a number, remember, and not with the unlimited accuracy of the map-derived value for pi either. Just a ratio: a relationship between two distances. I imagine similar observations could be made for "e" and "G".

So the natural world contains ratios. Is that maths existing in nature? Well I would say no, you'd need a bit more than this. But it's interesting the extent to which pi really does exist in the natural world, without any input or observation by a human being being () necessary.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

P.S. Intuitively, I find it fascinating that the numerical value of pi never terminates: its decimal places go on forever. Is it a coincidence that this is a 'natural' value, being imported into an invented numbering system with an arbitrary base? In such a case, you might expect that this would be the case, as it is so unlikely that our numbering base and that of nature (?) would match. , just rambling.

No implied mysticism intended, PC. I was drawing an analogy, not suggesting a congruence.

Another way to put it is that maths *does* exist in the real world...in the form of neural/paper imprints. Numbers exist. Pi exists as the discovered relationship between the circumferences and radii of circles.

Sure, whether pi would still exist if there where no people around to know the relationship is another, dafter issue, along the lines of 'If Helen Keller fell down in a deserted forest, would she make a sound?'

In the sense that these things exist in maps - i.e. in the world-models of people - and these people (and therefore their maps) exist in the real world? Yes, I can go with that.



You're a Bad Man, Ed!

Pattern-chaser

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Noggin:

GTB:

Faith statement or not, Noggin, this is a lot farther than I was going. I don't suppose you'd care to elaborate on your conclusions? How is Everest (the mountain, not the label "Everest") map-based? And if the territory - the real world in this case - consists only of rules, is this just saying the true () nature of the real world is unknowable, or is there more to it than that?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

At the risk of continuing to be sucked into the silliness vortex...

>>is this just saying the true ( ) nature of the real world is unknowable

Well, obviously the true nature of the world is unknowable. It's bigger and more complex than will fit into a single head. The maps (or other forms of description) describing the geology, meteorology, topology, flora, history and best climbing routes up Everest are used to supplement the heads of the different people with different aims in life. The map which completely decribed Everest, down to the level of the behaviour of the subatomic particles within its component rocks would be bigger than the mountain itself...and thus of no use to anyone.


But while I'm on...this 'unknowability' of the world once again seems to be a central theme for the mysticists. For the atheist fundamentalist, it's a non-issue. Why should we be able to 'know' the world? Can a bonobo? A dog? A slime mould?

I actually meant that we have no objective way to perceive it, but your points are just as valid.



For this pantheist too! But there are some science-ist literalists who think they have, or can have, objective knowledge of the world.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"