[X] My Assistant

[hendric]

http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_8.html#porco

Where do I sign up?

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

hmmmm...

dvandorn,

I think we should first settle the statute of mathematics, as the problems involved are simpler than with spirituality or abstract souls.

You say that mathematics don't exist by themselves like sort of gods, they are a language for our minds. But even if so, they exist, as a language. For instance if I say that I have five fingers, the relation that we call "five" exists. Some natural numbers exist, and other not. For instance the number five exist, the number six exist, and not any other between (if we keep with natural numbers, not fractional of course). It is this which is expressed by the word "abstract" (etymologicaly: extracted of, as historically abstract concepts were generalized from concrete examples).

If mathematics were subjective, we should observe things such as 2+2=4 in french, and 2+2=5 in english, of 2 sheeps + 2 sheeps equal three for the tax payer, and five for the land owner. It is not like that. Right on the countrary, despite the fact that different parts of the mathematic science were developped by different civilizations, they form today a coherent, unanimously accepted and non-self-contradicting structure.
This is a remarkable property of mathematics, that every people did not came with its own maths, as they regularly did in other domains: so many different morals, law systems, grammar, language, philosophies... but only one mathematics. if mathematics were created (by humans) peoples would have created each their own mathematics. Right on the countrary they were DISCOVERED.

To say that 2+2 give the same result for everybody is what I mean to say mathematics are OBJECTIVE. They DON'T NEED to exist as material facts for this.

Objective means: what appears in the same way for everybody. Subjective means: what appears for only one person (or set of persons). This has nothing to do with being material or immaterial.

(edited later, but before other replies:) Even the statement that mathematics would be only a construction of our minds is not shared by all the mathematicians, right on the countrary most mathematicians think that logics and maths exist by themselves, and when they tell us about a new theorem, they say that they "discovered" it, not "created" it. Only politicians can say that they "create" a law. (This remark is not pejorative or hinting for anything in any way, it is just a basic fact).



I think you could accept that, if there exist other physical spaces like ours, and that there is some complex evolution taking place in them, this evolution can also lead to the formation of brains, and the folks bearing these brains will sense their own universe as existing physically and ours being untestable (damn I hope they will not use the Occam razor or Popper refutability principle, otherwise they will make us disappear!!)

But what happens if such a brain structure appears in a mathematical simulation? I clearly tell: not a simulation running on a computer, but an EQUATION or something which solution behaves like a complex physical space. I let you think about it by yourself.

Perhaps I shall not reply this evening (here on my part of the planet it is time to go to bed) but if so I let you time to think.