(June 13, 2020 at 10:15 pm)Belacqua Wrote:(June 13, 2020 at 2:14 pm)Grandizer Wrote: What is the problem with the materialist perspective when it comes to this topic? I'm not considering here consciousness or the mental world by the way. That may perhaps be a mystery (I can certainly understand how some people see it as such), but I don't see what is the mystery exactly regarding the applicability of mathematics to the physical/real world.
If by "mental world" you are referring to an individual's mental activity and memory, then I agree that's not relevant to the issue. That's phenomenology -- what Popper calls "World Two." It depends on, but is different from, the purely material. We don't have to solve the mystery of exactly how the mental world of personal ideas arises from the physical world of brain tissue.
Nor is there any problem with the applicability of math to the physical world.
However, if you take "physical world" and "real world" to be synonyms, then you're begging the question. Because for Popper and others, the material world (World One) is real, but so is World Three, which is the non-physical world of numbers, symphonies, fictional characters, etc. etc.
You're right. Should avoid equating physical world with real.
That said, let me share with you how I intuit numbers like 2. Based on how I currently see things, there is no number 2 floating out there in the Platonic sense and serving as some form of cause for the concept of 2 in our minds. For me, number 2 strictly exists in our minds, as a way to "visualize" a certain quantity of identical things. The quantity is out there in a "vague" sense, but it is not decipherable as "2" without a mind to see separateness and "identicalness" of the objects of interest. What would be the biggest challenge to this view?
