[ExI] Problems with Platonia again

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Thu Sep 25 07:55:12 UTC 2008


Stuart our Avantguardian writes

> Lee wrote:
> 
>> To sum up, the answer to Wigner's question concerning
>> the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics",
>> as in
>> http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html,
>> is that mathematics cannot be thought of as in any way
>> distinct or separate from the physical universe, but only
>> our way of describing the universe's own preexisting
>> constraints.
> 
> So does this mean you renounce Platonia, Lee? ;-)

Like I've said from day one! Could someone please explain
how the frames in Platonia are tied together the way Balbour
and fellow travelers say? 

(I see where the confusion may lie (or maybe I'm just confused.)
I am a *mathematical* platonist, which is not at all the same 
thing as someone who believes that our physical universe just
reduces to timeless Platonia. A mathematical platonist merely
affirms that the patterns are "out there", be they in Platonia
or (as I say) embedded in constraints in the way our universe
behaves. I have no quarrel with the followers of Platonia on
that score.)

In particular, how does a physical law obtain from a Platonia
viewpoint? Suppose snapshots are all that exists. Let a sequence
of them be f1, f2, f3, f4, ... that amount to a photon in motion
which is following a Maxwell equation, conserving momentum
and so on. But somewhere in the pile of all possible configurations
of the universe is an f3', which has the photon in some very weird
place and an f4' so that between them f3' and f4' correspond to
a photon going the other direction far, far away. Why is f2 somehow
more tightly coupled to f3 than to f3'?

I.e., how does physical law emerge?

Lee




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