Write4U:
I have told you a dozen times that other than via stochastic processes, mathematics is not causal to physical interactions. It is causal to HOW physical actions interact. Determinism.
....
I said that mathematics is causal to HOW physical interactions occur.
Mathematical functions guide the processes.
How many times will you ignore my answer and ask the same question?
Please allow me to attempt to translate your words into something understandable.
Your claim is that mathematics doesn't
start a physical interaction; rather, the maths
guides interactions after they have started.
Is that a fair description of your position?
Consider an example: I allow a tennis ball to drop from my hands. It falls and lands on the floor.
The way I interpret your position is that mathematics had nothing to do with my causing the ball to drop from my hands, because "mathematics is not causal to physical interactions". The obvious question that arises, then, is: what you do think
is causal to physical interactions? There must be something
independent of maths that starts off physical processes. Do you have any definite ideas on what
that thing might be?
Now, once the tennis ball has started falling, that's where the maths kicks in, according to your position. The maths "tells" the tennis ball to accelerate at a rate of 9.8 metres per second per second as it falls, for example.
The question that now occurs to me is: is the maths just making a
suggestion to the tennis ball? Does the tennis ball have any power to "refuse" the suggestion that it should accelerate at a particular rate? If not, then wouldn't it be fair to say that it is the maths that
causes the ball to accelerate at that rate?
In other words, what do you mean when you say that mathematics "guides" physical interactions?
You seem to be saying that, without the "guidance" of the maths, the tennis ball would not necessarily accelerate at 9.8 metres per second per second.
What else,
other than this "guidance" from the maths, would be a
sufficient reason for the ball to accelerate at that rate? It can't be
just the maths alone that does the trick, because then it would be fair to say that the maths is what
causes the acceleration at that rate. Yet you have told us that maths is not causal to physical interactions. So, apart from the "guiding" maths, what
else determines how the ball falls, in your theory?
Going back to the start, what actually caused me to drop the ball? Was it my "free will" perhaps? Is free will one of those things that is independent of maths, in your philosophy? Or was my decision to drop the ball at a particular time somehow itself "guided" by maths, but also somehow not "caused by" maths? If the maths didn't cause it, what did?
As you can probably see, I think that your attempt to distinguish a "causal" role for maths from a "guiding" role is untenable, because causing and guiding are not really separable ideas when it comes to breaking down a physical interaction into any sort of time sequence.
There's another problem, as well, and it comes back to the same unanswered question I have asked you many times. Let us accept, for a moment, that maths doesn't cause anything, but it can nevertheless "guide" processes. You still haven't answered the question of
how this "guiding" works, exactly. The maths says a tennis ball
should accelerate at 9.8 metres per second per second, let's say. But what mechanism translates that mathematical "message" into the physical effect of the ball actually accelerating in the physical world at the specified rate? In other words, what mechanism connects the abstract mathematical idea to the physical reality of the system in question?
I don't think you have any answers to any of this. I think that, mostly, this is because you just make up stuff as you go along and you don't really think it through. I expect that you'll most likely respond to this with an irrelevant one-liner, like you usually do, or else you'll simply try to ignore the issues I have put to you. But we'll see whether you have the capacity to think about your own position and to respond honestly and fully.
If you know these answers, then instead of just calling me wrong, why not tell me what is right? Can you do that or will you slip-slide away like Dave did, by declaring it is too complicated and lengthy for him to bother with, but is expected of me to prove my position.
It is not up to
me to try to rationalise your position, Write4U. When you make claims, it is up to
you to justify those claims.
I don't think your claims are consistent, let alone justifiable, and I can't really help you to pick up the pieces of the mess of your "theory", to salvage them into some sort of workable thesis. If I was you'd, I'd give up the whole thing as a hopelessly flawed concoction.
Here's an alternative: the position I have been putting to you in this thread is that maths is
descriptive, not
prescriptive. That is, we can use maths to
model the ways in which physical systems behaviour, but the maths only affects how the
model behaves, not how the physical system behaves. In other words, the maths is part of the map; the physical system is the territory that the map is describing. Mathematical models are successful to the extent that they allow us to accurately predict the behaviours of the physical systems they are modelling.
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