Math and Reality

[Purple Rabbit]

Thanx for your reaction Sae in these slums of the forums avoided by the great mathematical minds of AF.

I was intrigued by your statements in the shoutbox, especially this one :

"The concepts do not require the human mind to exist. Only in identifying is the mind required. They are helpful in describing reality because they are reality (or at least the pattern[s] by which it follows)."

That first sentence strongly suggest that mathematical concepts exist independently of a mind that thinks 'm. But what follows suggests that you think that math is a conceptual implementation of what the human mind sees in reality.

That would necessarily have to mean that math 'follows' reality i.e., the pattern you speak of is first somehow observed in nature and then abstracted into mathematics. But that imo is not the case with many mathematical concepts. Complex numbers come to mind, infinities too, Minkovski space was there before Einstein made use of it, and a whole lot of contemporary math has no known correlate in reality whatsoever. So this poses a real problem for the view that mathematical concepts are derived somehow from reality. In fact it looks just the other way around. Many mathematical concepts probably will never have known correlates in reality.

So this is a strong argument for mathematical idealists, which in fact is a form of dualism.

Furthermore in contemporary physics the situation has even 'deteriorated' much more, in the sense that where physical intuition has lead the way to new breakthroughs it has been replaced by math itself. The Nobel Prize winning physicist and one of the fathers of quantum mechanics Paul Dirac was famous for his insightful advice, “follow the math.” Indeed, following the math and leaving our physical intuitions behind has become a necessary and revealing trend in physics, string theory being a exceptionally strong case for that.