Sara Imari Walker

But I don't know that I can assign physical realism to.

to anything that we can't observe directly.

And I would rather take the mathematics and the theories of physics themselves.

I do these thought experiments about the theoretical physics of theoretical physicists.

It's like if I were outside of myself and I was watching what I was as a theoretical physicist writing down equations and trying to describe the world, what would those mathematical objects look like as physical things?

And so this to me is the perspective that I find much more productive because I don't think people have looked at that

through that lens at what mathematics is.

Like we tend to take the Euclidean, you know, and like the, you know, Plato's cave type paradigm from the ancient Greeks that like there's a perfect world of forms and like, you know, we're just seeing the shadows of like this perfect reality.

And I think the universe is constructing itself and mathematics is a particular thing our universe has constructed that enables things to be possible that wouldn't be possible without mathematics existing.

Well, I think the idea, it's kind of like what you're saying.

If you take the limit, it actually is consistent with our equations to assume that the universe could be infinite or the time in the future could be infinite.

And to them, I think it seems like it has some physicality to it.

But I don't but I always it always seems to me to be a placeholder of like the boundary.

And so but also like, you know, it depends on what you think is satisfactory.

So if you want to believe a multiverse hypothesis and there's sort of an infinite number of realities because you find that more explain it like explanatory to assume that everything exists and therefore like we're just one thing in that space.

You know, some people find that satisfactory.

I don't find that satisfactory because it doesn't explain why we exist.

And I just I want to explain us.

I want to know what we are.

Yeah, but it's a hard set of questions around infinity and mathematics just generally.