alt Hacker NewsIsn't most of our current understanding of how life on earth came to be (eg: primordial soup, hydrothermal vents, etc), natural evolution, all basically "just statistics"? They all require the correct "setup" (time, location, etc), but in a large enough universe, it's _statistically_ likely (mediocrity principle) and "just statistics" again, right?
Well yeah, that's tautologous because statistics is a mathematical abstraction. Everything, viewed a certain way, is "statistics". Just like everything, viewed a certain way, is "physics". And everything, viewed a certain way, is "narrative".
Mathematics models the world, it does not have substance. It is a useful way of looking and a useful way of manipulating, but many models are equally useful. Capital T Truth, beyond models is very difficult to get at. We can show that things are true for certain models well enough. Showing that something is true in all models (a universal truth) is far more difficult. You face incommensurability.
I see a lot of people in technology fall into this extremely basic logical fallacy called Reification constantly.