On Wednesday, February 26, 2020 at 6:54:36 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote: > > > > On Wednesday, February 26, 2020 at 1:36:49 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote: >> >> >> >> On 2/26/2020 2:48 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >> Being sure of that sentence is true, "Dr Watson was a friend of >> >> Sherlock Holmes." doesn't mean the things named in the sentence exist. >> > >> > It certainly means that Watson and Homes exist, in some sense. The >> > question is “is that sense interesting with respect to our goal of >> > explaining "everything” (matter and consciousness) in a coherent way? >> >> They exist in exactly the same way arithmetic and Turing machines exist. >> >> Brent >> > > Are the integers, and by extension arithmetic, fictitious? AG >
Arithmetic (or algebra, or geometry) is a language (or collection/family of languages to be picky) - expressed formally as a list of axioms and theorems produced from that list of axioms - so as a* language* it is itself not fiction, just as when you walk into the fiction section of a library, you see books written in English, and English as a language is itself not fictitious. But numbers - the entities or subjects of arithmetic - *are* fictitious. @philipthrift -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/29555a54-8a0f-4d35-8a35-ee56468eca3e%40googlegroups.com.
