Physics’s pangolin

Some interesting stuff, such as

> You do not need to be a hard-core dualist to imagine that subjective experience might not be amenable to mathematical law

(difficult to argue but worth considering, from my POV)

The presentation of the argument (that the increasingly counterintuitive implications of mathematical theories of physical reality represent some kind of progressive societal neurosis in the face of fundamental incommensurability) seems a little confused, in that it conflates things like the string theory Landscape and the many-worlds interpretation with perfectly testable theories like QM. I think it's reasonable to have a physical theory that seems like nonsense, so long as the theory passes experimental tests and there's no better theory that does. Why should we expect tiny tiny bits of the universe to be unsurprising to relatively gigantic inhabitants, etc? Whereas my lay impression of The Landscape, the Anthropic Principle, and so on, is that they seem like so much flailing around in the dark, and can support the author's case a lot better - the accusation of neurotic ritual behaviour seems to find more fertile ground with proponents of untestable theories than with those espousing well-tested but absurd-seeming ones.

Though Platonism is a common enough accusation, I wonder if the author is really objecting to Pythagoreanism, whose adherents profess: "all things that are, are numbers" - a narrower claim than Plato's ideal realm, perhaps, and so maybe an easier target. After all, at least one Pythagorean was neurotically (if apocryphally) murdered for revealing the embarrassing incommensurability of the square root of two, which goes well with the article's thesis.