From: *Bruno Marchal* <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
On 17 Dec 2018, at 14:57, Jason Resch <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Monday, December 17, 2018, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 7:06 PM Jason Resch <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 1:50 AM Bruce Kellett
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 5:59 PM Jason Resch
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
What I am curious to know is how how many of these
statements you agree with:
"2+2 = 4" was true:
1. Before I was born
2. Before humans formalized axioms and found a proof
of it
3. Before there were humans
4. Before there was any conscious life in this universe
5. As soon as there were 4 physical things to count
6. Before the big bang / before there were 4 physical
things
"2+2=4" is a tautology, true because of the meanings of
the terms involved. So its truth is not independent of
the formulation of the question and the definition of the
terms involved.
So would you say it was false before it was asked and the
terms defined?
The true/false dichotomy is not applicable to undefined terms. As
in QM, "Unperformed experiments have no results!"
Was the 10^100th bit of Pi set only at such time that Pi was
defined, or did it have a set value before humans defined Pi?
Before pi was defined, the question had no meaning.
But was it not in a certain sense inevitable that we would get "3" as
the first digit?
Only after Pi is defined, of course. But (of course again) that is
true for physical objects too. Before the moon is defined, the
question “does the moon exist” had no meaning.
That is simply a matter of words. Before there was language, and the
word "moon", one could not form that sentence.
That does not make the moon not existing when the man were not there,
nor does the human definition of Pi makes Pi different from 3,141592…
before the human discovered and defined it. The circumference of a
circle divided by diameter is a transcendant number, independently of
the fact that some mammals or some alien ever get the fact.
The problem there is that the idea of a circle is a man-made concept:
there are no perfect circles in nature, so there are no existing objects
for which the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is exactly the
number we call "pi". The arithmetical or mathematical realm did not
exist before it was invented. "pi" is the ratio of the circumference to
the diameter only in the Platonic realm of perfect forms. We can reject
Platonism because there is no evidence, direct or indirect, for such a
realm of forms. It could only be by magic that we could ever know about
such a realm, Socrates and Plato notwithstanding. Consequently, these
ideas were rejected because there was no evidence for them.
Bruce
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