Essay Abstract
A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather than being an odd coincidence arising due to our strange position as passive (and even more strangely, conscious) observers in the cosmos, these two problems might be intimately related and potentially explainable in terms of fundamental physics - that is, if we are willing to make the concession that information can physically influence the world. My premise begins by distinguishing physically possible states of the world, defined as everything permissible by the laws of physics, from physically accessible states of the world, defined as those that are achievable from a given initial state. For universes where the laws of physics are such that the number of accessible states is less than all that is possible, I argue that the most probable states among all possible states are those that include physical systems which contain information encodings - such as mathematics, language and art - because these are the most highly connected states in the state space of everything that is possible. Such physical systems include life and - of particular interest for the discussion of the place of math in physical reality - humans. Within this framework, the descent of math is a natural outcome of the evolution of the universe, which will tend toward states that are increasingly connected to other possible states of the universe, a process greatly facilitated if some physical systems know the rules of the game. I therefore conclude that our ability to use mathematics to describe, and more importantly manipulate, the natural world may not be an anomaly or trick, but instead a natural part of the structure of reality.
Author Bio
Sara Imari Walker is a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist and Assistant Professor in the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. She received her PhD in Physics from Dartmouth College and has held postdoctoral appointments in the Center for Chemical Evolution at the Georgia Institute of Technology and as a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow.