[ExI] Apple Pi

[Jason Resch]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 5:58 AM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

"Object permanence" -- the psychological term for the understanding that
objects continue to exist even when no longer being sensed -- is learned.
Young children don't have it.

Likely it develops after the brain notices repeated reappearances of
objects that formerly disappeared from one's senses. Perhaps this is what
the game of peek-a-boo is meant to help teach.

But as we never encounter objects from the past reappearing in the present,
most humans, unless they study relativity, study Parmenides, or develop a
taste for Platonism, never come to develop "object permanence" for past and
future events. We are fooled into thinking that because we can't see the
past or future that they must not exist.


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?
>

I think all being is of the same kind: the necessary, mathematical,
platonic kind.

It is easier to understand our universe as a kind of platonic object once
you come to see it as a static four dimensional object, and time as a
subjective illusion for some substructures embedded within it. I write
about this in more detail here:

https://alwaysasking.com/what-is-time/



> 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.
>

I would add an additional, abd subtle point. That is, if the world exists
as a mathematical being, then an infinity of all possible universes exist.

Then our own consciousness minds, being finite objects of finite
complexity, will find our existence compatible with an ever changing, yet
infinite set of different such universes (as our memories and conscious
experience at any time will always be compatible with many such universes.

So we cannot really speak of our universe being any single formal object,
but rather we may have to speak of an infinite collection of different
formal objects. There's now strong reasons to believe this as it apparently
can explain many previously unanswerable questions concerning "why quantum
mechanics?"

I write about this here:
https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/#Why_Quantum_Mechanics

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.
>

Very well said, I agree!

Jason
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