On 14 Sep 2017, at 14:39, ronaldheld wrote:


On Thursday, September 14, 2017 at 8:01:16 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 14 Sep 2017, at 13:22, ronaldheld wrote:

This should cause some discussion. Maybe belongs in the "is math real" thread, but that one is large??
               Ronald

What is your opinion?

The author believes that PI does not existed 100,000 years ago.

It looks like he believes that 100,000 existed 100,000 years ago, making hard for me to understand why PI would not exist, and in which sense, as PI is not a function of time.

Then the author seems to believe in a primary physical universe, and does not seem aware that this is an assumption too, and indeed arguably much stronger than assuming arithmetic.

The main problem is that the author does not put its assumption on the table, and take for granted that existence is physical existence. That does not make sense with mechanism (probably), but to be franc, I am not sure this makes sense even without mechanism. He confuses also mathematical theory and mathematical reality, it seems.

What do *you* think? What would be your primary assumption?

My feeling is that it is a waste of time to guess what exists or not before saying what we are willing to assume as primitively true, or what is the metaphysical background accepted.

Bruno



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<1709.03087.pdf>

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Well, his use of 100000 years does not fit with some little things he states. I am not the best person to comment, one because we should get more opinions. AFAIK his view is that mathematics (applied) does not fit the "real world" as well as others have claimed. he also assumes that lesser animals cannot do any math besides counting low integers.


He seem to believe that mathematical object does not exist physically, and in that sense, I can agree. The platonists usually think something very close, like the idea that there is no physical circle, and thus no PI, "on earth". In the terrestrial plane, appearance of circles and PI are mere approximation of the "divine PI in the sky, or in the mind of God, or in the mind of mathematicians". The question is then about the terrestrial plane: is it fundamentally real, or is it a delusion due to the infinitely many "video-games" executed in arithmetic? The question is never is this real or not, but is this fundamentally or primarily real of not.

Now, I can understand an intuitionist doubting about discontinuous function, or about non computable real number, but to say that PI does not exist, without saying precisely what exists, does not make much sense to me. Pure primary matter has never been observed, nor even defined, nor even really used in physics or even in metaphysics (except to stop thinking on the mind-body problem). So, most conception of primary matter is already mathematicalist: primitive matter is just what is denoted by the elementary terms of the theory (string, particles, fields, ...), but all those notion presumes the natural numbers, intuitionistically or classically. The paper here seems to assume a physical reality, but never try to make that precise, and so is poorly convincing, and a bit naive on the fundamental issue, I would say.

Bruno








                  Ronald


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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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