Fwd: Bigotry (you win, I give up)

[justin walters]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 9:52 PM, Mike Reveile <wizardinthewoods at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I can measure a Pineapple... by weight, volume, color, taste, smell,
> ripeness... but none of these numbers are the pineapple. They only help me
> relate to the pineapple. In this way Math itself (and the entire realm of
> computer science) is unreal.



I've always felt that math is simply another language like English or
Spanish. Language is an abstraction
that humans use to convey meaning to other humans. We agreed on common
labels and sounds
to represent things, actions, and ideas. Math is the same. The laws of
physics obviously exist in some sense
because we can observe their effects. We represent these effects with
numbers and symbols. The number 1
could just as well be the number gobbledeegorp. It doesn't matter. The
number one simply represents a single entity
of anything at all. Of course this is all from the narrow field of human
perception. What humans perceive
to be real could, in all possibility, be completely made up in our own
minds. I don't want to get to far into
the "perception is reality" side of things although.