On Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 03:50:42PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> What I mean is that their arithmetical property are independent
> of us. Do you think those people believe that the proposition
> "17 is prime" is meaningless without a human in the neighborhood?
Of course it is meaningless. Natural numbers are representation
clusters by infoprocessing systems: currently machines or animals.
Pebbles can't count themselves, obviously.
No realization without representation.
I have no trouble seeing the universe as artifact from some production
system (but that metalayer be transcendent by definition), but assuming
universe exists because numbers "exist" does strike me
as a yet another faith.
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="
http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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Received on Mon Jan 12 2004 - 10:29:52 PST