[ExI] Apple Pi

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

I was just musing about why is there something rather than nothing. This
question has bedeviled humans since time immemorial. God was invented as an
answer, and clever scholastics created whole whirlpools of circular
reasoning around the question - like "God is perfect, non-existence is
imperfect, so god must exist and he said "Fiat lux", so there we are,
something rather than nothing, so praise god".

But what if we try to dissect the psychology behind our questioning of
existence? When we think about anything at all aside from formal systems we
use our built-in intuitions. Intuitions are feelings about what is likely
to happen, what is likely to be, based on a complex, non-verbalized thought
process that develops in our minds from evolved mind forms that interact
with sensory inputs and various physical processes in our brains. In
creating formal systems we attempt to strip the complexity of intuitions
down to almost nothing, until only the inevitable remains, shaped by its
internal logic, seemingly unconnected to the complex world around us. The
crystalline purity of mathematics is thus chiseled out of the messy swirl
of our thoughts.

Our thinking about the observable world, such as apples, is full of
intuitions, rules of thumb imprinted on our mind by what we see. One of the
intuitions is the idea of "not being anymore". If you eat an apple, it's
not there. It is possible for an apple to not exist. This thought is
embedded in an enormous set of assumptions about our world, and not just
any world but the world where apples exist and are sometimes eaten. There
is a lot of complexity here, including the notions of time, identity,
space, hunger and deprivation. We think about the non-existence of apples
as something important in part because we have evolved to care about having
access to food. We think about our death because ancestors who had an
abstract fear of death were better able to use abstractions to solve
long-term challenges to their existence and thus gave us the genes for
thinking and the genes for fearing death. Everything that we think about
apples and us is highly theory-laden and sits on top of enormous complexity.

By contrast, formal systems are simple. They might impose a psychological
burden on us because we are not evolved to think specifically about them,
which is why there are so few mathematicians but by cutting off the complex
intuitions built into our minds we investigate entities that appear to be
inevitable, that have structures independent of our quotidian intuitions.
Take the number pi. It's defined in a very simple way yet its decimal
extension is an infinity of digits, unpredictable except by laboriously
computing them, every one of them in its place, too large to be stored in
any mind or computer but still inevitable. The mathematician exposed to
thinking about pi and other such entities soon develops the intuition of
timeless existence, Platonic form, something that is intangible but
unavoidably true. Mathematicians do not obsess about why pi is the way it
is, because pi is as it must be. They don't worry about pi not being there,
because the intuition tells them it cannot disappear and that's it. Case
closed.

So we have the high-level intuition about physical objects being able to
just be gone and we have the mathematical intuition about entities that are
outside of time, inevitable and thus beyond the question of cause and
effect. Pi is. It must be. God didn't invent pi. The question "Why is there
pi?" is ill-posed. Which intuition is true? Well, both, as long as you
apply the correct intuition (or rule-of-thumb) in the right context. You
can run out of apples, which may be important for survival, but you can't
run out of pi.

The nagging feeling that there must be a cause for existence in general and
the worry that it could just stop being comes from applying the intuition
we have about apples to the whole world, the sum-all of everything we can
think of, and then some. But is Being like an apple, or is it like pi?

Men much cleverer than I, such as Stephen Wolfram, Joscha Bach and others
say that the world is a formal system, a mathematical Being, and I feel
they are right, and have felt this way for many decades. All rules are
applied, the ruliad exists like pi because it is not possible for
mathematical things not to be. We are embedded in this formal system and we
create the intuitions we need to deal with our immediate vicinity but these
intuitions are ill-suited to the formal system itself. You need to clear
your mind of thoughts about apples and think about the world like
mathematicians think about numbers.

The world is not an apple, it is pi. Something exists. It must.

Rafal

-- 
Rafal Smigrodzki, MD-PhD
Schuyler Biotech PLLC
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