ABSTRACT
Successful mathematical treatment of nature majorly confirms that faith but at the cost of focusing only on the features of reality that exhibit clear patterns that can be expressed mathematically. Perhaps what makes the prospect of perfect simulation seductive is the characteristic "chunking" involved in language and thought alike, whereby "a rose is a rose is a rose." Determinism expresses the wishful thought that nature can be accounted for exhaustively from first principles, in an axiomatic system. Like determinism, "indeterminacy" is not a property inhering in nature, but a state of knowledge. The identity of an individual thing is relative to the parts that constitute it as a whole, and also to the greater wholes of which it is a part. Moreover, like the partitioning into "system" and "environment," a property or element reflects a human cognitive act as well as a putative reality.
