One way to look at this is to see that arithmetic is _behaviour_. Like all behaviours, it is subject to reification: see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification
and especially as it is done in the German language, reification has this nasty habit of turning behaviours (i.e. things that are most like a verb) into nouns, or things that require nouns. Even the word _behaviour_ is suspect, as it is a noun. This noun-making can be contagious .... if we thought of the world, not as a thing, but happening-now (and see how hard it is to not have a noun like 'process' there) would we come to the question of 'Who made it?' For there would be no 'it' there to point at. It is not too surprising that the mathematicians have run into the limits of reification. There is only so much 'pretend this is a thing' you can do under relentless questioning before the 'thing-ness' just goes away ... Laura -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
