3 ms·

> You are missing my point here. Not at all! Talk about losing the trees for the forest... Even the blind guy knows, viscerally, that what he is hugging is not

> You are missing my point here. Not at all! Talk about losing the trees for the forest... Even the blind guy knows, viscerally, that what he is hugging is not the "entire universe," or that stepping off a cliff would result in a dramatic experience; that a sighted person (and a philosopher) can see "a bigger picture" does not change the facts; indeed, a focus on "a bigger picture" can be deceiving (think of quantum vs. classical mechanics). > my dog's name is not knowledge We are going in circles. Mathematics is not just "names." > the non-wobbly stool is not related to three It is. You have a class of non-wobbly stools with a matching number of legs. You have a class of girls with a matching number of eyes that boys like more than others. Examples abound. > how I would find the ordinals in nature The early bird may get the worm, but it's the second mouse who gets the cheese. See also https://byjus.com/maths/ordinal-numbers/ https://byjus.com/maths/ordinal-numbers/

danbruc 3y ago
The blind guy is of curse not hugging the entire universe but a part of it. Where there trees before humans existed? No. It took our minds to look at the universe and say »Hey, it would be really helpful for talking about the universe if we would consider those wooden pieces of the universe that are roughly cylindrical and have the green stuff attached on the top individual things and give them a name, maybe something like tree.« We could have decided otherwise, never invented the concept of a tree and always just talk about forests. The subdivision of the universe into objects, at least on the macroscopic level, is not intrinsic to universe, it is an invention of the human mind. Also the non-wobbly stool is just that, one non-wobbly stool. [1] It again takes your mind to divide it up into components, including the legs, collect the legs back into a set and count them. Take a monocrystalline non-wobbly stool, it is just a weirdly shaped single crystal, nothing indicates that one should consider three specific areas of it as legs. Look, I am not arguing that it makes no sense for humans to think of this thing as a stool with three legs, but if you want to argue that numbers exist in nature independent of humans, then you have to keep human concepts out of the argument. Because we see the stool as a distinct part of the universe with three subcomponents that we can group together in a set to count them, does not mean that there was a stool or legs or a set of legs or a set of cardinality three before a human mind had a look at the situation. You have to argue that objects are not a human invention, that cutting a forest up into trees instead of considering it one whole thing makes sense in absence of humans. If you have that, you have to argue that collecting objects into sets makes sense in the absence of humans. And then finally you can argue that the cardinality of those sets is not an human invention but was discovered. [1] Or maybe not even that, maybe just a specifically shaped part of the universe.
- Koshkin 3y ago
  You are essentially saying that the huggable "part of it" did not exist until the blind person has bumped into it. I think this would be a wrong way to look at things; in the end, though, all this comes down to people taking different philosophical positions which cannot be reconciled in principle, like science and religion, for example.
  - danbruc 3y ago
    Depends on what you mean with exist here. It exists in the sense that it is part of the universe, the atoms are there [1] and they can interact among each other and with the rest of the universe including the blind person part of the universe. What I think does not exist independent of a human is the idea of a tree or maybe even the idea of an object in general, grouping together some atoms [1] and labeling them as a tree, blind person or whatever. It is all physically there in the universe, but not logically split into pieces and labeled with words, but this is what you need to count things. The entire universe physically existing is not enough, you also have to logically break it into countable pieces. This is really the core of my objection against three horses and apples, the atoms [1] are there even without humans, but the atoms [1] being there is not enough to logically have apples and horses to be counted. [1] I really do not want to use the idea of atoms here but I can not think of a good way to this without making this even more confusing.
    - Koshkin 3y ago
      You are saying two things: what we call objects (perhaps, except for "atoms") did not exist - in a meaningful sense of the word - until humans appeared and found it convenient to perceive them; and the nature admits no actual boundaries between objects (which is why these objects do not, in fact, exist), rather itself being kind of a soup of atoms. There are terms for these philosophical delusions, one being (a mild form of) idealism, the other, reductionism. They are indeed delusions, because neither is useful or can be proven in any logical or scientific way. Why, for example, not take you reductionism a step further and say that atoms, elementary particles, etc. do not exist, either? You are left, then, with a rather featureless, uniform "matter" (you could call a "matter field" or something). Your philosophy ends there, as there is nothing else left to talk about; my point, on the other hand, has been that the objective reality is much more complex than that; that, in particular, there are emergent phenomena - which are no less real than what they came from; even the very convenience and practical usefulness of perceiving things the way humans do is, in fact, dictated to us by something that is outside our control. I call that something "objective reality."

danbruc 3y ago

The blind guy is of curse not hugging the entire universe but a part of it. Where there trees before humans existed? No. It took our minds to look at the universe and say »Hey, it would be really helpful for talking about the universe if we would consider those wooden pieces of the universe that are roughly cylindrical and have the green stuff attached on the top individual things and give them a name, maybe something like tree.« We could have decided otherwise, never invented the concept of a tree and always just talk about forests. The subdivision of the universe into objects, at least on the macroscopic level, is not intrinsic to universe, it is an invention of the human mind. Also the non-wobbly stool is just that, one non-wobbly stool. [1] It again takes your mind to divide it up into components, including the legs, collect the legs back into a set and count them. Take a monocrystalline non-wobbly stool, it is just a weirdly shaped single crystal, nothing indicates that one should consider three specific areas of it as legs. Look, I am not arguing that it makes no sense for humans to think of this thing as a stool with three legs, but if you want to argue that numbers exist in nature independent of humans, then you have to keep human concepts out of the argument. Because we see the stool as a distinct part of the universe with three subcomponents that we can group together in a set to count them, does not mean that there was a stool or legs or a set of legs or a set of cardinality three before a human mind had a look at the situation. You have to argue that objects are not a human invention, that cutting a forest up into trees instead of considering it one whole thing makes sense in absence of humans. If you have that, you have to argue that collecting objects into sets makes sense in the absence of humans. And then finally you can argue that the cardinality of those sets is not an human invention but was discovered. [1] Or maybe not even that, maybe just a specifically shaped part of the universe.

Koshkin 3y ago
You are essentially saying that the huggable "part of it" did not exist until the blind person has bumped into it. I think this would be a wrong way to look at things; in the end, though, all this comes down to people taking different philosophical positions which cannot be reconciled in principle, like science and religion, for example.
- danbruc 3y ago
  Depends on what you mean with exist here. It exists in the sense that it is part of the universe, the atoms are there [1] and they can interact among each other and with the rest of the universe including the blind person part of the universe. What I think does not exist independent of a human is the idea of a tree or maybe even the idea of an object in general, grouping together some atoms [1] and labeling them as a tree, blind person or whatever. It is all physically there in the universe, but not logically split into pieces and labeled with words, but this is what you need to count things. The entire universe physically existing is not enough, you also have to logically break it into countable pieces. This is really the core of my objection against three horses and apples, the atoms [1] are there even without humans, but the atoms [1] being there is not enough to logically have apples and horses to be counted. [1] I really do not want to use the idea of atoms here but I can not think of a good way to this without making this even more confusing.
  - Koshkin 3y ago
    You are saying two things: what we call objects (perhaps, except for "atoms") did not exist - in a meaningful sense of the word - until humans appeared and found it convenient to perceive them; and the nature admits no actual boundaries between objects (which is why these objects do not, in fact, exist), rather itself being kind of a soup of atoms. There are terms for these philosophical delusions, one being (a mild form of) idealism, the other, reductionism. They are indeed delusions, because neither is useful or can be proven in any logical or scientific way. Why, for example, not take you reductionism a step further and say that atoms, elementary particles, etc. do not exist, either? You are left, then, with a rather featureless, uniform "matter" (you could call a "matter field" or something). Your philosophy ends there, as there is nothing else left to talk about; my point, on the other hand, has been that the objective reality is much more complex than that; that, in particular, there are emergent phenomena - which are no less real than what they came from; even the very convenience and practical usefulness of perceiving things the way humans do is, in fact, dictated to us by something that is outside our control. I call that something "objective reality."