RE: Atheist VS Naturalist - the latter sounds more appealing to me...
June 6, 2020 at 6:33 pm
(This post was last modified: June 6, 2020 at 6:33 pm by Belacqua.)
(June 6, 2020 at 11:32 am)polymath257 Wrote: Another: if you take 1 rock and forcefully smash it into another rock, it is quite possible to get 3 or more rocks out at the end. Once again, 1+1=2 is not a good descriptor of what is going on.
The examples you've given aren't math problems. They're empirical problems. As such they have empirical tests, of course.
You have two rocks, you smash them together. Do they merge into one rock? Shatter into a hundred? You're asking about rocks, not numbers.
Empirical statements about rocks need to be tested empirically. That's obvious.
But there are any number of math questions that can't be tested empirically. Negative numbers, irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, infinite sets, numbers larger than the quantity of particles in the universe.
By declaring a priori that only empirical things are true, and math is always and only a language to talk about that, you are again begging the question. Karl Popper and Roland Penrose disagree with you that numbers are only descriptors of physical states.
Popper's Three Worlds system shows how non-physical entities also have a kind of existence, not testable through empirical means. They exist, but they have no extension or location.
