🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5nkvou$e8g$1...@unlisys.unlisys.net>,
    Wolfgang Schwanke <wo...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
>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.
>>>
>>    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.

    I didn't introduce (or create) it, I identified it. The concept
existed long before anything that could conceive it did. Don't confuse
the language with the thing language is describing.
    Similarly, the "field of mathematics" refers to what humans have
worked out, while "mathematics" itself includes all mathematic things,
whether humans have discovered them or not.
    Of course, normally terms aren't used that precisely, which is
where a lot of confusion comes in.

>Relationships existed, but they're not mathematical.
>You confuse our model of talking about the real world with that
>real world.

    You're confusing things here - mathematics isn't a model of the
world. Physics tends to fill that role, and it uses math heavily
because it's useful in that context, but vast areas of math which
deals with bisecting a 10,000 dimensional geometric shape are not
useful (ie. don't model the real world in any perceivable way), and so
aren't used in physics.

--
John Bayko (Tau).
ba...@cs.uregina.ca
http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~bayko