Category: Epistemology and Method

(math)

—“Curt: Someone said:”The closest you can get to objective truth is maths, which is apriori, analytic and not empirical whatsoever” Is this a lie? I’m having difficulties understanding that since maths is axiomatic.”—

This is one of the great intellectual problems that we must deal with. And it’s as old as the Greeks at least. It is better to say, that if you can describe something in *certain mathematical equations* then you have the lowest chance of misinterpretation of description.

However, as we see in statistics daily, economics weekly, and physics monthly, mathematics is a tool limited to describing certain things. It does not for example, describe causality or sequence. And it can be misused more easily than used.

Mathematics depends upon constant categories and constant relations, at scale independence. And so it is good for expression of deterministic phenomenon. However, in economics and in sentience, we have only inconstant categories, and fungible relations. We can think of it this way: the physical world can’t decide to change categories and relations; we can cause changes in the physical world if we want at some cost or other. The economic world can change categories and relations, but at some cost and effort; and the sentient world can change categories and relations with only exposure to information, and very near zero cost to the individual, but at very, very, very high cost to groups.

This does not mean we cannot make true statements about economics at some degree of precision. Just as we cannot make true statements about subatomic world yet beyond some degree of precision. The reason being that at the subatomic level, and in the economic and sentient levels, the causal density is so high and categorical variation so high that mathematics has proven little use in direct prediction of consequences – and almost none at all. At the sentient level we have no way at all of expressing in mathematical terms the information necessary to change state.

What we have seen is that there is a point at which we can model sufficient causal density of systems that we can observe intermediary phenomenon (patterns) that assist us in defining limits of consequent patterns (ends we want to observe). So we may not be able to predict the location of molecules of gas, prices of a good at a location, or the information necessary to form an idea. But that does not mean that we cannot make truthful (parsimonious and descriptive) statements about those phenomenon.

And this is the current limit of our understanding of what we may be able to do with mathematics. In other words, while there may be an unmeasurable and unpredictable set of end states due to causal density and rapid heuristics that change our actions or associations, it appears that whatever limits humans are limited by, just as whatever limits the universe is limited by, cause patterns that appear, and these patterns may in fact assist us in predicting end states.

The problem, as usual, will be at some point, the information necessary to perform a calculation is equal to reality itself.

So, the response to your friend is that math is good at measuring simple things, that does not mean all things that we need measure are simple.

Math works because it is trivial. But we have, until the 1800’s only used it to measure trivial things.

We are just beginning to touch upon complicated things.

-Curt