Feb 19, 2025 10:39 PM
(This post was last modified: Feb 19, 2025 10:40 PM by Magical Realist.)
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/mathe...orary.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."
https://www.johnpiippo.com/2014/08/mathe...orary.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."
