On 1/23/2014 2:47 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 23 Jan 2014, at 07:42, meekerdb wrote:
On 1/22/2014 10:38 PM, LizR wrote:
On 23 January 2014 19:35, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 1/22/2014 10:21 PM, LizR wrote:
The real world doesn't add raindrops, or most other things we think of
as
entities - adding raindrops isn't 1+1, nature is really adding
something like
10^25 atoms to another 10^25. But it _does_ add bosons in a BEC. Even
when the
constituents are indistinguishable, nature can perform simple
arithmetic with
them.
I'd say *we* perform simple arithmetic to describe them - but only when we
correctly recognize what is countable and what isn't. So the truth of
Ax(x=/=x+1)
is in Platonia.
Platonia? Where's that, then?
In our heads and in our language (and publications of the AMS).
So, 2+2=4 was meaningless before life appeared on this planet?
It is part of our best theory describing how things were before life appeared
on this planet.
Brent
I can easily imagine that "2+2=4" was meaningless, but I can't conceive that 2+2=4 would
be meaningless, if only because Platonia is out of time. It is not related to physics,
except that physics is a persistent illusion coming from the machine's inside points of
view in Platonia.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ <http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/>
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