#24 - Popper's Three Worlds
from Increments Hosted by Ben Chugg and Vaden Masrani
This episode begins with a big announcement! Ben has officially become a cat person, and is now Taking Cats Seriously. Vaden follows up with some news of his own, before diving into the main subject for today's episode - Popper's Three Worlds. In this episode we discuss: The TCS parenting movement Chesto's tweet to Deutsch How Popper's Three Worlds differs from Deutsch's Things/Qualia/Abstractions classification Would prime numbers exist if humans didn't exist? What constitutes reality? The existence of non-physical entities and the reality of abstractions Having a quick glance at the following wikipedia pages will help ground the conversation: Formal systems Formal languages Modular Arithmetic Rules of inference Alternative Logics Errata: Somewhere Vaden says English is a formal language. Nope definitely not - English is natural language, which is distinct from a formal language. Send us your best guess for whether or not we're real at [email protected].
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Chapters
- 0:00 Intro: cats and cold open
- 0:36 Big announcement: Vaden is going to be a dad
- 2:50 Taking Children Seriously movement
- 6:54 Main segment: Popper's Three Worlds
- 13:00 Are abstractions real? Against reductionism
- 16:01 Deutsch vs Popper on the reality of abstractions
- 20:16 Do prime numbers depend on humans?
- 21:34 Platonic forms and mathematical Platonism
- 33:44 Mathematics as formal systems: the clock example
- 43:11 Chess and independence of formal consequences
- 48:12 Why does mathematics apply to reality?
- 1:07:15 Hitting intuition bedrock
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