Lorraine Ford No, I’m not invoking a Platonic realm at all. In fact, what I’ve been saying is almost the exact opposite.
When I say “the state of the system,” I simply mean the actual physical configuration of the system at some point in its evolution. I don’t mean that there is an abstract mathematical state existing somewhere independently of physical reality. The mathematical state is our representation or description of the physical configuration.
If a particular configuration physically obtains, we can symbolically write something like (category1 = number1 AND category2 = number2 ...) IS TRUE. That’s fine. But I don’t think the words “IS TRUE” establish that the physical system itself possesses knowledge that those propositions are true. They merely establish that our symbolic description corresponds to the configuration that physically obtains.
That’s an important distinction. Something can physically be the case without the system possessing knowledge that it is the case. A rock can have a particular mass, temperature, and internal configuration without the rock knowing its mass, temperature, or configuration.
So no, I’m not introducing Platonism to explain anything. My ontology is explicitly physical. The substrate is primary, and mathematical objects, categories, numbers, equations, and algorithms are representations and descriptions we use to characterize its behavior.
If anything, the additional ontological step here seems to be the claim that because a configuration can be represented propositionally as “TRUE” then the physical system must therefore contain a knowledge or consciousness aspect, but that doesn’t follow from the symbolic representation. That would need independent physical justification.
