Shut up and calculate: an extreme mathematical universe

But math contains all physically realizable structure, i.e. all structure that can represent some feature of reality. But also structure that cannot be realized in reality, e.g. sets too big to fit in reality. That one can deduce some logical structure from observing reality isn't the deciding factor here.

> I advocate an extreme “shut-up-and-calculate” approach to physics, where our external physical reality is assumed to be purely mathematical.

> Here, I will push this idea to its extreme and argue that our universe is not just described by mathematics — it is mathematics.

> Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you.

Here's one mistake he makes: he doesn't account for qualia, the fact that people have subjectivity. Here is the one sentence where he glosses over it:

> In this example, the frog itself must consist of a thick bundle of pasta whose highly complex structure corresponds to particles that store and process information in a way that gives rise to the familiar sensation of self-awareness.

This is a pretty big assumption to make: processing something gives rise to sensations? Just because the processing is mathematically describable, is the sensation also? What would the mathematical description of the experience of a fever chill look like? And what about the 'system' that carries out the transition from process to sensation? Could it even be called a 'system' or is it more on the order of the fever chill itself?

Edit: I clarified a few things a couple minutes after posting.

However, it's not really that surprising: Science over the centuries has steadily (and for it's time, justifiably) eroded the role of subjectivity in order to uncompromisingly get at what is consistently true (regardless of what we'd like to be true) and this process required being very suspicious of any subjective accounts that can't be measured.

That being said, perhaps the time has come to dig a bit deeper and in the same persistent and uncompromising way ask what does objectivity or subjectivity mean? What do they arise from and to whom? I don't know if any new technologies can be derived from having clearer insights to these questions, but I do feel that it would be time better spent than any untestable mind made artifact about what reality ultimately is.

Do they? Everyone is entitled to their unquestioned assumptions as long as they state them outright and describe their parameters. I have yet to see dualists (which ultimately is at the base of this whole line of argumentation) admit that they posit subjective experience _without evidence_, since they equate asking questions and "seeing" things as subjective experience. It's worthwhile debating and deconstructing just exactly what that means before accepting it and its hoaky mystical follow-ons. The fact remains that no entity can successfully prove to another entity that it has inner experience, so how would proving you have subjectivity to _your own mind_ work? You can't, and probably, you don't bother, because it is somehow "self evident" that you have this property. The whole qualia and consciousness debate is riddled with circular reasoning about something that dualists just "feel." Well sometimes I feel like I might have the same thoughts as a jelly donut, go ahead and prove me wrong with math!

> I think people sort of push this point aside either by saying that qualia/subjectivity could be generated by math (or a computational process), and that's what really matters. But we have no examples of abstract math generating anything;

This is a bizarre and unsupportable statement. Clearly physical processes can carry out computation, which is a special case of mathematics (or vice versa, depending on what you got your doctorate in), and computation can produce statements in whatever language you desire, even English. Yes, chips and software stacks produce outputs, even in English. How is that not "generating" something? Ah, but you ask what is inside? Tons! There are gazillions of bits inside computers, and similarly gazillions of flashes in your neural circuitry. That's a whole lot of "inside". How do you know that it _doesn't_ feel like something to be all those twinkling bits? If you still accept without question that you do in fact have subjective experience, doesn't it stand to reason that if the neural network which absolutely definitely does correlate with your consciousness did feel like _anything_, then by definition it would have to feel like this?