On Wednesday, September 4, 2019 at 4:52:58 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 2 Sep 2019, at 21:48, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com <javascript:>> > wrote: > > > > On Monday, September 2, 2019 at 10:57:50 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >> >> On 1 Sep 2019, at 17:58, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> >> I'm saying there is no such thing as numbers >> >> >> >> Explain this to my tax inspector! >> >> >> Bruno >> >> >> > But there would be no tax collectors if such people had not come into > being (evolution from matter). > > > Without number, there would be no tax, nor tax inspector. > > I am agnostic on matter, and as a researcher in the fundamental field, I > prefer to avoid an ontological commitment unless shown necessary. >
Which makes you fictionalist, despite your horror at my suggestion of this being the case 5 years ago. Refer to the Philip's link to fictionalism again if this is unclear: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fictionalism-mathematics/ <https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fplato.stanford.edu%2Fentries%2Ffictionalism-mathematics%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNFzxcVQuPMtlKeg1K66ix2tOuluDQ> Unless you provide evidence to refute those arguments and convince Philosophers and linguists of the oh-so-innocent ontology from high school of merely "2+2 = 4", with as many time- and spaceless deities as there are natural numbers at the very least... only those affected by the pleasantness of platonism will remain innocent clients. These types of argument are rather aesthetic, which is outside your field. > > > > > So arithmetic reality depends on there being stuff to fabricate > arithmetic-computing devices. > > > > Physical computer are universal machine only in virtue of the fact that > some subset of the physical laws can implement the universal machine > discovered by Turing in math, and mathematically, and eventually shown by > Kleene, based on Gödel 1931, to be an arithmetical notion. > > I can explain to you a tun of arithmetical proposition, without the need > to assume anything in physics, > If you can demonstrate a means to do so without people having to: drink water, go to the bathroom, employ physical medicine for survival and/or not eat meals/consume other physical resources for extended periods of time: do it. We'd be rid of world hunger with the great imaterialism, right? PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/fe813cd1-2f09-4a66-a0ec-10d4cebf44f1%40googlegroups.com.
