Has anyone ever noticed the uncanny similarity between God and mathematics?
As physicist David Deutsch puts it, humans explain the seen with the unseen. We posit unobservable explanations for things that we observe but do not understand. The logic is simple: if something happens, but we cannot see why, then the reason it happens must be something unseen.
Two comments. First, the logic depends on the assumption that events have explanations. There is no proof of such an assumption. Why should there be a reason for the change of seasons? Why did people ever even ask themselves why things fall down instead of up? The fact that humans have always assumed a reason for things shows our fundamental attachment to determinism. We demand explanations. (My next blog will give the scoop on our hunger for knowledge).
Second, it’s amazing how much power we assign to the unseen causes of things. God is huge. He doesn’t just explain why there is day and night. He explains why we wear clothes, why we speak different languages and why we have a sense of morality. God is an efficient concoction/entity (depending on your beliefs) – we get the answers to everything all in one. Bada-bing, bada-boom.
For non-believers, it’s easy to laugh and say, “God’s ability to explain everything is just further proof that he can’t possibly exist.” But hold on a sec. Non-believers have their own powerful, unseen explanations for things. Nowadays the most popular replacement for God is mathematics.
Mathematics is huge, maybe as huge as God. Mathematics is used everywhere to account for everything. Math is taken as the reason why one theory is right and another is wrong. And yet no one “observes” math. We observe only what we interpret as outcomes of the math – just like religious people interpret phenomena as being the works of God.
Math is a powerful authority despite its mysteriousness. Much of our scientific knowledge was accepted only because the math works. Einstein’s relativity is like that. Relativity has observable effects, but nobody’s ever observed it in action. Relativity is accepted because the numbers crunch correctly. If the math works, then of course relativity has to be true. Voila! A few equations explain a whole slew of phenomena, from GPS technology to electromagnetism.
Even psychology is bending knee to mathematics. Human behaviour is explained away by statistics and probability. Psychologists don’t discuss what thought processes are like. They conduct experiments, trace neural connections, plot correlations, and measure doses. As in physics, math has the final say. If the numbers show it, the theory is true.
Mathematics is becoming the modern God. It’s creeping in everywhere. It’s used blindly as a justification for why things are the way they are. If two theories are batting heads, we turn to math to determine which is right. You argue, “Well yeah, but that’s because mathematics is true, it’s universal. Math is never wrong – if there’s a problem, it’s because people are following the wrong steps or applying a principle incorrectly.” And the response? That’s exactly what people have been saying for millennia, if you just replace the word “math” with “God.”
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P.S. For other nerds of logic and language: ever notice how when you say “A is B” you’re not really asserting equality? When we say ‘A is B,’ we usually mean “A doesn’t really exist on its own, it’s just another way of saying B.” Like when I say, “Math is God,” I’m making an assertion about math, not God. If I’d said, “God is math” then I’d be making an assertion about God – namely, that he isn’t really anything other than math. Our language thus fails to replicate mathematics. The verb “is” is not equivalent to equality, as the semanticists will tell us. That’s why logic is cool – it’s the smooth union of language and math. So from now on, all my blog entries will be written in the format of logic.
QED
Well well well. Well, OK, but here's the thing, OK, maybe just a thing. A key tenet to math, or any scientific method, is testability and predictive capacity. The theory of relativity (or something like that) was a paper argument but predicted that light could be bent by gravity, and then proven true, or at least shown to be consistent with the theory, by a distant star's light being bent during an eclipse.
ReplyDeleteBut here's a question: why do people understand "or" invariably as an "either/or"? For example, if you tell me I can have an apple or an orange, and I take both, I am obeying the request on logic grounds, but not on semantic grounds. Old straw that one, I know, I still like to chew on it.
Back to taking a picture of a tree falling in the woods
Indeed, but the point is that people have also made predictions based on God, which they believe were shown to be "consistent with the theory." The math itself was never shown to "exist" or "be true" - we just interpret certain effects as being an indication that the math is right.
ReplyDeleteHere's another question: why do people understand "if" to mean "if and only if"? Logically, the two are quite distinct.
If a man makes a statement outside the hearing range of any woman, is he still wrong?
The man will end up being wrong and wronged If, and only if, he obeys: Here honey, have a bite of this apple.
ReplyDeleteMathematical elegance, though it may be a sufficient condition to get a new `explanatory principle' into UG (in practice anyway), is anything but sufficient for science.
ReplyDeleteFor actual science, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider, and yup it's true it's only wiki but it's good enuff to give you sources (!), and here too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b240PGCMwV0.
These two show that mathematical elegance is only necessary, not sufficient. In brief: there are 3.1 billion Euros acting as counterexamples to mathematics being sufficient with the Large Hadron Collider in physics; and there is Feynman's brilliant, brilliant summary :)
But yes yes yes, on a deeper level it's true, logic assumes everything has an explanation (at least logic as most people use it; Hofstadter would say that logic is isomorphic to reality. And I'd agree, at least this reality). But da truf is, I don't know jack (..who's jack??) and in the final analysis I think math is nothing more than a way to put order on the world based on our own perception of it (is that (G/g)od(z)? And what about string theory (not that I know anything about ANY science at all (......yet!!!), but my popular understanding of it is that at least at one point string theory had 5 (or so) parsimoniously equivalent subtheories which accounted for everything, but no 2 of them could be taken together because they would mathematically contradict one another. Contradiction's a funny thing too (esp. if you're a formalist who takes it as a buncha symbols, and gut how a contradiction :feels:))). Also, back to the original thing before my semi-`bouquet of parentheses', the world as we perceive it may or may not be the Actual World, and I have serious doubts that it is.
(ps and wtf??? I thought you'd reciprocate my last email, esp. considering you got me off my metaphorical behind to write it!! :P )
(ppss (see? I'm alluding to you) I still have to read about the muffin man too, but I'm overworked and so it'll have to wait.. :)
Oh? Oh? Reciprocate my emails, says the guy who wrote, "Why doesn't fb have a like button on our emails? That way I could just like your email and you'd know I received it and acknowledged it and took it the right way, there'd be no need to respond."
ReplyDeleteAnd at least I CITE your name when I quote you!!
Check your emails buddy ;)
P.S. You also wrote, "math is nothing more than a way to put order on the world based on our own perception of it." 'Tis exactly the point - God and math have the same function.
P.P.S. Forget about string theory, check out this guy: http://www.ted.com/talks/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_everything.html