I find it infinitely fascinating that everything that ever happens leaves a trail of information that we keep getting better at querying.
From understanding what exactly stars are made of, to the evolution of life on Earth, and the exploits of humans living thousands of years ago.
It's really uncanny the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, something we made up by manipulating abstract symbols, in modelling and helping us understand the universe in every minute detail we care to inquire. Truly miraculous.
Inherent principles exist in any really high resolution system that are so hard to control they can usually be tracked and manipulated but never completely controlled.
It’s why cancer is so prevalent and damn near unsolvable: an organism our size has about 7 octillion atoms, even forgetting the impacts of the stuff smaller than that. That’s 30ish trillion cells, many are multipurpose little motor vehicles inside our body running around doing stuff constantly.
It’s just so much STUFF happening, take the brain out of someone and leave them a vegetable digesting on a bed and they still burn hundreds of kcal a day, and that’s a highly efficient system millions of years in production.
So two things emerge from that, 1: extremely robust universal principles like electromagnetic gradients being used for travel, and 2: runaway feedback loops like black holes or cancerous cells.
What that means is that you can view mathematics as a spontaneous emergence FROM a high resolution system, or the inverse. We usually think of the inverse, because it seems like no matter what we discover in the system it can be explained by increasingly complex math.
But the inverse of that is very interesting to me: math emerges as a side effect from the high resolution system. It also passes the smell test, if you make a low resolution simulation of the solar system you will not see the effects of the high complexity systems, relativity works perfectly without any quantum dynamics.
I just love these kinds of chicken and egg problems.
I think you're framing this as idealism vs materialism?
The debate is fascinating. I tend to be more of an idealist but I recognize that science is predicated on materialism. I believe we ought to find a complete explanation for how things work.
It is odd though that experimental data seem to indicate that at the quantum level locality is not preserved and there are no hidden variables thus non locality seems to be intrinsic to the universe. That would indicate to me that materialism is in serious trouble.
Mathematics is a tool. What make such understanding possible are the relentless, disciplined, often-pointless-looking collection and categorization of data of any kind, by generations and generations of selfless scientists.
From understanding what exactly stars are made of, to the evolution of life on Earth, and the exploits of humans living thousands of years ago.
It's really uncanny the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, something we made up by manipulating abstract symbols, in modelling and helping us understand the universe in every minute detail we care to inquire. Truly miraculous.