Seeing red

[Angrboda]

We use math to describe material interactions.  It's a useful and precise language...it helps us avoid common pitfalls of natural language, such as equivocation or interpretation.

That's not what Jörmungandr said:

Materialism is a reduction of all phenomenon to a small set of mathematical principles, with some metaphysics thrown in for good measure.

Maybe this was just an imprecise description, because it's not that different than my past descriptions of Idealism: that the most essential components of reality are reducible only to ideas-- like math functions.  Not that they are DESCRIBED by them, but that they ARE them.  I believe that under the hood, you won't find anything BUT math and other abstracts.  Do you believe that the math, at the most essential level of reality, is still descriptive of things?

I don't get what you're expecting to find here. Because we think in abstractions, our model of the world consists of a set of regularities defined by mathematical principles. It's the language in which we define how touch, sight, and feeling of the materia operate. You will never get down to anything else because at bottom it's a description of the behavior of reality, and descriptions by their nature are abstract. Do you think that if we drill the map down far enough we will suddenly encounter territory? All you will find is map and more map until the map can no longer be further refined. It will still be map.

So our difference is not in what we think the bottom layer will be like. At bottom, by its nature, there is only mathematics and abstracts. The question is whether those abstracts refer to something concrete or not, and you can't look to the abstracts to decide that question because doing so is uninformative. So the real question is why you have inferred that these abstracts don't point to something concrete? It can't be motivated by the fact that it's abstracts all the way down, that's just how models of reality work. So what is your motivation for denying that these abstracts refer to something concrete, when all our experience gives the impression of something concrete?