Re: Modeling question...

On Nov 19, 11:10 am, "Brian Selzer" <br..._at_selzer-software.com> wrote:
> "David BL" <davi..._at_iinet.net.au> wrote in message
>
> > The physicist Max Tegmark uses the term "baggage" to refer to the
> > informal bindings between things in the real world and the identifiers
> > (like "electron") that appear in all our existing models or
> > descriptions of reality. He was using this term with reference to the
> > question of whether it's possible for there to be a theory of
> > everything described in a way that's completely free from baggage.
> > He claimed the only way is to use sets of abstract identifiers that
> > have "no baggage" because their meaning is only derived from their
> > axiomatically defined relationships to each other. This is hand wavy
> > stuff, but I think the distinction is relevant to DB theory.
>
> Can you cite a reference to that claim? In "The Mathematical Universe"
> Tegmark hypothesizes that "Our external physical reality is a mathematical
> structure" and argues that "A /mathematical structure/ is precisely this:
> /abstract/ entities [emphasis added] /with relations between them/." His
> argument stresses that any words or other symbols used to denote
> descriptions of entities and relations between entities in the external
> reality are mere labels with no preconceived meanings whatsoever. It does
> not suggest that those labels are in any way abstract, but rather that what
> they identify are.

Sorry, my description was rather lacking.

Note BTW that the idea that symbols can be baggage free in the description of a mathematical structure is disputed by some people who suggest that all descriptions of mathematical structures depend on "metaphor" at some level.

I think that philosophical debate isn't very interesting, and instead one should associate this somewhat ill-defined "baggage free" idea with the well defined concept of testing for equivalence of two given mathematical structures up to isomorphism. Received on Wed Nov 19 2008 - 05:24:40 CET