Does mathematics really exist in nature or is math just a human construct?

Informal does not mean incorrect.

 

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Certainly not.

So, let's do a quick calculation about how unlikely it is that Hindu-Arabic numeral symbols 0-9 were NOT based on orderings of the number of angle vertices.

Order matters. Use any other written ordering of any other language you wish to enumerate the field of possibilities. Looks pretty unlikely that it would happen by chance to me. I left it at that, so just shoot me and be done with it.

Thanks, Origin.

 

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Well, to calculate the exact orbit of a planet, you'd have to factor in the effects of every mass in the universe, wouldn't you? That may be hypothetically possible but for practical purposes an approximation is better.

 

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Interesting you say this. Because quite a few people in this thread think nature is doing exactly that - calculating the exact orbit of every body as influenced by every other body at every passing moment.

 

True

And these people are wrong. They just have to come to this conclusion on their own. The growth of their intellect.

 

Nature IS the only thing that is exact. Approximation, like math aided by symbols with which to communicate the relationships in nature we are able to discern, are tools crafted of finite minds.

 

What does this statement mean? Are you supporting or refuting the claim that the physical world performs mathematics to figure out how to move or grow?

 

A "science" is still an artificial discipline orchestrated and conducted by humans or equivalent. 99.9999... percent of the cosmos spends its time at the primal business of just non-conscious "be-ing" and disinterested "modification" rather than methodological exploration and understanding of itself.

Because of the subdivision of pure mathematics floating on its own without intentional application to affairs of the world and abstracting directly anything new from such, the following cliches are only pertinent to their particular area of here addressing category confusion about mathematics (which might be transpiring hither/thither in the thread): "the map is not not the territory, the tool is not the target of its application, the principle is not what it governs, the description is not the described, the simulation is not the simulated".

There's no conventional or common definition for mathematics as being or connected to anything other than a systematic practice of study / investigation and development which requires people (and some of their inventions like computers) to carry it out, as much as carpentry does. Even if the label of "mathematics" was by community process or arbitrary act applied to something else, like wild strawberries, it would introduce a different subject whose relation to the original subject -- via employing the same word for both -- would consist merely of the potentially deep confusion it generated in listeners or readers.

There are eccentric varieties of parlance in philosophy of mathematics where selected "mathematical entities" are argued to have correspondence with affairs of the physical sciences; and in older contexts there are "mathematical entities" which are argued as prior in rank to the sensible world and which regulate it or even make the latter possible. But this activity usually consists of extracting certain principles from the overall quantitative enterprise, and not an assertion that the latter whole itself is pre-human.

Either way, concepts stripped of specific kinds of empirical content which might instantiate them locally -- when reified as something beyond human convenience -- can't be anything other than global principles, tendencies, or patterns that concrete empirical circumstances are argued to conform to. [By virtue of their defined identity; change the definition and an item of different identity is then introduced. Again, retaining the same word doesn't preserve the original item.] Nominalism does not reify universals and generalizations since they are not concrete, tangible objects with discrete spatiotemporal locations. Their being represented or expressed by impotent symbols does not count as the supposed actual agencies enforcing matter or events to conform to them, which rival conceptual realists would apparently endorse as a distributed brand of "real".

In effect, reifying "philosophy of mathematics" [PoM] as a pre-human or non-artificial agency or system which governs the universe (etc) would be slightly less nonsensical than reifying mathematics itself, because the former at least entertains the latter's reification [limited aspects of it, anyway] as a recreational speculation. When a mathematician waxes poetically about "mathematical realism", he has placed his foot outside his own profession and adjacently into one of PoM's regions, like a basketball player stepping off the court and entering the team management office.

 

I don't because observation teaches us that physics is local. The near-Keplerian orbits of the planets are emergent properties of planets moving in the most natural way.

Conceptually, Kepler's idea is descriptive of the gross motion. Newton's idea is that the planets are compelled to move that way. Einstein's idea is that the way planets move is baked into the definition of the simplest possible motion. These are large conceptual shifts. But in the local view, there is no calculation of the Keplerian orbit going on by the universe. But that definition of the local simplest possible motion is modeled by a ten-component geometry where something analogous to addition going on. If you want to think of that as a calculation, fine, your thinking doesn't affect anything — but you are just using a metaphysical analogy to guess at what is really going on. Other people want to think of a mechanistic metaphysical underpinning, which would be fine if they actually had one that worked. It is the job of math and physics to abstract out the metaphysical guesses and just describe what is observable behavior.

Telling people they are thinking wrong about metaphysics is unproductive pseudoscientific puffery. When you can demonstrate you are thinking correctly about fundamental physics, then you have evidence that you are talking about the physics of the universe and not the metaphysics of your personal aesthetics.

 

Dan, have you found anything yet to back up your claim here...

You know, if it was possible on these threads to click a button to like your own post...I'm very sure Dan would be doing that for his own posts.
Cue Dan and that button>>>

 

What does this statement mean? Are you supporting or refuting the claim that the physical world performs mathematics to figure out how to move or grow

The Human mind ; by mathematical symbols ; therefore tools; can not completey express nature.

 

Humans are just an animal made of bones, a liver, a pancreas, its pretty much all the same across animals. To say that math is a human construct is sort of like saying your human experience isn't the same as any animals.

 

A stone or a planet requires no mathematics to calculate which direction to fall. It is all taken care of by the inertialess quantum foam and energy exchange events, most likely mitigated by exchanges of energy between bound rotational energy propagation that is matter, and the Higgs field of which the Higgs boson is an excitation. It can bend unbound energy of photons with which it interacts only weakly, and produces time dilation in any bound or unbound energy it interacts with. The principle of equivalence, combined with Higgs and E=mc^2 s literally all the math you need to understand.

If this sounds crankworthy to you, don't blame me. It's not mine. I didn't develop relativity or discover the Higgs boson, much less come up with this. But it is true, an awful lot of overly complex and inconsistent math which explains almost nothing can be dispensed with with this. I don't expect the idea to become very popular.

 

^^^^ ^^^^ You have just got to like it. ^^^^
Sciforums.com at it's best.

 

Humans are more than beasts. I do suppose you have a higher consciousness to think and make choices? To be compassionate? To be loving? And to care?

 

cat's get scarred when you make noise. Animals have emotions. The same basic instincts drive all animals. Humans can manipulate laws and principles of nature but they are the same laws for all animals.

 

Well it isn't. Obviously.

 

But that's not the question. The question is: does the physical world need to understand this.

I don't think it's cranky. The physical world does what it does with consistency. We describe those consistencies - as best we can - using mathematics.

 

get food, have a nest or home, manipulate nature like other animals. I get four pounds of wheat every Thursday riding my horse to town. His names Mr sasquatch. He's brown with fur. I have to admit I say horse when I mean sasquatch.

 

That's what the creation myth tells you. It's a bunch of nonsense. This planet, and everything which isn't human, would be much better off without us and our sociopathic baggage to deal with.