🚀 go-pugleaf

ba...@borealis.cs.uregina.ca (John  Bayko) writes:

>In article <5ni3s5$1s...@elmo.cadvision.com>,
>    John W Hall <Digita...@cadvision.com> wrote:
>>wo...@berlin.snafu.de (Wolfgang Schwanke) wrote:
>>
>>>Mathematics is a made up set of rules. Made up by humans.
>>>It's not intrinsic to the universe.
>>
>>Maybe, but the number of clockwise spirals of sunflower seeds, and the
>>number of anti-clockwise spirals in the same head, are adjacent
>>numbers in the Fibbonacci Series.

>    Same with pinecones...

I don't know what that is all about. Anyway:

>    If mathematics is made up by humans, did the number of Earths
>vary between 0 and infinity until the first neanderthal learned to
>count to one?

You just introduced a new concept "number" in that sentence.
It's an abstract and made up concept which is part of that
human invention called "maths". You used that concept to
describe what was going on in the real world, similar to language.
But that doesn't make that language the same as the real world.

That didn't stop the physical stuff from doing the same stuff it
always does ... but there was nobody thinking about it in any abstract
concept such as "maths". That means, until "the first neanderthal
learned to count" there were no numbers.

[,,,]

>    In other words, mathematical relationships existed long before
>humans did - the intensity of light still varied by 1/d^2 (or the
>Earth would have been plasma), water was still 1/8 hydrogen by mass,
>and pi was still pi.

Relationships existed, but they're not mathematical.
You confuse our model of talking about the real world with that
real world. It's a very good model at that, and the only
one we have to express a lot of situations in daily life or in science.
That fact makes it so essential to us, and that's why it's so hard
to understand that maths is just our mental model of the universe,
but not part of the universe.

Greetings

wolfgang

--
Elektropost: wo...@techno.de | wo...@berlin.snafu.de         |       IRC: wolfi
WeltweitesSpinnweb: | http://www.snafu.de/~wolfi/ | RealLife: Wolfgang Schwanke
                  she said you're some kind of laughing stock
              because you dance to disco and you don't like rock