An accident of nature put Stephen Hawking into a life of perpetual contemplation (given the cottage industry of supports that kept him productive).
High capability for reverie can be a rapturous way of life (if one can afford it).
Perhaps reveries of leading minds in mathematics are anticipating Absolute Others, millions of years of evolution beyond us.
I expressed something similar to a philosopher of science today:
Just after emailing you about [a textual question], I recalled a recent article, relevant to a new Hawking book—but probably you've already read about a mathematical approach to particle physics whose “alien math” seems to decrease doubts about infinities. I'm not a mathematician, so that article is maybe as complex as I can weather.He didn’t reply. I guess I was too exotic.
However, the idea of alien math is intriguing. Lee Smolin, years ago, in The Trouble with Physics, mused that humans haven't evolved far enough to discover the math which can deal satisfactorily with such "things" as quantum gravity.
Given a high probability of intelligent life on other planets which happen to be millions of years older than our relatively young solar system, there would be literally alien math.
Hawking's holographicality is (I surmise) the ostensible mode of the holological phenomenality of intelligibility which is entirely mathematical. (That's not a nominalist stance about mathematics, nor exactly realist, in a normal sense.)
I like Smolin’s notion of “quantum foam,” which evinces—from which "emerges"—space-time as such, and intelligence lives in the phenomenality of what's "real."
How that quantum foam "is" faces us as the COBE image.
I like to think that the especially-blue area there is bumping against another universe.
cheers,
Gary
But a conceptuality of “Truth” and “Realism” can be a cosmic thing.
(I’m presently prospecting an elaborate interplay of the two concepts
for a fundamental sense of conceptuality.)
That “can be” is partly why the James Webb telescope, arming astrobiological questing, wagers that Our planetary mathesis of the Anthropic cosmos isn’t wondering Alone—though reverie about It All can easily be wandering alone.
