Is math invented or discovered? I find myself in the invented camp these days. Math doesn’t “exist” in the same way as a physical object like a rock. If humans never existed math would not exist but a rock still would. Also math is not as objective as most people think it is. It’s our collective best attempt to describe the complex phenomena that we observe but it’s not the thing itself.
Discussion
To the extent that physical objects like rocks exist, we only know about them through our limited perceptual faculties. And those faculties have been honed to give us a representation of physical objects that is somehow useful. So there’s a difference between the actual rock and how we perceive it. Math is interesting because it’s part rock, and part perceptual faculty (imo). The parts of math that describe properties of the physical world do exist, like the rock, but math is our flawed perception of those properties (maybe lol)
There might be some objective way to perfectly describe physical reality but I suspect that it would be completely incomprehensible to humans. That theoretical description might exist in the same way as a rock but that’s not what math is. That description would likely not resemble math at all
definitely
I think I’m more saying this:
“real” rock >> human perception of rock
physical laws >> math
the things on the left do exist, while the things on the right are representations. the representations depend on humans for existence, but what they represent probably does exist
I like this description
Also I just thought that it might be the case that the actually theory of everything is dead simple like A=A or just “42” but we’re not smart enough to deduce how everything else follow from that
yea the theory of everything is tough when you consider that even something as simple as ordering events becomes impossible outside of small local spaces. cause-effect models and continuity are like our basic assumptions but they don’t even hold up without time
Would be wild too see the math of another intelligent species from another galaxy and to compare the similarities and differences. I'm guessing a lot of it would be reducible to the other.
Right? I think the effectiveness of a species math would have a massive role in how successful that species is overall
I see it as both....
Exists on layer one and invented and layer two.