Posted: May 30, 2019 7:56 pm
Cito di Pense wrote:BWE wrote:I wish I understood what you wrote there. I feel like I would be entertained.
What you wrote was pondering what it means that the universe is consistent. However, you might just be on the wrong, wibbly track again. Isn't it just more correct to use consistent in reference to descriptions? These are abstractions of what we observe, and they necessarily omit details in order to give the satisfaction of consistency. Think of that as a labor-saving device. What does it mean that we want and use compact descriptions? We want so many, many things, not all of them, or even very many of them, consistent with anything you didn't just make up on the spot.
How do we get consistent descriptions? We make them that way. We find plenty of inconsistent descriptions, too, but for some reason, those are less interesting to those who ask why mathematics works.
You could go off into conniptions of ooh and aah over the fact that there are descriptions at all.
I like that idea, conniptions about descriptions. It's like a pome.
Hmm. I think the thing that makes math so interesting (at least in the vein of Wigner's essay) is the fact that the law of noncontradiction appears to be absolute. I mean, there are certainly paradigm issues which will forever keep a ToE at bay, but so far there has not been a case where a directly inconsistent behavior has been discovered. It may be that you are right that we simply change our model to make inconsistencies into consistencies, but that suggests something kind of profound about models. Why do they work so well? Even granting that question may include its own answer in a circular way, it still suggests that modeling is a strange capacity that is nearly synonymous with the idea of sentience. Of course, each of those terms is a word and therefore a part of a model but strange loops involve information.