\section{COMMENT # 4}

What is mathematics about? Recently answered.

Mathematics is essentially about possible measurements. The criterion, after all, is consistency.

So physics is about natural existence — what's actually measured by observers. (DeWitt, Clifford Truesdell, John Wheeler, Dirac have essays on the subject.) Nature being any subset of all that exists - the universe.

That meanwhile indeed is the reason Dirac's favorite approach of physical interpretation of mathematics works well or at all: what is not measured does not exist. (It has no behavior — does not induce a dynamic on any other system in the universe.)

So the so called unreasonable effectiveness of pure — invariant to physical realizational baggage — consistent speculation is simply that mathematics is a theory of measurement operations as they may be combined; physics is a theory of existence.

Of course they're intimately related — more than by random coincidence. Yet not the same. What can be measured is not necessarily measured. It's merely possible. Existence is more than that. — But what cannot be measured does not exist.

That beats random guessing about what's out there in the world, — whatever else is there. So this is therefore far more likely than random guessing at being correlated the truth — which is a map of things that do exist.

But indeed while all physical propositions are therefore a proper subset of all mathematical propositions, physics is not a proper subset of mathematics, not a part of mathematics, but mathematics is an important tool, one among many in a toolbox, in physics and physical reasoning.

For example, how much of pure mathematics — say http://www.math.harvard.edu/~lurie/papers/HA.pdf — is physically meaningful? None of was intended to be meaningful. (It's a good thing that intention is not always required to be right, rather (paraphrasing David Hume) only coincidence.)

When you stop to think about it, possibly quite a lot. The joke in mathematics is this: — we'll see later. Not all — but a lot. Essentially the subject would be measurements where information is not fundamentally lost, even when coarse measurements, ones at higher granularity, are performed and reasoned about.

\section{COMMENT # 3}

Q: Preview of a tribesteemup question of the week post coming up. What does tribesteemup mean to you?

That's the question.

A: My answer ... and I need to finish my posts answering previous questions ... would be along the lines of:

What does tribesteemup mean to me? Several things. I may propose a few axioms, in light of recent reading.

Only a communities can create new traditions.

Only communities can displace and replace other communities and other traditions.

Only peaceful communities that grow will bring people from violent traditions and communities into peaceful traditions.

Most traditions that have existed in the past have either been very small or highly dependent on ritualized, stereotyped violence. Coercive in essence. Also essentially highly unproductive. (Which is not really a coincidence. Long run projects are the most meaningful ones and violence or the potential for violence interrupts them, and problems don't get solved.)

People often remain in traditions only to be part of communities. Only when alternative, sustainable and clearly growing communities exist will people leave other traditions.

Very happy to participate in and contribute to any community that promotes peace. And believe such communities will only grow in significance in the future.

Communities that are voluntary and spread voluntaryist ideas as they grow are important, I think. Not enough of that. And basing them partly around a trust-less, public, neutral, permission-less system of communication and sharing is an important technical and historical innovation really.

\section{COMMENT # 2}

I'm moving along producing a formal framework for reasoning about processes that compose almost always correctly.

Like for combinatorics, we have already various good ways of reasoning about infinite combinators and small finite combinatorics. — But not for reasoning about very large combinatorics. Similarly we don't already have good ways about reasoning about algorithms which are correct in all or almost all important cases. (So not necessarily in all cases, possibly not in some unimportant cases.)

No issues so far; the idea of foliating different cases into small pieces (in a way a computer can also later do automatically if the framework is expanded) that can each be reasoned about without looking at the details inside seems to be working.

Will be ready to post the preliminary write up, or list the basic primitives that need to be implemented to start.

Have some good metaphors that provide intuition how this works, besides what was mentioned earlier ...

(1) Imagine an observer sees several windows each with several latches that can be left or right (or up or down, etc).

(2) (i) Left is Locked (and right is not), ... or (ii) left is unlocked and right is actually Locked. For each latch. One of the two is true. The observer doesn't know which however.

(3) But it doesn't really matter. Not if all the observer is trying to see is whether to approach the windows to lock them or not. (They're supposed to be locked, and the observer does not approach them if they are all quickly seen to be locked. Based on the position of latches.)

(4) How does the observer tell if they are locked or not? It doesn't matter because so long as the position of the latches for each window are mixed, all windows are locked.

In that case, it actually doesn't matter whether (i) is true or (ii) is true. This is also, if the latches we flipped randomly, because the previous actor in the room had no idea which way locks the latches and couldn't tell whether locked or not by flipping latches. (Only trying to open windows tests if locked or not, and that requires far more effort than just flipping latches or looking at them, for some reason exceeding the effort budget actors have.) Sometimes most or all the windows will be locked, all latches in one direction. - Sometimes unlocked, for the same reason. Most often most windows will be locked: latches are mixed, or they are all in the correct direction for the window, making the majority of cases.

(5) If the rules actually change from (i) to (ii) or from (ii) or (i) for some reasons outside the control of the observer, if the mechanism is changed by some other unknown occupant who leaves no trace of themselves, at the higher level of analysis, nothing statistically changes. Even strictly nothing much changes. Observers are reasoning about an invariant.

\section{COMMENT # 1}

Preview of an upcoming essay on Popper. And on a scientific career.

The philosopher's dilemma ...

The prisoner's dilemma. The innovator's dilemma. The philosopher's dilemma. Yes, it's a clickbait title. (So what?)

ABOUT ME

I'm a scientist who writes fantasy and science fiction under various names.

The magazines which I currently most recommend:
Magazine of fantasy and science fiction
Compelling science fiction
Writers of the future

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