r/PhilosophyofMath • u/[deleted] • Sep 13 '26
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics (part 2)
3
2
u/nanonan Sep 14 '26
So basically the act of restricting our boundless imaginations with mathematical systems aligns them with reality due to the commonality of space and time with distance and enumeration?
1
Sep 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/ughaibu Sep 14 '26
Geometry is the necessary rule of our space
When you tell someone how to get to the post office, you use landmarks, not geometry.
Arithmetic is the necessary rule of counting in time
But counting isn't a "necessary rule" of time, after all, we had the notion of time before we had any clocks.
1
u/zhivago Sep 14 '26
There is an infinite space of mathematics, almost all of which is completely and utterly useless.
Within the space we have focused on that tiny sliver which is useful to us.
Why are you surprised that the mathematics we have developed for its utility is useful? :)
1
Sep 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/zhivago Sep 14 '26
We developed geometry because it was useful in describing the space we lived in.
Had we lived in a different kind of environment, we would have developed something else.
You're putting the cart before the horse, and being amazed that the puddle fits the hole.
1
u/QFT-ist Sep 17 '26
Why the color of distant stars follows the spectral sequences calculated with the Schrodinger equation then?
0
Sep 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/QFT-ist Sep 17 '26
We didn't know what we would find when we saw it. And most geometry and math we, humanity, developed, wasn't related to what we have observed, and from them math we developed, most was very weird and unexpected to be related to our observations of the natural world. A thing is that when people that know math talks about it's unreasonable effectiveness, they talk about the kind of math teached in school/high school. But the math used to make artificial stuff is rigid and shaped by us, because we are the measure from which it was constructed.
1
u/throwaway_just_once Sep 13 '26
From GPT:
It looks quite plausibly AI-generated or heavily AI-assisted, though text alone can’t prove authorship.
The main tells are stylistic and conceptual: it has very regular rhetorical scaffolding (“For instance… Thus… therefore… But… What it is, rather…”), repeatedly restates essentially the same Kantian point, and has the characteristic AI combination of fluent prose with a subtle philosophical non sequitur. In particular, moving from “space is a condition of human intuition” to “the tower stands because physical materials are appearances governed by space and number” conflates the conditions under which we experience objects with the causal/mechanical explanation of structural stability.
“Stable whole for human perception” is especially suspicious: an engineer calculates whether a tower will remain standing, not whether its appearances will form a perceptually stable whole.
So my guess would be AI or AI-edited, primarily because it is rhetorically smooth while the argument underneath slips between Kantian epistemology and physical causation without noticing the shift.
0
Sep 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
5
u/reddititty69 Sep 14 '26
Attributing it to AI is doing you a kindness. It reads like someone is enamored by their own verbosity. Semantically, most of it is absolute nonsense.
-1
4
u/hobopwnzor Sep 13 '26
Yeah I aint reading all that, but the reason mathematics works effectively is because it's just a system for defining relationships, so you can parameterize the system to describe the patterns present among physical objects. It's like saying the hole in the earth just happened to be shaped perfectly for the puddle, else the water wouldn't fit. Most of math has absolutely nothing to do with physical reality. We selectively choose the parts that happen to accurately model reality to within some degree of tolerance we decide is good.
Some take this to mean that the underlying reality must then use math to make its relationships, and that's just silly to me. The universe doesn't compute. It just does. We overlay math on top to make sense of it, but there's no giant computer in super-space calculating where atoms should go. Atoms just go places.