One of the great mysteries
still to be addressed by philosophy is
Why is it that numbers? Which are after all?
constructs of the human mind
Why is it that numbers are?
so
incredibly powerful for the description of nature
nature after all is somehow given we find it all around us and
numbers arise in the depths of human
ratio summation
So what is the relationship of these things to each other?
This is it may appear to be an
Easy question it's such a difficult question that it wasn't even asked in philosophy
until the 20th century
It's very
Puzzling and I think that it indicates a fundamental congruence between
Processes that are mental and the structure of the world itself. This is why I
didn't get into it too much tonight in a popular lecture like this, but I am the inventor or the purveyor of a
mathematical theory of consciousness, and I believe that
More powerful than any atom smasher more
subtle than any Space
Telescope is the human mind
The human mind is the most
subtle and superb of all instruments for the study and measurement of
Nature when we look into ourselves
we discover the same patterns that we discover in the birth and death of
a species the flow of a river
the collapse of a corporation or the flowering of a love affair
It's that process
Is somehow under the aegis of a kind of universal?
Equation of description so it doesn't matter whether it's the birth and death of your hope
Or the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire or the evolution of the Pacific Ocean?
processes always occur in the same way, and this is why there is
Congruence between the mental world of human beings and the world of abstract
mathematics and the world of nature these things are as it were simply different levels of
condensation of the same
Universal stuff, this is why the concept of truth
Can have some meaning I mean when you think about it truth?
Why should it? Even be possible for us as monkeys?
To entertain that notion, where is it writ large that?
Mammals traveling in packs should have any relationship to truth
Whatsoever and yet the faith is that somehow?
Thinking means something it's not just something we do it
Means something it means something because there is sufficient
freedom within the human system to be both right or wrong and
This right or wrong lays upon us the obligation of mirroring nature in
Models which we build in our own minds now the old idea in science was that these
mathematical models of nature were in fact laws
truths
Eternal platonic truths that were being teased out in the 20th century
a slight deepest omalo djegal
Sophistication leads to this word models where we say we're modeling
reality and our model is only as good as
Need to be if we're trying to model the flight of an artillery shell
The model needs to be only good enough to get the artillery shell to its target
We don't need to understand the essence of lead or the nature of motion there
We simply need the model to kick out the data that interests us and in the 20th century
It's been understood that all knowledge is
Dependent upon the question asked and the relationship of mathematics to nature is one of the profound
indicators, I think that
Truth can be known maybe not the truth
But I always think of the positivist philosopher Vidkun Stein who was once?
Asked in a classroom situation about a certain proposition is it the truth and he said well
it's certainly true enough and
You know that's where we are with our modeling of the world and with our mathematics
It is the truest truth. We know it is true enough
somebody else here yeah in front
You
