Intuitionism

When you take a picture of an apple, you have a picture of an apple, not the apple itself. Both are real and related, but not the same thing.

I’m no physicist, but I understand that Newtonian physics aren’t strictly true as such, but they are a good enough analogy to put a person on a different planetary body.

So I think it’s fine to be agnostic and practical about the outcomes without needing say much about the metaphysics either way.

Anyway, both perspectives tickle my curiosity.

Yes. And such order exists within the observer, the mediators. We are measuring instruments. Scales are bound to the ruler and not to what’s being ruled. So mathematics represents order only in as much as there are people to validate it. Should all rulers be broken and forgotten, then there’s no measure at all. This is the same for those orders not yet established, that is, the future of science. Nevertheless, I do believe there’s a principle which allows order, but it’s not order itself, but a foundation of order, which I believe to be Unit. Unit is not mere duality, because duality implies two, Unit would be more like Cause-Effect, wherein one is the same as the other (either Cause-Cause, or Effect-Effect, doesn’t really matter). This is also different than yin-yang, since each is discrete, and discreetness itself cannot exist prior to Unit. I like to think that all numbers are qualities of Unit, and the whole of mathematical theories are different theories of Unit, so they will be consistent every time Unit is maintained consistently, when something “follows” from what has already “followed”, following some definition of “following”, whatever it may be. It would explain the effectiveness of mathematics in the sense that the whole Universe is Unit out of self-similar Unit. The fact that all of information can be encoded in 0s and 1s is a great illustration of the power of Unit, and the fact that binary streams only makes “sense” upon interpretation is a great illustration of consciousness, which is an expression of Bias. Even if the Universe would change so all of the physical “laws” would mutate, Unit would still persist unchanged. New things would still “follow”. I haven’t come across anyone realizing that a theory of “everything” can exist but be useless, just like the concept of “everything” is useless as a particularity, and theories aim to be particularly applicable, so a theory which really applies to every thing applies to no thing. This would be the utmost conclusion of Gödel‘s incompleteness. How would a theory of absolutely everything be different than an infinitely long ruler without any subdivisions, or even with infinitely many zero-spaced subdivisions? One wouldn’t be able to measure any particular thing with such universal ruler.

I'm of the "all models are wrong, some models are useful" school of thought. My best guess is that the platonic-ideals-are-real folks are mistaking something in their head for something outside it. That's not to deny that there is an objective reality out there, just that I have no particular reason to think that it's perfectly representable in 3 pounds of primate headmeat and expressible by squirting air through our meat-flaps. [1]

But ultimately, it doesn't matter too much to me, because the practical utility of both models is pretty high. It does make me wish to meet intelligent beings from different evolutionary backgrounds, though, as I think there would be a lot of "So you think what exactly?" that would be very revealing about which things are pan-human quirks and which are more universal.

[1] Credit goes to Terry Bisson here for the last bit: https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...