Conversation

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
people seem to ask this question a lot and honestly i’ve never really understood it. when you play tic-tac-toe you learn that perfect play is a draw. that’s a mathematical fact you can prove. does it “come from” somewhere? i dunno! what does that mean?
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pendertif
@pendertif
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan
Where does math come from anyway? The harmonic series is to music notation as ???? math
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
if someone thinks they understand what the question is asking i’d really genuinely appreciate it, iirc it crops up all the time, alongside “is math discovered or invented” (short answer: people invent rules to games and then discover good and bad strategies for those games)
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Prince Vogelfrei is in New York
@PrinceVogel
people are asking if the universe is made of math or not, or if maybe there's a seperate, transcendt world where math is. That's really it. It's ontological. It might also have something to do with a desire to know what rules genuinely underly mathematics
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
hm okay this sounds like a dope question but i still don’t really understand it i guess 🧐 i just don’t think of mathematics as something that has a location at all. it’s a bunch of processes to me, not a bunch of things
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
like... is the universe made of basketball? probably not! is there a separate transcendent world where basketball is? probably not that either! basketball is just an activity people do sometimes. and so it is with math
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)
@QiaochuYuan
offhand i lean towards an anthropic explanation here - if the world were not sufficiently regular intelligent life could not possibly have evolved - although i recognize that most people find this sort of thing deeply unsatisfying
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Xplor.eth ⚒️
@XplorCrypto
Replying to
@QiaochuYuan
and
@PrinceVogel
It speaks to definitions of truth, specifically universal truths 2 + 2 = 4 That is true, in a profound way. Sure, there are contrarians who argue about "what if I define the symbols", but they're dancing around the obvious point that the concept is capital T True.
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NFT profile picture
Xplor.eth ⚒️
@XplorCrypto
Math is a proof of the concept of universal truth. It may be the only one we have found so far that is difficult to argue against. Again, contrarians say that math is arbitrary, we made it up, etc But math is proof that there are rules that the universe follows.
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