RE: Are Numbers Real?
October 17, 2018 at 8:18 am
(This post was last modified: October 17, 2018 at 8:28 am by I_am_not_mafia.)
(October 16, 2018 at 4:39 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: But now I feel like we are getting away from the significance of the question in the first place. To follow your and Rob's skepticism any further, we may as well say "there are no such things as facts, because for there to be facts in the first place relies on a basic set of assumptions."
The hive mind aliens may not be able/willing to understand math the way we do, but this has no bearing on the fact that math is a real, objective thing.
But Maths isn't a real or objective thing. It's a made up system.
It's like saying musical notation is real because octaves can be seen having double the frequency of a real world string. But we made the decision that the note A is 440hz and to partition the scale up the way we have even though there are real physical reasons for doing so (like 4th and 5th notes being more in phase than the 7th note in a scale).
For example, what is 0 divided by 0 ?
If I find that I have a problem that cannot be adequately described by Maths, I am free to create a new form of Maths to allow me to reason about it. It's just a tool I use. I'm also not very good at Maths so the system I come up with may not be that effective.
People argue the same argument for logic and claim that it also objectively exists. But this assumes that both the values True and False exist in reality.
They don't.
The only difference with logic is that it is constrained to two values whereas Maths uses an infinite number of numbers.
Unless you use fuzzy logic that is which was created to have the best of both systems.
Or take probability. Is that based on a real underlying chance of something happening, or is it based on our lack of knowledge and understanding of what we predict?
(October 16, 2018 at 4:39 am)ignoramus Wrote: Mat, I wouldn't imagine that to be the case with aliens.
The periodic table has beautifully simple structures ... eg: Hydrogen = 1 proton, Helium - 2 protons, Lithium = 3 protons., etc
I believe any advanced race will discover all these correlations via maths.
They may recognise that everything that we see as distinct and singular is in fact made up of constituent parts. Much like protons and neutrons in fact being made up of subatomic particles.
