Mathematics, Discovered or Invented?

[muhammad_isa]

I think that the rules of mathematics are invented to help us model the world around us and the consequences of those rules are discovered after that invention..

I don't see how you could think that .. we all agree that 1 + 1 = 2 ..
..what is invented about that, apart from the notation?

 

[muhammad_isa]

It does mean some neutron fired that wouldn’t have otherwise, so there *is* a physical change..

..but that is not what is being referred to .. neutrons .. so irrelevant.
The mind is not a physical concept, whatever you think it is, or however it actually operates.

That's the point. "non-physical" refers to concepts, more often than not. They exist .. they are real.
We are not all barmy.

 

[Polymath257]

I don't see how you could think that .. we all agree that 1 + 1 = 2 ..
..what is invented about that, apart from the notation?

The concepts of 1,2, and addition.

 

[Polymath257]

..but that is not what is being referred to .. neutrons .. so irrelevant.
The mind is not a physical concept, whatever you think it is, or however it actually operates.

If it is the result of the operations of neurons, then it is ultimately physical.

That's the point. "non-physical" refers to concepts, more often than not. They exist .. they are real.
We are not all barmy.

Concepts are invented by us to help us make sense of the world. They exist, but only in our minds.

 

[Ostronomos]

If it is the result of the operations of neurons, then it is ultimately physical.

This is a common misconception. Mind can expand beyond the skull as it is immaterial. Everything is within consciousness. Including the brain.

Concepts are invented by us to help us make sense of the world. They exist, but only in our minds.

They exist nevertheless. Mind=reality as I have pointed out earlier. To say it is an illusion is to mistake illusion as reality. When the mind expands beyond the brain, those concepts can manifest in various ways in the so-called physical reality. As the Quantum Sciences dictate. You may be of a naturalist philosophy, but naturalism is ultimately false. See my other threads.

 

[muhammad_isa]

Concepts are invented by us to help us make sense of the world..

Again, whether or not that is so is irrelevant .. it exists .. it is real, but not physical.
i.e. the concept does not describe physical matter

 

[muhammad_isa]

Concepts are invented by us to help us make sense of the world.

..not invented, discovered.

..or are you saying we have all invented it? i.e. the concept of 1 and 2

 

[Polymath257]

That's patently untrue.
..unless of course, you consider yourself more educated, or more smart than "the average bear".

Hope it’s it patently untrue that every culture makes up its own explanations and myths?

That is, you consider believers to be gullible and/or foolish.

Not quite that simple. Most people learn their traditions while children from their parents. They usually don’t completely rethink what they learned at that point when they trusted adults to know things. Then they become adults and pass the same on to their kids.

That isn’t gullibility or foolishness. It has a component of intellectual laziness, but almost everybody has that to some degree

So what?
What exactly has changed in meaning, would you say?
There is a reason why it wasn't initially written down .. yes, you know that .. it was memorised.
Still is.

The politics of early Islam determined the teaching people followed. Those teachings were then selected among by later rulers wanting to support their power. That the Sunni-Shiite divide is ultimately about who should have been caliph centuries ago shows this.

Too simplistic .. we don't need priests to believe in G-d.

No, you probably picked it up from your parents. If not, then from the later culture.

Most people accept arguments that conclude in something they like and reject those that end in something they don’t. When it comes to religion, those likes and dislikes are generally learned in childhood, before critical thinking has been established. Very few people learn enough history, archeology, biology, chemistry, physics, math, or philosophy to really question their original beliefs.

As you like..

 

[Polymath257]

..not invented, discovered.

..or are you saying we have all invented it? i.e. the concept of 1 and 2

Most of us learn about them in our childhood from parents or teachers. But they are the product of the culture that has worked through these ideas for thousands of years, modifying them until they work well for what we want to do.

There is no number 1 or 2 in the real world. They are made up by people to help them categorize the world around them.

For a long time, 1 was not considered to be a number. Fractions were only seen via ratios and not as numbers. Zero was invented quite late (5-600 AD). These are notions that were invented to help us deal with things we want to control or understand.

 

[Polymath257]

This is a common misconception. Mind can expand beyond the skull as it is immaterial. Everything is within consciousness. Including the brain.

They exist nevertheless. Mind=reality as I have pointed out earlier. To say it is an illusion is to mistake illusion as reality. When the mind expands beyond the brain, those concepts can manifest in various ways in the so-called physical reality. As the Quantum Sciences dictate. You may be of a naturalist philosophy, but naturalism is ultimately false. See my other threads.

I have seen your threads. Sorry, but your claims of superiority don’t go very far when you show you don’t understand the basics in many cases.

Quantum science, for example, says nothing about consciousness and you would know this if you read something other than popular accounts. But without the understanding of math, you can’t do that and your math skills are, shall we say, lacking. Maybe, if you put in some work, you could start to understand some of the basics.

 

[muhammad_isa]

Not quite that simple. Most people learn their traditions while children from their parents. They usually don’t completely rethink what they learned at that point when they trusted adults to know things. Then they become adults and pass the same on to their kids..

Stereotyping often doesn't give us the complete picture.
..and nor does specialized education.
We need a broad education in order to understand the whole.

..and Oxford & Cambridge Universities started off with religious education..
Coincidence? No, not at all.
Theology is just as important, if not more so, than the sciences.

That isn’t gullibility or foolishness. It has a component of intellectual laziness, but almost everybody has that to some degree.

..so you assume that if people educated them selves, they would no longer believe in G-d?
I couldn't disagree more .. on the contrary, if they embark on a broad spectrum education, they would
appreciate its importance .. and NOT necessarily conclude that there is no G-d.

The politics of early Islam determined the teaching people followed. Those teachings were then selected among by later rulers wanting to support their power. That the Sunni-Shiite divide is ultimately about who should have been caliph centuries ago shows this.

Oh yes, satan is always dishing out his "divide & rule", but it is only temporary .. he can't succeed.

Most people accept arguments that conclude in something they like and reject those that end in something they don’t.

Ah .. now you're getting closer.

Very few people learn enough history, archeology, biology, chemistry, physics, math, or philosophy to really question their original beliefs.

I see you left out religion .. was that intentional?

..and you make it all about "the brain" i.e. intelligence, when there is something even more important
than that..
..and that is the heart !

 

[muhammad_isa]

There is no number 1 or 2 in the real world. They are made up by people to help them categorize the world around them.

Maybe in your world .. but not in mine.

For a long time, 1 was not considered to be a number. Fractions were only seen via ratios and not as numbers. Zero was invented quite late (5-600 AD). These are notions that were invented to help us deal with things we want to control or understand.

Well, if you can't understand what a non-physical concept is, or deny their existence, you will never
get it .. you won't see that concept is more important than notation.

 

[Polymath257]

Stereotyping often doesn't give us the complete picture.
..and nor does specialized education.
We need a broad education in order to understand the whole.

..and Oxford & Cambridge Universities started off with religious education..
Coincidence? No, not at all.
Theology is just as important, if not more so, than the sciences.

I happen to disagree. Theology is simply a rearranging of biases and claiming that God agrees with you. This is common among theists, from what i have found. God *always* agrees with them. Until, that is, they loose faith.

..so you assume that if people educated them selves, they would no longer believe in G-d?
I couldn't disagree more .. on the contrary, if they embark on a broad spectrum education, they would
appreciate its importance .. and NOT necessarily conclude that there is no G-d.

Yes, I think that if more people were really exposed to math, physics, chemistry, biology, archeology, anthropology, history, other cultures, etc, there would be far fewer theists.

In fact, with the rise of the internet, this has been actually happening. People are falling away from religion because they realize that it is mostly a collection of outdated biases.

Oh yes, satan is always dishing out his "divide & rule", but it is only temporary .. he can't succeed.

It's hard to succeed when non-existent.

Ah .. now you're getting closer.

Look at the history of *any* religion and you will find many examples. Not that religion is the only example: politics is another very common one.

I see you left out religion .. was that intentional?

I think that learning the history of religions is a very good way to lead people to atheism. But it is good to learn some real stuff first so the patterns are clear.

 

[Polymath257]

Maybe in your world .. but not in mine.


Well, if you can't understand what a non-physical concept is, or deny their existence, you will never
get it .. you won't see that concept is more important than notation.

Yes, I agree. The concept is more important than the notation. The notation is usually invented after the concept is to make it easier to write and talk about it. That usually clarifies the concept (and sometimes modifies it slightly). But getting the 'wrong' notation can make working with the concept considerably more difficult. There are many examples throughout history of this. Just to let you know: I have been involved in this process in math...inventing a concept and then trying to find a good notation for it (as well as a name for it).

But, no, I don't know what it *could* mean to say that something non-physical exists.

Maybe the issue is finding a definition of the term 'exists' that we can agree upon.

 

[Stonetree]

Babylonians apparently used
a different system of Math to
understand the triangle and it's
related measurements created
by it's angles and sides

 

[muhammad_isa]

I think that learning the history of religions is a very good way to lead people to atheism. But it is good to learn some real stuff first so the patterns are clear.

You are the one with the biases .. religion IS "real stuff".
..unless of course, you would rather be a hermit.

Community is important .. and religion is a part of that .. as community is part of religion.

 

[muhammad_isa]

Maybe the issue is finding a definition of the term 'exists' that we can agree upon.

It is your philosophical stubborness that makes that impossible.

You refuse to acknowledge any concept that does not involve physical matter in some way.
That is not reasonable to most people.

Just take the colour green .. green in itself is not matter .. it describes how matter might look like.
It is irrelevant how the colour green comes to be in a scientific way.

When a person says they've changed their mind, nobody envisages neurons flying about..
..except a few pedantic people on this forum, perhaps.

 

[Brickjectivity]

I happened to have found an interview with Sabine Hossenfelder (not on her own channel) where she takes the position that we've gotten far with mathematics as a useful tool for describing observations but that she doesn't think its possible to determine whether mathematics captures what reality is. She also doesn't think its ever going to become plain.

https://youtu.be/6xGwdUCYzgw?t=633
channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas
titled: Physics at the Limits of Reality

Nevertheless I am in love with the idea that the universe could not exist at all and could merely be invisible relationships, not exactly maths but analogous. To me it makes no sense for us to exist rather than not.

 

[Polymath257]

You are the one with the biases .. religion IS "real stuff".
..unless of course, you would rather be a hermit.

No, I am not interested in such. But I don't consider religion to be a serious topic for scholarship because there is no way to establish truth in the subject: it is literally all opinion with no possibility of testing.

Community is important .. and religion is a part of that .. as community is part of religion.

Yes, community is important because we are a social species. I think we will be much better off if we can put aside our superstitions and learn to focus on real problems instead of 'praying for solutions', which does nothing except make people feel good for doing nothing.

Communities need ethics. They need people with clear insight into the situations they find themselves in. They need people who speak unpopular truths. They need people who aren't so caught up in their superstitions that they forget reality. Religion, as far as I can see, is exactly what we *don't* need more of.

 

[Polymath257]

It is your philosophical stubborness that makes that impossible.

I am willing to consider any suggestion you make. What does the term 'exists' mean to you?

You refuse to acknowledge any concept that does not involve physical matter in some way.
That is not reasonable to most people.

You give me a workable truth or falsity detection process for 'non-physical' and I will be willing to see what happens. In the absence of that, it is mere opinion and worth nothing for determining truth.

Just take the colour green .. green in itself is not matter .. it describes how matter might look like.
It is irrelevant how the colour green comes to be in a scientific way.

You seem to be confused about the difference between 'material' and 'physical'. Matter is limited (usually) to stuff made from atoms. A more refined definition might involve being made from fermions instead of bosons. The composition by fermions is why 'matter' takes up space (bosons do not obey the Pauli exclusion principle, so do not need to 'take up space').

But 'physical' is much more inclusive. It involves both fermions and bosons. Light is primarily bosonic, so is physical while not being matter. At a basic level, 'green' is a certain piece of the spectrum of light corresponding to a range of frequencies. More inclusively, it is also how our eyes respond to that light and how our brains process the resulting sensory data.

So I do not think that how the color green comes about scientifically is irrelevant. In fact, I see it as crucially relevant if we want to understand that color. This is true to such an extent I have difficulty imagining how it *could* be irrelevant.

When a person says they've changed their mind, nobody envisages neurons flying about..
..except a few pedantic people on this forum, perhaps.

Well, neurons don't fly, they *fire*. The communication between them is electrochemical in nature and they define what happens in our minds. I assure you that most doctors would see this. Most people versed in biology would as well.


As a good book for learning more about this, I would suggest 'Behave' by Sapolsky. he goes into some detail concerning how our brains make decisions and the complexities involved.
.