Debunking of Modern Evolutionary and Cosmological Theories

[JuliaL]

I'm horribly ignorant of math beyond simple algebra and I haven't done any in-depth studies of the different ontological positions regarding numbers and the arguments for or against their existence in the sense of real or simply imaginary objects;

May I say that my math is old and creaky and if you think I am going to deeply grasp the wholly other thing that is quantum weirdness, then your faith is badly misplaced.  I do believe that consciousness is a material process and that any product of consciousness is thereby at least dependent on, if not being in its entirety, a material, real, process.  Much like I find 747s to be natural products because they are products of human designers who themselves are natural products.  Kind of counterintuitive, but I haven't seen evidence to the contrary.  Hence, for me, imaginary objects are real objects.

that being said, even if all thoughts can be demonstrated to correlate to electrochemical signals of the brain, I don't see how that would explain why numbers have the properties they do or why they* seem to exist only as mental representations of a certain class of objects and yet describe the world with such uniform and regular precision, a characteristic they match to a tee.

We create them as mental representations because they are useful constructions in organizing our observations. Predator pursuit courses and ballistic trajectories help us eat.  Math refines this...to still help us eat. If it didn't, there would still be the consistencies in reality that make up reality but we wouldn't care.  I don't seem to be as impressed as some others are in the match between math and reality.  From what I see, the match is pretty coarse or we'd be able to predict things like exact times and locations of lighting strikes better.  We're impressed with what we can do while ignoring the vast landscape of the things we can't do...like predicting the weather more than a week in advance.  I think we feel this way because accurate prediction of anything more than a couple of seconds in the future is so awfully difficult that we want to pat ourselves on the back when any of it is accomplished.  

Why reality is consistent is unexplained, certainly not to me and I don't expect it would be.  Math is useful and descriptive where it is useful and descriptive.  Other places, e.g. quantum logic, are other.  That they don't conform to the "laws" of logic shows me that there are problems with the laws, not that "they can't do that!"

And besides, if we were to reduce the (world of our) mind to this stuff we call matter, wouldn't our experiments inevitably depend on the sort of rigid and changeless precepts of our mathematical and logical languages anyway? So, would that actually "prove" without a doubt that matter is all that exists?

I don't think there is any way to ever establish that what we observe is all that exists.  All one can hope for is a closed and complete description of all observations and correct prediction of future observations.  Eventually, one is left with the parent's exasperated "just because!" explanation to the child's endless question of "why?"  But if there is a closed and complete explanation, why go looking for anything deeper?

Or would it only establish certain facts about our reference point, one particular mode of existence, and which requires an observer who interacts with such-and-such an object, such as his or her own brain? The nature of what it even really means for something to "exist" is still a battle far from won by either side, or so I have been told. To paraphrase what my philosopher professor said, "Thinking about abstract objects is difficult. Because they're abstract."

Julia, you might find this quite fascinating:

Fascinating, yes, and incomprehensible.

Quantum logic has some properties that clearly distinguish it from classical logic, most notably, the failure of the distributive law of propositional logic:[6]

p and (q or r) = (p and q) or (p and r),
where the symbols p, q and r are propositional variables. To illustrate why the distributive law fails, consider a particle moving on a line and let
p = "the particle has momentum in the interval [0, +1/6]"q = "the particle is in the interval [−1, 1]"r = "the particle is in the interval [1, 3]"
(using some system of units where the reduced Planck's constant is 1) then we might observe that:
p and (q or r) = true
in other words, that the particle's momentum is between 0 and +1/6, and its position is between −1 and +3. On the other hand, the propositions "p and q" and "p and r" are both false, since they assert tighter restrictions on simultaneous values of position and momentum than is allowed by the uncertainty principle (they each have uncertainty 1/3, which is less than the allowed minimum of 1/2). So,
(p and q) or (p and r) = false
Thus the distributive law fails.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic

I think I understood the first 3 text lines.
But then came "p = "the particle has momentum in the interval [0, +1/6]" and I couldn't tell if the author was saying that that the momentum of the particle had a value between 0 and +1/6 or that the particle was located within the interval [0, +1/6] and that it possessed momentum.  It got worse from there.
But I'll stipulate that the distributive law of propositional logic does not apply somehow here.  Maybe it's because the variables can't be defined like they should .  If p and (q or r) = true  but the values of p (momentum) and (q or r)(position) are linked by uncertainty, how can they be treated like valid booleans in the given phrase?  They aren't independent.

Maybe the end of science will be the discovery that the entire project was built on illusion.

But at some level, every illusion has a real core even if that's only the observer being deceived.