On 5/20/2017 9:56 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 8:30 PM, David Nyman <da...@davidnyman.com
<mailto:da...@davidnyman.com>>wrote:
>
2+2=4 is a tautology of arithmetic; IOW it merely expresses
something that is formally necessitated in the very definition of
the terms. What does it then add to say that it is true that
2+2=4? Well, we test the truth of this assertion by perceiving
that it corresponds with the (perceptual) facts.
For example, as you often like to say, we can simply see that two
objects plus two more objects is indeed equal to four objects.
Now, this idea of truth as correspondence with the facts has no
direct parallel in physics,
I disagree. Humans only became aware that 2+2=4 because they notice
d
that 2 PHYSICAL object and 2 more PHYSICAL objects resulted in 4
PHYSICAL objects. If the laws of physics were different from what they
are and
whenever
2 objects and then 2 more objects became associated together another
object popped into existence from the quantum vacuum
then
everybody would say it
was
intuitively obvious that 2+2=5 and and number is not
conserved
under the addition operation.
It is not necessarily the case that 2 objects plus another two objects
makes 4 objects. The example I gave earlier was when the tennis doubles
team meets with the ballroom dance contest winners there may be only 2
or 3 people in the meeting. So like any mathematics it can be
misapplied - like using language to tell a falsehood.
Brent
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