(April 26, 2015 at 9:04 am)Hatshepsut Wrote: If that happens, I'm afraid the mathematicians will blanch because two major assumptions they have made will suddenly be as vulnerable to melting as ice cream in a hot car in July. You can do addition by experiment, using only marbles if you don't have a lipid bilayer handy. 2 + 3 = 5 becomes visually evident as marbles. But if you repeat the experiment next week, will you get the same result? Mathematicians assume that once you've established something like 2 + 3 = 5 you never have to prove it a second time. In other sciences that's not so. Anything done empirically is subject to re-investigation and possible overturn.
The other assumption is trickier: If you do math with apples instead of marbles, then what is the "sixness" that connects 6 apples with 6 marbles? Somehow, mathematicians feel that 6 ought to be 6 whether it's represented by marbles, apples, or dancing electrons on a bi-lipid membrane. They call it the principle of isomorphism.
I don't see the second assumption as being trickier, more of an alternate expression of the first. The thing that connects the 6 apples and the 6 marbles is (one or more of) us pointing out something that we consider significant, same as in the first paragraph. Reality is what it is and so far as it has communicated with me, unconcerned. The six apples are six apples, the six marbles are six marbles. They do not connect their "sixness." We do.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat? 
