On Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 03:50:42PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: > What I mean is that their arithmetical property are independent > of us. Do you think those people believe that the proposition > "17 is prime" is meaningless without a human in the neighborhood?
Of course it is meaningless. Natural numbers are representation clusters by infoprocessing systems: currently machines or animals. Pebbles can't count themselves, obviously. No realization without representation. I have no trouble seeing the universe as artifact from some production system (but that metalayer be transcendent by definition), but assuming universe exists because numbers "exist" does strike me as a yet another faith. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net
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