On 9/15/2017 5:58 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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/
<http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/>
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).
In fact I never see the term anywhere except on this list - where you
use it as a strawman.
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.
That is because scientists don't start from assumptions but from
observations, which are necessarily less precise than axiomatic systems
- but have the advantage of being real.
Brent
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