On 20 January 2014 10:39, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 1/19/2014 1:26 PM, LizR wrote: > > 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? > > 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. > > Why does it model the world (apparently to quite a lot of decimal places) if it's only relations between sentences?
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