On 1/19/2014 1:26 PM, LizR wrote:
On 20 January 2014 08:56, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[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?
It doesn't encode knowledge about the world. It encodes relations between sentence, i.e. axioms=>theorems. With suitable interpretation we can use it to model the world (and evolution hardwired this to some degree): One apple and one orange makes two fruit. Two tennis players and two basketball players make four players - oops, one of the tennis players is also a basketball player, so it's only three players. Interpretation is essential.
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