Actually, I think you are correct—I misread part of it the first time. He is pretty meticulous about saying this only applies to 'external physical reality,' and the only reference to an internal part is in the excerpt I gave above about the sensation of self-awareness.
However, it's a similar kind of trick. He goes ahead and makes statements like:
> Everything in our world
is purely mathematical — including you.
—which isn't really so significant if you are implicitly ignoring any interior aspects.
Instead, it's just kind of a tautology: the 'exterior' aspects of reality (well, the selection of them which we know of/discuss anyway) are precisely the ones approachable to conceptual/linguistic/mathematical formulation. So I don't see much more being said here than "the mathematically describable parts of reality are mathematically describable."
> Do you have any links? I'd like to read more.
I've already spent far too much time on this thread, but if you look around at adherents of digital physics, computational universe, etc. you'll find a similar elision repeating itself: either subjectivity/qualia are ignored completely, or it is assumed that they would be a by-product of some kind of generative mathematical/computational process. I've seen several articles related to the idea just on HN.
Edit: also: this is just a recent manifestation of the idea, which has been around at least since Plato.
>> Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you.
> —which isn't really so significant if you are implicitly ignoring any interior aspects.
You are quoting the quite catchy climax of the introduction. The paragraph this quote ends with starts with "So here is the crux of my argument." The author is trying to pave the way for the actual argument and a context-free quote of the buildup does not help the discourse.
>> Do you have any links? I'd like to read more.
> I've already spent far too much time on this thread
I am sorry to have wasted your time with requests for foundations of your claims.
> Edit: also: this is just a recent manifestation of the idea, which has been around at least since Plato.
Which aspect? I actually find it very refreshing to read an essay that goes down to foundations of philosophy. If your valuable time allows, could you maybe find the time to explicitly point out congruent arguments in philosophy "since Plato"?
> The author is trying to pave the way for the actual argument and a context-free quote of the buildup does not help the discourse.
The reason I quoted it is to show that he makes assertions meant to sound as if they include interior aspects of reality, even though he says previously in the article that he is only talking about external aspects. There is nothing that happens in that paragraph which affects that fact at all.
To be more clear, the pattern is like: Let us redefine the universe to just refer to exterior aspects of the universe. Then for the rest of the article he can just talk about anything and the reader is supposed to call to mind the initial disclaimer. Statements like "Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you" gain their force from the fact that he stated his limitation only early on, so that 'everything' has been redefined to mean something else.
> I am sorry to have wasted your time with requests for foundations of your claims.
If I were deferring justification that would be another matter. Instead, I was declining to give yet more elaboration of which there's plenty in this thread already.
> If your valuable time allows, could you maybe find the time to explicitly point out congruent arguments in philosophy "since Plato"?
The common thread is that folks since Plato have tried to make arguments that general categories of things are more real than particular things themselves. The means of going about this have been various. The author's particular tack is called 'mathematical platonism': https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/
Actually, I think you are correct—I misread part of it the first time. He is pretty meticulous about saying this only applies to 'external physical reality,' and the only reference to an internal part is in the excerpt I gave above about the sensation of self-awareness.
However, it's a similar kind of trick. He goes ahead and makes statements like:
> Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you.
—which isn't really so significant if you are implicitly ignoring any interior aspects.
Instead, it's just kind of a tautology: the 'exterior' aspects of reality (well, the selection of them which we know of/discuss anyway) are precisely the ones approachable to conceptual/linguistic/mathematical formulation. So I don't see much more being said here than "the mathematically describable parts of reality are mathematically describable."
> Do you have any links? I'd like to read more.
I've already spent far too much time on this thread, but if you look around at adherents of digital physics, computational universe, etc. you'll find a similar elision repeating itself: either subjectivity/qualia are ignored completely, or it is assumed that they would be a by-product of some kind of generative mathematical/computational process. I've seen several articles related to the idea just on HN.
Edit: also: this is just a recent manifestation of the idea, which has been around at least since Plato.