On 1 March 2014 19:04, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2/28/2014 9:22 PM, LizR wrote: > > Nevertheless, it does seem to be. That is, 17 is a prime number regardless > of whether anyone knows it is, or even knows what numbers are, or indeed > whether anyone is even alive (e.g. it was prime in the first instants of > the big bang - maths has been used to work out what happened in the early > universe, with observable consequences now). There's a lot of hand waving > going on to deny this, but I haven't seen a knock down argument (or even a > suggestion of one) to indicate otherwise. > > > To deny what? That 17 is prime? That's a tautology. It's our theory > that the world consists of countable things - whether it really is, is > questionable. > > That's a different question. I'm not arguing for the world being based on maths, I'm trying to answer the question in the thread title - where does the maths come from? My answer is that it appears to just be a fact, or to put it another way it comes from the fact that it couldn't be any other way (17 couldn't be non-prime, for example, because there is no way to arrange 17 objects, abstract or real, that lets them fitt on the intersections of a grid and exactly fill a rectangle). If you think that 17 being prime is a tautology (I may have misunderstood what you said about, but *if* you do) then you appear to agree.
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