[naasking]

> Its insane to suppose that somatosensory representation building, which requires organic neruoplasticity to be connected to the organically adaptive neuromotor system, etc. etc. etc. can just be instantiated in a bit of sand.

Why? That's just an assertion, not an argument. All of those big words and sophisticated concepts you used all reduce to field interactions that we've mostly captured mathematically. Unless you're imbuing these things with some magical essence that can't be observed, but then who's doing the pseudoscience?

[mjburgess]

I'm just driven mad by how people thinking physical objects with specific properties is "magic", but reducing reality down to abstract platonic mathematical forms is "science".

This is the opposite.

Gold isnt lead. Lead isnt wood. Cells are not bits of metal. Bits of metal do not polymerise. Bits of sand do not form weak covalent bonds...

It's kinda exhausting that this mathematical superstition is so prevalent in people who otherwise believe they are somehow anti magical thinking.

There is no more magical thinking in supposing that you can ignore reality, describe it in a formula, reinterpet that formula against some other reality, and it'll all work out.

As if, "2 + 2 = 4" means the same thing when it's "2 drivers + 2 drivers = 4 deaths" vs. "2 cookies + 2 cookies = 4 happy children"

The idea that reality is essentially mathematical and not essentially physical is pythagorean magical thinking. Science says the opposite.

All the mathematics in explanatory scientific laws are just paraphrases of descriptions of the physical properties of systems. None of it is actually mathematics.

Physics does not study "2". It studies there being earth and the sun and a force between them, summarised as "2 masses" etc.

[naasking]

> Gold isnt lead. Lead isnt wood. Cells are not bits of metal. Bits of metal do not polymerise. Bits of sand do not form weak covalent bonds...

That's not the argument. Both gold and lead are aggregates of fields. They don't have the same macroscopic properties but they do have the same microscopic properties (or attoscopic if you want to nitpick).

> The idea that reality is essentially mathematical and not essentially physical is pythagorean magical thinking. Science says the opposite.

Science says no such thing, and nobody is saying that reality is not physical. Those who adopt a mathematical universe hypothesis, or the like, say that reality is physical but that the physical is a subset of the mathematical.

> Physics does not study "2". It studies there being earth and the sun and a force between them, summarised as "2 masses" etc.

Mathematics is the study of structure. Physics is studying the structure of reality. There is therefore an obvious and inescapable link between mathematics and physics that you are simply not going to refute by repeatedly asserting that mathematical structures have nothing to do with physics. Of course any structures that have a formal correspondence have important equivalences, because that's literally what formal correspondence means.

[mjburgess]

"Formal equivalence" does not have any causal significance.

> They don't have the same macroscopic properties

Exactly... see the above...

Whenever you taalk about "formal" equivalece you mean: ignoring the causal semantics for the formula describing the system.

"2 + 2 = 4" is eqv. to "2 + 2 = 4" even when talking about wars, people, cars, animals, ... sand, cells, brains, bodies...

NO, obvious not. This isnt hard, this is obvious.

It requires some extraordinary magical thinking to suppose that field configurations of sand are equivalent to arbitary systems... this is obvious nonesense