GENESIS OF A PYTHAGOREAN UNIVERSE by Alexey and Lev Burov

I consider that the real abuse of reason is to discuss an ideology that is entirely coined and defined not by any supporter but purely by its opponents, without any concrete reference of who are the supporters of the ideology they are opposing, who would actually formulate and defend the claims of that ideology.

Moreover I dismiss all this "debate" you talk about as absolutely futile, thus not worthy any attention. Indeed I consider economic systems as something that go their own way, and that any proper or improper methodology that some economists may have adopted in the history of that discipline is just an insignificant, imaginary problem that only concerns what is in the heads of that very small minority of people who study economics, and has most of the time no significant impact on reality because most people just go their own business without caring about any ideology. Instead, I develop my own understanding of economics independently of anything ever taught in academic circles.

Or when some ideas have an impact on reality because the "large masses of people" happen to follow an ideology, then I can consider it, but it is a different situation. In particular for the Soviet Union, that resulted from Marxism, I regard it as a religion just similar to Christianity. And I have good reasons for this.

In particular I saw 2 absurdities in your anti-scientism slides.

The first absurdity is that you claim the impossibility to rationally understand or analyze consciousness, and at the same time you claim to bring rational arguments to draw some conclusions about consciousness, in particular issues of "cognitive dissonance". These 2 claims contradict each other.

The other absurdity is that your rational approach to psychological issues remains a purely theoretical speculation disconnected from any care of observational check of the conclusions of your abstract reasoning. In particular you claim the ability to conclude that the belief in chaosogenesis would be a cause of cognitive dissonance. For such considerations in such subtle matters of psychology to not be purely speculative and possibly completely wrong (or fall into the fault of ridiculous irrelevance), would require that this possible cause of cognitive dissonance, as you present it, was observationally confirmed to be the main cause (or at least the main ideological cause) of cognitive dissonance that can be observed in real life. But where are your observational confirmations of this claim ? The actual facts are:

As explained in the article and video by Greta Christina I referenced in a previous post, atheism does not lead to any nihilism, as there are many atheists finding full sense of life and not coming to any nihilism. This may be a mystery to you but it is nevertheless a fact and thus has to be accepted as such.

My own experience (as I have been evangelical Christian in the past) points to the opposite conclusion to yours, which is that among ideologies that may cause cognitive dissonance, Christian faith can be devastating, much worse than any atheism. As a personal experience, it would be senseless to try arguing in theory whether it is correct or not, and no philosophical treaty can change anything to this reality. No amount of arguments could convince me of the non-existence or impossibility of my own life. Now as a fact, it can also be explained, as you can see other authors doing, following my links "About the psychological damages of Christian faith".

In conclusion, your own victorious failure to make correct theoretical guesses about psychological issues, still does not suffice to validate your belief in the impossibility of any rational understanding in this field. Now why should I be interested about treaties that you read and that led you to such absurd standpoints as you are putting forward ? Such treaties are likely to be quite misleading. A real abuse of reason and a serious source, maybe not of cognitive dissonance, but at least dissonance between beliefs and reality. Thus, no thanks.

Dear Alexey and Lev,

I really enjoyed your essay, and it helped further my own thought processes about the consequences of Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. I liked the identification you make between the totality of mathematical forms and "some sort of mind, but a mind totally indifferent to the forms it contains".

I like the way you frame the issue of "chaosogenesis" within the context of "fine-tuning":

"Does the universe indeed have no clear signature excluding any possibility of it having been randomly selected from the totality of all possible structures?"

Your distinction between "minimal observers" and "cosmic observers" is interesting: our world indeed seems "theoretizable", and I agree with you that if we can show that the laws of our universe are much, much more regular than the "minimally stable" laws that could support our kind of observers, it would seriously undermine the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (or make it necessary to think about possible selection factors that make universes with regular laws have a higher "measure" than universes with fluctuating laws). Your arguments convinced me (contrary to what I state in my essay) that the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (in its simplest form) does make predictions, and can be considered a scientific hypothesis.

I agree with you when you say that "chaosogenesis, being limited only by the anthropic principle, is the only option for a completely scientific solution to the problem of cosmogenesis". You say that chaos and mind are opposites, but maybe Ultimate Mind, being the sum of all modes of existence, contains by itself zero information, and is somehow equivalent to Ultimate Chaos...

In my opinion, your essay is one of the most thought provoking in this contest, and I hope your make it to the finals. Good luck!

Marc

Dear Dr. Burov,

I think Newton was wrong about abstract gravity; Einstein was wrong about abstract space/time, and Hawking was wrong about the explosive capability of NOTHING.

All I ask is that you give my essay WHY THE REAL UNIVERSE IS NOT MATHEMATICAL a fair reading and that you allow me to answer any objections you may leave in my comment box about it.

Joe Fisher

Alexey & Lev,

Excellent essay.

It seems, though, that we are on opposite sides of Max Tegmark's hypothesis -- though for much the same reasons. To explain:

You approach chaos theory as if it were dependent on the disorder of random events. In fact, though, chaos is deterministic -- and while I agree with you that on any particular scale of activity, chaotic behavior is "limitless and structureless," in a hub-connected network in which local information is distributed laterally (theory of multi-scale variety ~ Bar-Yam), rather than hierarchically, self-organized global order is evident.

We agree fully on the important point: randomness is not a fundamental property of the universe.

Highest mark from me, and I hope you get a chance to visit my essay.

Best,

Tom

Hi Alexey,

Several years ago I came up with my theory without knowing about Tegmark and upon checking the net(I couldn't believe what I have discovered) by googling "reality math" the search came up with MUH. I was so exited, contacted Tegmark and he replied favorably. However since, I have developed my theory and have arrived at many results BUT he refuses to comment. I think he is either not convinced of my system or the results look too grand and he does not want to be associated with a "crackpot".

Checking your Bio I see that you are a physicist with programming background and you believe in MUH. You should be the perfect candidate for reviewing my theory. Please do not get discouraged by the claims, spend some reasonable time running some of the simulations, I hope you will see that I am not making up the results, the results are just coming out of the simulations and I have no control as such.

It is also interesting that my theory is similar to Armin's in this contest but he still has hard time connecting both of us, understandably so.

Maybe you have browsed my essay but I hope you spend more time on it, I think toy will like it, in general at least.Any comment is appreciated.

"Reality is nothing but a mathematical structure, literally"

Thanks and good luck

P.S. please read some of the first comments in my thread for more information on running the programs. the running times are indicated on the programming pages which you can go to by clicking on the "program links" at the end of the sections.

I hope that Lev will help in the running of the simulations. Thaks Lev.

Dear Alexy and Lev.

Your paper is well argued. I will admit to being very agnostic about these sorts of ideas. In particular I am very agnostic about Tegmark's hypothesis, which seems not mathematically provable, nor scientifically testable. Even string theory is only at best indirectly testable, but Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis seems impossible to test.

A couple of points I mention first. The WAP as I understand it is the statement that the universe observed must be of sufficient complexity and structure to permit such observers. It does not mean that any cosmology that exists must admit observers. I think that is the strong AP (SAP). The other point is that chaos, at least within the meaning of Hamiltonian chaos or strange attractor physics, means that a system can execute a vast number of complex dynamics, all of them separated by very small initial conditions. This means that phase space is specified to a very small fine grained detail. Given this is cut into N boxes or pieces, and in each is one of the possible states (0, 1), the degree of complexity is 2^N = e^{S/k}. This is the dimension of the Hilbert space corresponding to this classical setting and the entropy S = k ln(2)N = k ln(dim H), H = Hilbert space. Chaos then in fact implies a high level of complexity.

I did not make much mention of this in my essay. It could be said that mathematics has a body and soul. The body concerns things that are numerically computed and can in fact be computed on a computer. The soul involves things that involve infinitesimals and continua. These tend to be at the foundations of calculus with limits and related arguments. Even though my essay discusses homotopy, this is argued on the basis of continuous diffeomorphisms of loops or paths. However, in the end this is not what we directly compute in mathematics. We are interested in numbers, such as indices or topological numbers, and in physics that is much the same.

If you crack open a book on differential geometry or related mathematics you read in the introduction something like, "The set of all possible manifolds that are C^в€ћ with an atlas of charts with a G(n,C) group action ... ." The thing is that you are faced with ideas here that seem compelling, but from a practical calculation perspective this is infinite and in its entirety unknowable. This along with infinitesimals, or even the Peano theory result for an infinite number of natural numbers, all appears "true," but much of it is completely uncomputable. This is because the soul of mathematics touches on infinity, or infinitesimals.

The soul also involves things that quantum mechanically are not strictly ontological. These are wave functions or paths in a Feynman path integral. The existential status of these is not known, for the standard idea of epistemic interpretation is now found to be not complete. This differs from classical physics, where the physics is continuous, with perfectly sharply defined paths and energy values and so forth.

I am somewhat agnostic about the existential status of the soul of mathematics. In some sense it seems compelling to say it exists, but on the other hand this leads one into something mystical that takes one away from science. So it is not possible as I see it now to make any hard statement about this. We seem to be a bit like Garrison Keillor's Guy Noir, "At the tenth floor of the Atlas building on a dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets, one man searches for answers to life's persistent questions, Guy Noir private eye."

I will give your essay a vote in the 7 to 10 range. I have to ponder this for a while.

Cheers LC

Dear Lawrence,

Thank you so much for your generous compliments to our essay. As you see, we are showing there how Tegmark's MUH is refuted on the scientific ground. Yes, it goes against the dominating opinion of the community of cosmologists (and your own), that the full-blown MUH is unfalsifiable, but our refutation looks very solid for me.

About your 'couple of points'. First, your distinction of WAP and SAP fully agree with the conventional one, as I may judge. It isn't clear to me what point you were trying to make about them. Second, we use the word "chaos" in its ancient meaning, as we stress it when this word is used the first time, pointing there to Platonic philosophy. This meaning sometimes is expressed by such words as "nothingness" or "nothing". This formless entity, chaos/nothingness, is a source of pure accidental, random, causeless factors. It has little to do with the mathematical concept of "dynamical chaos" you mention, which assumes certain mathematical forms already given.

Your ideas about "the soul of mathematics" sound very interesting to me, and I would very much wish to discuss them with you in much more detail than this specific place and occasion allows. You know how to find my email. Please be assured that I would highly value communication with you on these and other questions.

All the best,

Alexey.

Dear Alexey,

I was hoping you and Lev find explicit mistakes in my system in the spirit of the contest. But of course I do understand if you do not find the time or the inclination.

Thanks and good luck to you.

Dear Alexey,

I am an engineer by trade with interest in physics, not a philosopher or anything fancy. I Just took a good guess which was very similar to other people's guesses like Wolfram(NKS), Conway and others, However my guess was just very successful in my opinion. This is exactly the lesson people could draw from the "effectiveness of math". It is for other people to evaluate my system and consider it as useful or not as it stand. There is also the possibility of improving it so it maybe more convincing, or somehow I would discover that the system is trivial and I would be happy to kill it and use my time to make more money :-) Sorry for wasting your time.

Thanks and good luck.

Dear Alexy and Lev,

Thank you for an interesting essay.

You write that there is no reason for the rules to be selected. In my essay I explain why some of the rules related to some of the phenomena are, in fact, selected.

Thanks,

Noson

Dear Alexy and Lev, I keep reviewing other essays, expanding my list of the best essays I found, and now I would like to recommend you the essay Was there a choice? by William Nelson, which I found to have interesting common topics with your own, even if their reasoning is different.