The strong correspondence principle

It's a long standing question of why reasoning, logic and math are so adequate to describe reality. In fact, seekers of the theory of everything, physics' modern knights of the round table, have in their quest an implicit belief that a fundamental principle underlying all of reality holds the key to derive all possible statements about the universe that are true.

As we've already more than knobheadedly stated, the universe is made of things looking at things. Perception and comprehension happen when a system interacts with a second system and both develop an internal structure as a result of their encounter. And, just as we've shown before, such coupled systems often constraint themselves to a limited set of answers.

One thing we can say about the rational part of our mind is that it is a system which effectively (more likely approximatively) deals with only two states: true or false. This system basically measures how comfortable you are with a particular statement and whether you should act according to it. It has its own rules called logic which have been drawn out for quite some time.

The common scientific view, in close connection with these rules, entertains the idea that there is a fundamental reality which is true and that the human mind, through the practice of thought, can come asymptotically close to it. However, as several people have pointed out in very beautiful ways throughout the history of mathematics, statements can't always be either true or false. Indeed, this statement is false, is a statement which is alternatively true or false. If it is true then it is false, and if it is false then it is true.

This happens because logics, reason and mathematics are dynamical phenomena of our mind. There is a physical system whose dynamics correspond to our thought process which are effectively described by the simple rules of logic. For a single statement, the possible orbits are either continuously true, continuously false, or alternatively true and false. The paradoxical statement above is in fact a logical equation whose solution is a cycle: true, false, true, false, true, false, true... but true is nothing fundamental about the world. It is a state of the system.

Like the magnet detector, a result of true or false doesn't tell us anything about reality. As Trinity put it, "The Matrix can't tell you who you are." It can't tell you what things are either. The results of reasoning only express the result of the interaction of the logic thinker and the object. Existence happens at the edge of real things.

And this is why mathematics has always come through. The rational part of our brain is an adaptive system where logic structures form until a stable structure is found. That's why theories evolve as discovery proceeds and, just like with living organisms competing for survival, massive extinctions can also happen. They're called scientific revolutions.

The same way the auditory cortex adapts to recognise new sounds, the logic centres design new theories as a result of their own environmental constraints. This whole theory of ours is the outcome of our rational interaction with the world. But then so are the physical phenomena that underlie our conscious thought. Which has led us to formulate the strong correspondence principle:

Every phenomenon has an experience associated with it and every experience has a phenomenon associated with it. Phenomena and experience are themselves an experience and a phenomenon. They are indistinguishable.

Whereas in the weak correspondence principle we assume the tangible existence of a physical phenomenological world which expresses itself through subjective experiences, this updated statement acknowledges the fact that the depiction of reality in terms of physical phenomena is itself an outcome of the dynamics of these physical phenomena. It means we can either think of the world in physical terms or in mental terms; they are the same.
The reason why so many people disagree about the nature of the world is because the whole system is so complex that many realities (stable configurations that result from the universe's interactions) are possible. We know many systems in our mind, such as the emotional mind, think very differently from the rational mind. Yet they also evolve, reach a conclusion then evolve again.

Looking at logics from a phenomenological point of view makes it pervious to generalisation. How common is our logic? Does it emerge often in complex systems? We will come back to this point later.