[eckza]

Not to handwave too hard here; but do we know, _for certain_, that the universe can be in total described mathematically?

Yes, I know that what I'm hinting at is not falsifiable, burden of proof, etc.

But I think it's a little arrogant of us as a species (nb, I'm not talking to you, sgillen, in particular) to think that since we've come as far as we have, that the mysteries of consciousness and life and the universe and everything are going to be laid bare Real Soon Now.

[p1esk]

Do you have any reasons to suspect the universe _cannot_ be described mathematically? Mathematics, unlike physics, is pretty flexible.

[d_tr]

We are essentially asking whether the universe could contain a complete encoding of its workings.

The answer is certainly not obvious to me, especially when we have results such as Goedel's theorems.

[p1esk]

Goedel’s theorem is not a problem because math is not limited to models of our universe.

[HEmanZ]

I don’t think it’s even controversial that it cannot be fully described mathematically. I don’t think I’ve heard of an epistemological system that would support this. E.g try to reduce the experience qualia down mathematically.

But there’s also no reason this is required for consciousness to be emergent from non-human-brain systems.

I think one of the hard parts of theory of mind is that we probably will never understand the experience of being in things sufficiently different from ourselves. Any computer system will probably be sufficiently different, so we can’t know what it’s like to be an AI.

What’s it like to be a chatbot?