Hi Bruno Marchal Numbers are not in spacetime, that is, are not at location r at time t. So they are ideas, they are not physical. To be physical you have to have a specific location at a specific time. This is not my view, it is that of Descartes.
The same with arithmetic. Numbers and arithmetic statements are not at (r,t). Which is not to say that they are not real, if by real I mean true or as is without an observer. Like in a textbook. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/24/2012 "Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-23, 03:42:03 Subject: Re: Prime Numbers On 22 Sep 2012, at 22:10, Stephen P. King wrote: > On 9/22/2012 7:32 AM, Roger Clough wrote: >> How could mathematics be fiction ? >> If so, then we could simply say that 2+2=5 because it's saturday. > How could we have a world we many minds can, on rare occasions, come > to complete agreement if that where the case? Perhaps it is true > that 2+2=4 because we all agree, at some level, that it is true. (I > am not just considering humans here with the word "we"!) How will you define "we" without accepting "2+2=4", given that IF we assume comp, "we" are defined by (L?ian) universal number and their relations with other universal numbers? Why do you keep an idealist conception of numbers, which contradicts your references to papers which use, as most texts in science, the independence and primitivity of elementary arithmetic? Or you remark was ironic? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
