RE: Math and Reality
February 14, 2010 at 4:39 pm
(This post was last modified: February 14, 2010 at 4:40 pm by Violet.)
Interesting idea... I honestly had no idea what you and Adrian were discussing at first.
Why would the reality have to be separate from nature? And is math somehow different from any other thing a girl can think?
If you can make the argument that math is 'supernatural' or 'objective'... then you can make the same argument with any other thought. We know that thoughts are a product of our brains... so they probably aren't supernatural. But are thoughts (concepts rather?) objective? That is a harder question i think.
A man born blind cannot see blue, but that doesn't change the properties of anything. He can't even know what blue means... the idea is beyond his ability to grasp. And so every idea is the product of firstly what we perceive, secondly what we infer from there. A small child for the first time sees a person, then sees another person... it probably just began to establish what 1 and 2 are (among other things) from that data.
My position is that math, logic, and the like are so good at determining reality only because they are created to define and describe things we have perceived (we have probably never perceived an apple becoming 15 oranges of its own accord before our eyes... hence the A=A rule of logic. It may ultimately be false... but for what it describes it appears to be true).
So I think that math is natural and "objective"... just as blue exists wether we think about it or not... so do the patterns exist that we call mathematics. I'm also not conclusive on this, it's just what i think so far.
Why would the reality have to be separate from nature? And is math somehow different from any other thing a girl can think?
If you can make the argument that math is 'supernatural' or 'objective'... then you can make the same argument with any other thought. We know that thoughts are a product of our brains... so they probably aren't supernatural. But are thoughts (concepts rather?) objective? That is a harder question i think.
A man born blind cannot see blue, but that doesn't change the properties of anything. He can't even know what blue means... the idea is beyond his ability to grasp. And so every idea is the product of firstly what we perceive, secondly what we infer from there. A small child for the first time sees a person, then sees another person... it probably just began to establish what 1 and 2 are (among other things) from that data.
My position is that math, logic, and the like are so good at determining reality only because they are created to define and describe things we have perceived (we have probably never perceived an apple becoming 15 oranges of its own accord before our eyes... hence the A=A rule of logic. It may ultimately be false... but for what it describes it appears to be true).
So I think that math is natural and "objective"... just as blue exists wether we think about it or not... so do the patterns exist that we call mathematics. I'm also not conclusive on this, it's just what i think so far.
Please give me a home where cloud buffalo roam
Where the dear and the strangers can play
Where sometimes is heard a discouraging word
But the skies are not stormy all day
