[lbrandy]

> they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism.

This paper is doing the opposite. It's arguing that other papers/ideas advocating dualism are going the wrong way and purely physicalist explanations are the best path forward.

[dr_dshiv]

Purely materialist explanations, you mean? Platonic dualism, as advocated by folks like Max Tegmark, isn't non-physicalist. And it needn't be dualist even — if the world is made of math and the materials emerge by implication.

[bobthechef]

What does it mean to be "made of math"? This reads like gibberish to me. Mathematics deals with formal abstraction. Geometry, for example, abstracts the spacial characteristics of matter from matter and focuses on them solely while ignoring everything else. (This actually reminds me of Bertrand Russell's structuralist account of physics and how it omits much if not most of reality.)

(Also, Platonism does posit an immaterial realm of the forms in which all material things participate. But this participation relation is problematic, something Aristotle pointed out in the Third Man Argument and something Plato himself knew.)

[dr_dshiv]

"Gibberish": Plato, Russell, Penrose and Tegmark?

Made of math is as Aristotle noted: "All is number" — Platonic-Pythagoreanism was at the heart of classical civilization and the enlightenment.

I can only suppose that there is something about these ideas that deeply disturbs or even frightens. But I wouldn't dismiss them as gibberish.