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Was going to say the same thing. Most of my professors were secretly platonists, though they had to pass as formalists to get respect in polite society. It's ha
by akud 10y ago
Was going to say the same thing. Most of my professors were secretly platonists, though they had to pass as formalists to get respect in polite society. It's hard to make absolute claims about the nature of mathematical reality; the formalists need to explain why math is so successful in the real world, and the platonists need to give an account of the ontological nature of mathematical objects.
- breuleux 10y ago> why math is so successful in the real world Well, math is a universal approximator -- if there are patterns in what we observe of reality, math can fit them, but that's a far cry from them "being" math. Other formal systems like Turing machines or Lambda calculus can also approximate anything (including each other, naturally) with different primitives... and they have an easier ontology (as far as I can tell). I mean, if you posit that fundamental reality is a computer of sorts, you get your ontology, and you get math as a very good formalism to describe the particular program we're in.