🚀 go-pugleaf

bill_h <bil...@azstarnet.com> wrote:


>Wolfgang Schwanke wrote:
>> Mathematics is a made up set of rules. Made up by humans.
>> It's not intrinsic to the universe.

>sorry but your completely wrong there.

>the ratio of the diameter of a circle to it's circumference doesn't
>depend on what sort of symbol you use for pi (or for D) to cite one 
>example.

The concept "circle" itself is an arbitrary definition.
Its intrinsic relations are consequences of that definiton,
and therefore not natural.

>from something as simple as that, you can figure out each other's number
>system and the appropriate symbols used to represent the various "digits"

>There are hundreds of physical constants or relationships that aren't
>going to change just because they use a base_15 system, or symbols we
>wouldn't recognize (five hands with three fingers each?)

It is not the symbols we use to write numbers in, but
the very conept of numbers that's artificial. Physical constants
are a way to describe physical laws, but they "are" not these
laws. You could describe them in ways that do not use maths.

Maths is like chess: A logical game with arbitrary rules, who have
lots of complicated and interesting logical consequences, but who
are all based on the arbitrary set of rules. Most of the counter
arguments I've read here ignore that fact, and take the arbitrary
definitions for granted.

The difference between the two "games" is that maths helps as a
mental model of the world, e.g.. when you do such things as "count",
or express physical laws (which are real) in mathematical terms
(which is a human symbolism). When I say symbolism, I don't mean
the way how we choose to write a number, but the entire mathematical
logic.

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