Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor wrote:
And what does espousing Naive Realism suggest?
Milum
Yes, please do, 
No, but you implied by asking the question…
What is it that thinks?”
…that it is possible that there is an “ it” that thinks.
If you thought there was a zero possibility that there is an “ it” or something that thinks you wouldn’t have asked the question.
It is assumed in your question there is a possibility that there is some ‘thing’ or non-thing or an “it” that thinks.
Iamthat, have I over estimated your ability to think?
There is no implication in my remarks that it is an “it” that thinks.
Bless your heart. Do you really think that the nature of the universe is an “it” that thinks?
That “it” that you think “thinks”; simply “is”.
Wanna arm wrestle?
__________________
O’ Iamthat, my young hope, have I over estimated your ability to think?
There is no implication in my remarks that it is an “it” that thinks.
Bless your heart. Do you really think that the essence of the universe is an “it” that thinks?
That “it” that you think “thinks”; simply “is”.
Wanna arm wrestle?
__________________
Naive, Young Jedi?
Surely you cannot be referring to me.
The World hurts! Broken bones, burned flesh, horrid disease, the horrors of neurological illnesses.
Nothing is more real than that, kid.
That which gets up and kicks you in the goonies is real!
Humanity is wonderful, brilliant, & heroic.
And the whole dammed Human race could die tomorrow in ten thousand different ways, and most or all of us won’t even be able to figure out what’s happing to them. And the wonder, the brilliance, the heroism won’t count for a thing.
Reality plays rough, Young Jedi.
And the Universe can get along without us.
Doesn’t Godel’s Imcompleteness Theorem pretty much prove that mathematics, at least as we understand it, does not ‘underpin’ the universe, that mathematics is not the language in which Mother Nature speaks herself?
If nothing else, the paradoxes inherent in mathematics should demonstrate that mathematics is far too limited a tool to carve the universe–like trying to fashion a computer with a butterknife.
Sometimes abstract math is fine-tuned to fit reality. I guess abstract probability is an example of this.
Other times natural phenomena is used as the basis for abstract mathematics. Stuff like calculus and queueing theory are examples of this.
So is the math we’ve done a human construct?(silly question) Yes, but it seems that almost all of it is motivated at least somewhat by describing the patterns of the world. Unless you’re a number theorist.
Is the logic that allows math to work a human concept? Not really sure.
Milum
Try to keep me a sea level, neither on a pedestal nor under one. And I will do the same. Thank you.
Obviously you fail to grasp what I have said. I’ll take 50% responsibility,
No I do not think that the nature of the universe is an it that thinks, Milum.
Re: your question, “What is it that thinks.”
If I say, “What is it that smells?”…there is a suggestion, an implication that there is a possibility that there exists something that smells. Some might even say that I am indicating that I detect a smell and I am asking what it is. I am not. I am saying the latter.
But if you don’t see it you don’t see it.
What ** SentientMeat** and Bosda said. Thanks, guys.
I am still at a loss to see why radical skepticism and solipsism are more attractive philosophies than “Naive” realism. (Nice rhetorical shot, BTW. I can retaliate by reffering to “Juvenile” solipsism.)
This has wandered far afield from the OP, so my apologies to **meta-gumble **. One last time though.
We live in a world of phenomena which exhibits regularity and we live our lives according to that regularity. When we leave the house at night we might worry about crime or drunk drivers but we don’t worry that, say, a vast horde of laser-beam wielding pink carnivorous wombats will materialize out of nowhere and attack us. This is because we believe that the world is rule-based. This may ultimately be an act of faith, but it is so well attested to by experience that it seems the most justified act of faith imaginable.
Science is a way of investigating these regularities. at heart it is nothing more than a much more sophisticated form of the judgements we make about the world on a daily basis. If I hear a scratching in the walls I assume animal and guess rat or squirrel. When Penzias and Wilson detect cosmic background radiation they assume big bang. Given that I pretty much take phenomena as they come I see no reason why I should doubt any well established scientific theory, whether it’s evolution, plate tectonics, or the big bang.
Philonarnia, if you are arguing for the steady state theory you are switching horses in mid-stream. Your original posts positied a universe that somehow popped into existence recently, with the appearence of being old. Since, as SentientMeat points out the steady state theorists posit an infinitely old universe as opposed to a ten bil+ yr old universe you actually strengthen my original point which was simply that the Universe has existed longer than there were humans to percieve it. At any rate the new steady state theories, as I understand them (which admittedly isn’t very far) are held by a tiny minority of scientists and have a lot of explaining to do before they surpass the big bang theory’s explanatory power.
As far as the OP goes, it is precisely because the Universe is orderly that we can describe it mathematically. It is fascinating that a human construct like math can explain the Universe, that the diverse phenomena of nature trundle along in perfect obedience to mathematical law. This is what Eugene Wigner called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. If you like you can posit a theistic explanation for this, but if that disagrees with you, you can fall back on the Weak Anthropic Principle, which states that a mathematically ordered universe is the only kind of universe in which complex self-aware things like us could exist. Since we do exist it should not surprise us that the Universe is mathematically ordered. (I’m not really doing justice to WAP but I think that’s the general idea). I’m not going to the mat for theism or the WAP, but both show how math can be both a human construct and embedded in the deep structure of reality
** Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor** wrote:
Nothing wrong will a good healthy wild guess, I say.
No no no ! What is* it** that thinks?* is merely a rhetorical device to focus on the point that “something exists”. “It” in this case has no qualities but “existence”.
Now…
Since everyone agrees that “something” exists, we (being the experiencing organisms) wonder how and why this came to be? Here numbers are useless. The concept zero can never be more, or less, than zero, so in order to imagine how something came into being from nothing, we, being stubborn, tinker with the concept of time and rationalize cause and effect.
“Time is non-directional” We say. Or, doing a neat side-step, we say “What we perceive as time is a product of creation, before this something there was nothing, no time, no something, no before.”
And being clever little apes we can scratch out the math to prove either proposition.
Meanwhile some people, perhaps the wisest and more pragmatic of humankind, just go to church and pray.
It is pragmatic to conclude that the search for knowledge is just rationalization, and all we should do is pray? 
A similar but more restricted question as the OP poses:
Is the Universe computable?
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/everything/html.html
On a similar note, Stephen Wolfram, ( Ph. D in particle physics aged 20 and author of the famous software “Mathematica”), wrote a 1200 + page book, “A New Kind of Science”, where he claims the Universe is (or behaves exactly like) a celular automata.
Now, now. My original posts most definitely attached me to no specific beliefs. None of my posts have intended to establish, expose, or espouse my beliefs. I was simply stating that you had assured us all of something that was fundamentally unassurable.
As we apparently at this point have a good basis for argument without my ramblings on about this particular subject (none of the later arguments have depended upon your assurances), I’ll stop my ranting.
This post exists solely to clarify my initial position, both to you and to any who might read your post and assume that I actually had attached myself to any particular beliefs in this particular thread.
SentientMeat, IamThat, Milum, i’m glad you guys have sorted out your beef. IMHO theres nothing wrong with engaging in Solipistic activities, as long as its done behind closed doors of course.
ShepherdWong:
Larry Borgia:
I think these two points both express the same truth - that although maths is a human language it describes things that already exist in the world - logical relations. In the same way that apples existed before the word “apple” was invented, the ratio of a circles radius to its circumference was always 3.141592… before we discovered it and gave it the name Pi.
…the ratio of a circles radius to its circumference was always 3.141592… before we discovered it and gave it the name Pi.
Yeah, neato, Meta-Gumble, the approxamation * Pi *works well in man’s universe although no perfect circle has yet to be made by man, nor has been found to exist in nature.
So far the perfect circle exists only in the abstract. Which leads me to my point about basic math. Which is…
~~~~ The Case Against Two-ness.~~~~
Many primitive language groups have no real math systems and are able to only count up to two. Their entire “counting” lexicon goes…one, two,… many.
As you might imagine without math these primitives never amount to much; they mostly just sit around singing and dancing, dumb and happy, and don’t hate anything or anybody except for the occasional tigers that sometimes chase them about.
Then they would count.
" Help! One tiger is chasing me" They would say. Or, “Help! Two tigers are chasing me about !”
But they never said, “Three tigers are chasing me about”.
Instead they said, “Many tigers are chasing me.” I guess they thought, being primitive, that three tigers were "many’.
On the other hand, we, who have built great highways and filled them with great traffic, can count well into the billions. We have measured Pi to more than a million decimals points if we ever need to get that exact. (You never know.) We are hot stuff.
Oh, but if we only knew what “we” are.
We know we are “many”, or do we?
Imagine a perfect ball-shaped prime particle sitting on one edge of the universe. From our own orientation at the moment we can say that the particle has a left and right side and a top and a bottom but of course the particle itself has no such qualities because it is homogeneous…it is one. Now imagine a perfect ball-shaped prime particle sitting on the other side of the universe, is it the same particle? No, its seperateness is determined by its place in space relative to the other.
Now take away the particles shape and substance and just consider the gravitational force that extents between the two.
If we forget human orientation and the human bias against distance, are there two entities in this universe or just one?
Milum:
But the relationship Pi existed the moment a perfect circle was conceived of although it was unknown. The same is true of all mathematical rules - once one abstract thing had been conceived of, it contains a number of inherent truths, or properties that can be discovered. Since some properties are discovered, you have to ask to what extent also the original properties that constitute the conception of the abstract thing are also discovered.
In the case of the circle you might argue that the properties that define a perfect circle were inferred by observation from existing round things. It was observed how such round things were not perfect in the same way that human beauty was never perfect. This of course is one of the currents of Greek philosophy, the idea that there are perfect forms that things on Earth are imperfect representations of. Accepting this you would then have to say that the original properties of the abstract thing, because they followed from observation were discovered and not created.
To say that the perfect circle exists only in the abstract (as you do) is to do an injustice to the word “only”. What on Earth does it mean for something to have abstract existence? Does it follow that since we inferred the existence of a perfect form from the existence of an imperfect one that it is a creation of our imagination? How about the fact that it has very real and demonstrable properties?
Doesn’t a proton (sorry, Hydrogen ion) have a spherical electric field? Even a perfectly spherical electrical field?
We might need more than a loose approximation for Pi after all.
originally posted by** Meta-Gumble**
I’m a vagan myself,
There are no closed doors to a solipsist .
Are you saying the future already exists?
One cannot fully describe an actual particular apple because we can’t fully comprehend it or observe it in its totality. Sam with Pi.
What we know and what we ‘imagine’ we know are quite different.
Perfection is a flawed concept, and by inference so is imperfection. One cannot prove something is imperfect if there is no “perfect” thing for comparison. Something is imperfect only in relation to something else that is imperfect, ad infinitum, e.g. this imperfect thing fits our needs/desires better then that imperfect thing etc. Is there such a thing as a perfect concept or ideal?
Abstract existence = in the imagination…