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Something I always love to ponder: Would aliens who perceive reality vastly differently than humans come up with different number systems? For example, for the
by Razengan 2y ago
Something I always love to ponder: Would aliens who perceive reality vastly differently than humans come up with different number systems?
For example, for the longest time we thought of numbers as 1 dimensional and refused to consider 2-dimensional numbers. Even know we try to shunt them off to the side as much as possible ("complex", "imaginary") even though they model reality more closely.
Might a hypothetical alien race begin with 2D numbers? or something entirely different?
- yen223 2y agoI have pondered if a hypothetical race of liquid or gaseous aliens living in a fluid world invented maths that were not rooted in counting numbers, what would that look like.
- tim333 2y agoOr less hypothetically with AIs with no knowledge of physical space, I wonder how they'd do with deducing mathematics. There are non counting approaches to mathematics such as set theory or geometry.
- Razengan 2y agoOr consider a radially symmetric organism with sensory organs all around it, so it has no concept (need) for "left" and "right", or "forward" and "back" etc. How would they define angles, coordinates etcetera?
- andoando 2y agoUltimately mathematics is describing space-time. You can definitely think to start with the intuition of having 2D numbers, but to define that you'd have to define what 1D number is anyway.
- tim333 2y agoYou can use it to describe space-time but there's much more to mathematics.
- andoando 2y agoI think fundamentally math is modeling properties of space time. What is outside it?
- Razengan 2y agoI'd say spacetime exists IN math.. :)
- andoando 2y agoBut math is something our brain has conceptualized right? The set of constructs we built are those which our brain sees as being logical and in tune with our observations. The brain is a construct of space time, and its purpose is to model, understand and predict events in space time.