On Saturday, March 1, 2014 1:46:44 AM UTC-5, Liz R wrote: > > On 1 March 2014 19:04, meekerdb <[email protected] <javascript:>> 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). >
Keep going. Where does "fact" come from? What is the capacity which determines what ways can and cannot be? Sense. Where else? > 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. > > -- 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.
