Comment by Byamarro

6 days ago

Math is about creating mental models.

Sometimes we want to model something in real life and try to use math for this - this is physics.

But even then, the model is not real, it's a model (not even a 1:1 one on top of that). It usually tries to capture some cherry picked traits of reality i.e. when will a planet be in 60 days ignoring all its "atoms"[1]. That's because we want to have some predictive power and we can't simulate whole reality. Wolfram calls these selective traits that can be calculated without calculating everything else "pockets of reducability". Do they exist? Imho no, planets don't fundamentally exist, they're mental constructs we've created for a group of particles so that our brains won't explode. If planets don't exist, so do their position etc.

The things about models is that they're usually simplifications of the thing they model, with only the parts of it that interest us.

Modeling is so natural for us that we often fail to realize that we're projecting. We're projecting content of our minds onto reality and then we start to ask questions out of confusion such as "does my mind concept exist". Your mind concept is a neutral pattern in your mind, that's it.

[1] atoms are mental concepts as well ofc