Jolb
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Well, your examples here are not mathematical examples. You are stating physical examples that are impossible to understand, not mathematical examples. As I said before, all mathematics has to be understandable because it is a creation of humans all using an understanding of the mathematics.ApplePion said:"Why should Mathematics NOT be too big for the human mind? Why should the human mind be more than a machine? "
I agree with you. The human mind *evolved* for certain purposes. Why should it necessarily be good at things it did not evolve for?
Humans needed to be able to deal, at least intuitively, Newtonian mechanics because our ancestors had to hunt by throwing spears while hunting, to throw rocks at enemies etc. There was no need to understand multi-particle processes, so it is not surprising that things like phase transitions which are simple and neat empirically, have not been fully understood theoretically by humans.
Incidentally, the only way we can understand multi-particle processes and phase transitions theoretically is by using some sort of mathematics. Just remember that a lot of what we're discussing is the fact that physics≠mathematics.
I disagree with the idea that mathematical entities do not exist unless they are manifested physically as some informational process in a human brain. That would be to say that any time a new mathematical thought is conjured up by a mathematician, he is creating it out of nowhere. (This seems to violate some sort of "conservation law" to me.) As an example, you are saying that the Mandelbrodt set did not exist until the instant that Mandelbrot thought of it. That is nonsense. The Mandelbrot set always did and always will exist in the abstract mathematical ("platonic") reality.DragonPetter said:However, for those ideas/concepts to ever make it into our math and brains, it must have some real meaning, even as purely information in our brains and communicated through physical mediums. ... My reasoning tells me that all math that we know of or can imagine has to be grounded in the physical universe as reality, or else it would not be possible to manifest in our ideas/thoughts/communication - it would not exist.
As a second argument for the independent existence of mathematical entities, take for example a universal Turing machine. A universal Turing machine is capable of running any deterministic algorithm, of which there are infinitely many. Assuming each algorithm takes a finite amount of processing time, then it would be impossible to execute all of them. So there are always infinitely many algorithms which have never been executed.
Your argument says that a given algorithm does not exist until a Turing machine executes it. I would argue that as long as a Turing machine exists with the potential to run that algorithm, then that algorithm already exists without it already having been executed.
You don't even really need a universal Turing machine to make this example work. Imagine you had a super good calculator that can multiply any two numbers. For simplicity, use the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, ..., which of course there are infinitely many of. The algorithm in this case would be the calculator actually performing the multiplication. Your argument would say that the algorithm of multiplying two numbers A and B does not exist until one such calculator actually performs the multiplication of A and B.One thing I should clarify before someone points out that my two responses are ostensibly contradictory: "Mathematics" is not the same as the "abstract mathematical reality". The abstract mathematical reality always did and always will exist. Mathematics is a human activity that explores certain elements of the mathematical reality. Therefore it's totally consistent to say the following two things:
1. Mathematical discoveries must be understandable because they are derived by a human.
2. The mathematical entities these discoveries describe are not a creation of the human mind--rather, the mathematical result is a description of a discovered property of the mathematical universe.
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