On 20 January 2014 08:56, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 1/18/2014 7:38 PM, LizR wrote: > > Or it could be because we, denizens of this physics/universe, invent >> them. >> >> Why would that make it effective, though? After all we also invented > fairy tales, and conspiracy theories, and religion, and...) > > And those fairy tales were effective too - up to a point. "Don't sleep > near the swamp because the night demons will make you sick.", probably > saved a lot of people from malaria. >
Fairy tales and religion "work", in this sense (when they do - there's a lot of nonsense invented by humans, too!) because they encode knowledge about the world. So why does maths work? If it encodes knowledge about the world, where does that information come from? -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

