I’m working through the implications of discrete space and am starting to build some intriguing intuitions. I am trying to reduce the physical world down to a bunch of geometric atoms changing state—essentially, to a grid of voxels. I don’t claim the following is true, only that it’s a coherent way to explain a bunch …| Steve Patterson
Immaterial things are hard to understand, and taking their existence seriously has been unfashionable for centuries. Modern materialists have gotten comfortable simply defining them or laughing them out of existence. But since my philosophical conversion to Platonism, I now think that immaterial stuff way more important than material stuff—and there’s even a meaningful sense in which …| Steve Patterson
Countless thinkers for the past two thousand years have appealed to Euclidean geometry as an example of rock-solid reasoning. The proofs in Euclid’s Elements are beautiful deductive structures. One proof builds on the next, and by accepting the starting axioms, you are compelled to agree with the final conclusions. The geometric objects within Euclid have properties which …| Steve Patterson
There’s an ongoing quest to reduce everything to mathematics. It’s part of the reason we’re in a dark age. Seems like a good time to ask the question: is everything quantifiable? Were the Pythagoreans correct in saying that “All is number”? Consider three statements: 1 Alice is taller than Bob. This claim is easy to quantify. […]| Steve Patterson
