Comment by antonvs
21 days ago
> "intrinsic importance"
"Intrinsic" in contexts like this is a word for people who are projecting what they consider important onto the world. You can't define it in any meaningful way that's not entirely subjective.
21 days ago
> "intrinsic importance"
"Intrinsic" in contexts like this is a word for people who are projecting what they consider important onto the world. You can't define it in any meaningful way that's not entirely subjective.
Mathematical theorems at least have objectively lower information content, because they merely rule out the impossible, while scientific knowledge also rules out the possible but non-actual.
You have it backwards. Mathematical theorems have objectively higher information content, because they rule out the impossible and model possibilities in all possible worlds that satisfy their preconditions. Scientific knowledge can never do more than inductive projections from observations in the single world we have physical access to.
The only thing that saves science from being nothing more than “huh, will you look at that,” is when it can make use of a mathematical model to provide insight into relationships between phenomena.