Mario Livio Quote

Unfortunately, I do not find Tegmark's line of reasoning to be extremely compelling. The leap from the existence of an external reality (independent of humans) to the conclusion that, in Tegmark's words, You must believe in what I call the mathematical universe hypothesis: that our physical reality is a mathematical structure, involves, in my opinion, a sleight of hand. When Tegmark attempts to characterize what mathematics really is, he says: To a modern logician, a mathematical structure is precisely this: a set of abstract entities with relations between them. But this modern logician is human! In other words, Tegmark never really proves that our mathematics is not invented by humans; he simply assumes it. Furthermore, as the French neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeaux has pointed out in response to a similar assertion: To claim physical reality for mathematical objects, on a level of the natural phenomena we study in biology, poses a worrisome epistemological problem it seems to me. How can a physical state, internal to our brain, represent another physical state external to it?