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+--- Thread: Mathematical platonism as a problem for physicalism (/thread-17423.html)
Mathematical platonism as a problem for physicalism - Magical Realist - Feb 19, 2025
This has always been one of my "go to" reasons for rejecting the premise of physicalism, that the only things that exist are physical things. Aside from the somewhat sticky issue of what the property of physical even intelligibly means, entailing that such a property is not itself physical, mathematics is a field of study filled with entities that do not fall under that category at all. Numbers and constants and variables and equations all can be sensibly referred to like physical objects can. Their existence does not change or vary with time. And they are objectively interwoven into the order and structure of the universe. So while they exist, that aren't physical in any sense. Here's an article that brings home this basic truth...
https://www.johnpiippo.com/2014/08/mathematical-platonism-as-contemporary.html
"Brown is not the only mathematical Platonist. A number of mathematicians are, to include Frege, Godel, et. al. Pigliucci writes:
"If one ‘goes Platonic’ with math , one has to face several important philosophical consequences, perhaps the major one being that the notion of physicalism goes out the window. Physicalism is the position that the only things that exist are those that have physical extension [ie, take up space] – and last time I checked, the idea of circle, or Fermat’s theorem, did not have physical extension. It is true that physicalism is now a sophisticated doctrine that includes not just material objects and energy, but also, for instance, physical forces and information. But it isn’t immediately obvious to me that mathematical objects neatly fall into even an extended physicalist ontology. And that definitely gives me pause to ponder."
RE: Mathematical platonism as a problem for physicalism - Ostronomos - Feb 20, 2025
The abstract contains the concrete.
RE: Mathematical platonism as a problem for physicalism - Ostronomos - Feb 22, 2025
Reality is supposed to be a term that defines real on inclusion in the real universe. But if we have no definition of the real universe, then does it somehow interrupt our lives? It seems that if the universe were to assume an infinite size or sizelessness, all things within it would be under an illusion of space and time being real, when they are not. Cognition is representing time. Sensual information can represent space and objects.
(...)
What does this say about God? First, if God is real, then God inheres in the comprehensive reality syntax, and this syntax inheres in matter. Ergo, God inheres in matter, and indeed in its spacetime substrate as defined on material and supramaterial levels. This amounts to pantheism, the thesis that God is omnipresent with respect to the material universe. Now, if the universe were pluralistic or reducible to its parts, this would make God, Who coincides with the universe itself, a pluralistic entity with no internal cohesion. But because the mutual syntactic consistency of parts is enforced by a unitary holistic manifold with logical ascendancy over the parts themselves - because the universe is a dual-aspected monic entity consisting of essentially homogeneous, self-consistent infocognition - God retains monotheistic unity despite being distributed over reality at large.
I do not think of a pluralistic (imaginable, conceivable) God as real, I consider God as consciousness. When the self-declaring non-algorithmic "I" in the mind unhinges the freely functioning awareness, God is revealed as a unifying reality that is consciousness of all things physical as one.