Mathematical Universe? I Ain’t Convinced
By Massimo Pigliucci | January 16th 2014

So the other day Julia Galef and I had the pleasure of interviewing mathematical cosmologist Max Tegmark for the Rationally Speaking podcast. The episode will come out in late January, close to the release of Max’s book, presenting his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH). We had a lively and interesting conversation, but in the end, I’m not convinced (and I doubt Julia was either).

The basic idea is that the ultimate structure of reality is, well, a mathematical one. Please understand this well, because it is the crux of the discussion: Tegmark isn’t saying anything as mundane as that the world is best described by mathematics; he is saying that the ultimate nature of reality is mathematics.

This is actually not at all a new thesis, though Max is advancing it in new form and based on different reasoning then before. Indeed, the idea has a long philosophical history, and can fruitfully be thought of as based on two distinct philosophical positions: Pythagoreanism, or mathematical Platonism; and Mathematical monism.

Mathematical Platonism is the idea that mathematical structures are real in a mind-independent fashion. They are not “real” in the same sense as, say, chairs and electrons, but they do have an ontological status independent of the human (or any other) mind. As readers of this blog know, I’m actually sympathetic to (though not necessarily completely on board with) mathematical Platonism. The best point in its favor is the so-called “no miracles” argument, the idea that mathematics is too unreasonably effective (at predicting things about the world) for it to be just a human invention, rather than somehow part of the inherent fabric of the world. (Interestingly, this argument is equivalent to one by the same name advanced by scientific realists to claim that science really does describe — approximately — how the world is, as opposed to the antirealist position that the only thing we can say about science is that it is empirically adequate.)
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Could it be that theories like MUH are actually based on a category mistake? Obviously, I’m not suggesting that people like Tegmark make the elementary mistake of confusing the normal meaning of words like “objects” and “properties,” or of “physical” and “mathematical.” But perhaps they are making precisely that mistake in a metaphysical sense?
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newolder wrote:Mathematics and consciousness seems to have resurfaced again... http://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery- ... rates.html

may be off-topic, who and how can tell?

Abstract
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect

Physics of Life Reviews ••• (••••) •••–••• Review

Consciousness in the universe A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory

www.elsevier.com/locate/plrev

Stuart Hameroff a,∗,1, Roger Penrose b,2

a Anesthesiology, Psychology and Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
b Mathematical Institute and Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Received 23 July 2013; accepted 5 August 2013

Communicated by L. Perlovsky

The nature of consciousness, the mechanism by which it occurs in the brain, and its ultimate place in the universe are un- known. We proposed in the mid 1990’s that consciousness depends on biologically ‘orchestrated’ coherent quantum processes in collections of microtubules within brain neurons, that these quantum processes correlate with, and regulate, neuronal synaptic and membrane activity, and that the continuous Schrödinger evolution of each such process terminates in accordance with the specific Diósi–Penrose (DP) scheme of ‘objective reduction’ (‘OR’) of the quantum state. This orchestrated OR activity (‘Orch OR’) is taken to result in moments of conscious awareness and/or choice. The DP form of OR is related to the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and space–time geometry, so Orch OR suggests that there is a connection between the brain’s biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe. Here we review Orch OR in light of criticisms and developments in quantum biology, neu- roscience, physics and cosmology. We also introduce a novel suggestion of ‘beat frequencies’ of faster microtubule vibrations as a possible source of the observed electro-encephalographic (‘EEG’) correlates of consciousness. We conclude that consciousness plays an intrinsic role in the universe.

© 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.