Are Numbers Real?

[Angrboda]

I think it's worth pointing out that in some sense the question of whether numbers and math are real and exist is predicated on an ontological assumption that there is a world independent of our senses and that our sensory experience can provide us with direct evidence of that world. Our latest insights suggest that our mental concepts are all a product of a complex biological device and that any concepts about the external world are therefore necessarily constructs of the mind. One doesn't have to travel far to find examples of this. The example of a cricle was given earlier, and no such thing as a circle exists in the so-called real world. Our idea of a circle is an idealization that is largely a byproduct of the way our senses work, specifically with regard to granularity and sub-feature processing in the brain and eye. Until our ontologies catch up with the fact of the mental nature of "our world" then questions of the existence of things which may be based in the way the brain thinks about the world are likely to persist without any clear resolution. I'm not sure how to reconcile these two radically different ideas, that of the independent existence of an external world and the radically dependent nature of the mental one, but it's possible that such a reconciliation could dissolve such questions and render them non-questions.