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- MCP server with stdio transport for local use
- Search episodes, transcripts, hosts, and series
- 4,511 episodes with metadata and transcripts
- Data loader with in-memory JSON storage

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Episode: 3555
Title: HPR3555: PopKorn Episode 1: The Fallacy of the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the ETC
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3555/hpr3555.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 01:21:44
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3555 for Friday the 18th of March 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Pockern Episode 1, the fallacy of the unreasonable effectiveness
of mathematics in the etc.
It is hosted by Black Colonel, and is about 16 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Black Colonel tries talking off the cuff with mixed results.
Hello Hacker Public Radio, my name is Black Colonel, and in this episode I'm going to
sort of be talking more off the cuff than usual.
I've been trying to record more often, but the craziness of my life right now has been
making that untenable, so I'm trying to experiment with a few new ways of recording episodes.
I tried to do it in my car using my phone, which didn't work so well because, apparently,
getting it from my phone to Hacker Public Radio is a bit of a chore, so now I'm trying
it using, I just installed Slackware 15 on my desktop computer, but I came to my attention
that SlackBuilds.org doesn't have anything for $15.00 yet, so I'm trying to use the stuff
that comes with Slackware 15, so I'm using K-Wave at the moment, which doesn't have a compressor
plug-in or a way of removing noise cancellation or anything, or at least nothing that I could
find.
So I'm going to look into that a little more after I finish this recording, but I want
to get something recorded so that I would have something on a computer that I could use
to actually send it to the people at HPR.
Anyway, this is a series that I'm going to be calling Popcorn, which is basically just
going to be random stuff that I'm thinking about, and in this episode I'm going to be talking
about the fallacy of the surprising effectiveness of mathematics, is how it's usually seen.
It's one of those, I guess it's supposed to be some kind of proof of God or proof of
some kind of creator or creation, because according to, actually, let me, because I have my computer
right here.
Let me look up a definition from some of the...
All right, here we go.
So it's called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural science.
It says, the miracle of appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation
of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.
We should be grateful for it and help that it will remain valid in the future in research
that it will extend for better force to our pleasure, even though perhaps to our
development to the wide branches of learning, now where's the...
So that was the general formulation of it, let me see where the...
I can't apparently...
I've seen it used to argue the existence of God because while with the laws of mathematics
worked so well with the laws of physics in the natural sciences, I don't see that in
this particular formulation as far as this original 1960 article by Eugene Weigner.
Regardless, I didn't want to talk about how the evening concept this is a kind of fallacious
statement because there's nothing unreasonably effective about mathematics in natural sciences
because mathematics is a tool which is wholly humanly created.
I mean, even if we want to go all the way to the point of the fine structure constant,
let me pull that up so I can talk about it.
So the fine structure constant is something which Feynman said that every physicist should
have on his wall and worry about it because the fine structure constant doesn't have any
units, basically, is the thing about it, belief that it's correct.
Yeah, and the thing that's weird about that is that it just is a sort of raw number in
the math of quantum mechanics and it's not really that surprising, though, considering
that it is a ratio of two, as it would have to be if it was a number, a ratio of two equal
like of two different numbers that are the same units, if that makes sense.
The reason why this isn't even hard, like this is the most surprising thing mathematically
about the laws of physics, by the way, fine structure constant is approximately one over
437, but the reason why it doesn't matter, per se, is because it's hard to get people
understand this, which is why it's frustrating that I'm having such hard time even speaking
clearly at the moment.
I'm not very good at just riffing on myself, anyway.
It's arbitrary, like you could, it's hard to get people to understand how arbitrary mathematics
is, like, how many choices are available at mathematics, so mathematics is based on
the Zermelo-Frankle with choice axioms, and they'll seem relatively straightforward,
like, for example, the one of the most basic ones would be probably the axiom of identity
or the axiom of extensionality, I think, is what it's called the ZFC of extensionality.
The axiom of extensionality is sort of a definition for equality, which says the two sets
are equal if all of their elements are equal.
In the formal language, it's that for all A and for all B, for all A, for all B, for all
X, X is an element of A precisely when, or rather, if X is an element of A precisely when
X is an element of B, then that implies that A is equal to B, so if X is in A, if all
of the X's are in A, and all of the X's are in B, and they're all the same X's, then
A is equal to B, which seems like it's like, okay, yeah, if the sets have all the same
elements, then yeah, they're equal, why is this, like, a thing that needs to be talked
about, and the reason is because it's a logical formulation in first order logic, so you don't
mean, like, you have to possibly, because you can't prove it is the idea, but the thing
is, is it doesn't, you could come up with a different notion of equality, and it would,
it's possible for it to be just as valid or just as generalizable, so I mean, I can't
secure and give you examples of all of these different notions of equality, mostly because
I am a human, and this is sort of the way that I understand the world, but it's possible
that if there's another intelligence, then, like, an alien or something, then they might
understand mathematics in a very different way than we would, not just a different base,
not just a different orientation, but a completely different framework from the ground up that
just happens to intersect with all of the things that we already know, and so our mathematics
is not particularly exceptional in the fact that it can define the world, because the
world is already there, and all of the, like, the reason why we have this, the reason we
came up with this axiom, that we can't prove, so this axiom isn't something which can
be derived from, from more fundamental things, is because this is how it is viewed in the
real life, so we have purposefully constructed mathematics to reflect the real world, rather
than having mathematics sort of be the real world, because mathematics is axiomatic,
and sort of, definitionally, reality is not axiomatic, or if it is axiomatic, then that's
just another way of saying that it has a creator, and if it does have a creator, that isn't
something that you can prove by saying that math has a creator, because that's kind of,
it's at best non-sequitor and at worst, circular logic, but yeah, so that's sort of what
I wanted to talk about, I do kind of want to talk about a little bit that I kind of am
a outlier, at least in the people that I know of, because I am a very devout Catholic, so
I'm a very religious person, but every single time I see a proof of God, I just kind of,
it's frustrating, because they're all crap, like the basic reason why all proofs of God are crap
is because I have not yet seen a proof of God, which can prove the God it's trying to prove,
like the best example would probably have to be, same time as Aquinas, who used the
first mover proof of God, basically saying that, if something has an effect, then it has to have
a cause, so God is the thing which is the cause of the first effect in essence, it's a little bit
more subtle than that, it kind of has the same logical holes as what can be seen in that kind
of simplification, but I'm not doing it as much justice as I could, but at the end of the day,
that doesn't even prove, like, same time as Aquinas was Catholic, but it doesn't prove that the
Catholic God is the real God, because there could be, like, as a thought, or whatever, or Nihala
thought that maybe that's the thing which caused the first effect, maybe it all got sneezed out of
the thing from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it doesn't prove that your God is the
right God, it just proves that a God exists, which is a less strong, it's less strong than what most
of them would like it to be, and in general, a lot of times, the God that is proved in these could
easily just be the big bang, and then there's, you know, like, intelligence behind that God,
in a lot of these proofs, there are some that it stipulate that has been intelligent, like the
watchmaker argument and stuff like that, which I mean, if you've read the blind watchmaker by
Dawkins, then you can see kind of the logical fallacies with that particular argument, but
basically, it's frustrating to me that people keep trying to prove that God exists because
by its fundamental nature, because God is the universe, it's kind of hard, I mean, for the same
reason, mathematics, you can't, there are some axioms that you just can't prove because you need
them to build everything else, like, there has to be something to stand on before you can start
building stuff, and God is kind of like what I believe that is in the real world, which means
you can't prove it, which means stop trying to prove it, or else, like the axioms in mathematics,
which are other things that you can't prove, which also make them, you know, not very
fundamental to the real world, because we made them up in order to reflect the real world.
What was I going to say?
Hey, I remember what I was going to say after that, so I'm just going to end it here,
and take this as a good episode, so thank you for tuning in. My name is Izzy Leibowitz,
or Black Carlin, you can contact me on Mastodon at BlackColonel at KnicksNet.Social,
or you can email me at Izzy Leibowitz at pm.me, that's at India Double Zulu Yankee.
I don't remember how to spell my last name, hold on, um,
that is India Double Zulu Yankee, Lima, Echo, India, Bravo, Oscar, Whiskey, India, Tango, Zulu,
at popamike.micaco. So you can email me on there, or you can send me a Mastodon message,
which I already said what that is, and I'm not going to spell it, because it's going to be in the show notes.
Anyway, this has been a rambling time, and maybe I will edit it, maybe I won't, I have not yet
decided. Probably won't, just because I want to get it actually out there, so I'm sorry for all
of the long pauses and terrible audio quality, but, you know, socks, it is what it is,
and so CKS, I will talk to you next time, bye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio, at Hacker Public Radio, does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording
or cast, you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is. Hosting for HBR has
been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet archive, and our syncs.net.
On the Sadois stages, today's show is released under Creative Commons,
Attribution 4.0 International License.