Are numbers created or discovered?

Cypress said:
My sense is that the existence of Pi, e, Feigenbaum constant, golden ratio, et. al suggest that numbers are an abstract Platonic reality which exist independently of human consciousness.


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BTW, I love how those two brilliant minds just discuss the concept with each other. No emotion. Just rational.
 
archives said:
But how did you know you had three goats? Without numbers, you wouldn't know what you had, numbers allowed you to come up with the arbitrary understand of what three means and allows you to know. Question becomes were numbers invented by humans or do they exist outside of human comprehension

Granted a little off what is normally seen on this forum, but interesting, "cypress" gets kudos for getting it beyond three posts without the evolving into the uusal personal insults
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Well, in my experience, the first thing Mothers do, is count the fingers and toes on their newborn. So, it might spring from there. (?)
(Yes, agree about Cypress. Does bring actual 'thought' to the Forum)
 
BidenPresident said:
I do. I don't like people who think the conversation needs to drop to their level.

And the nature of number and math is not esoteric.
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In terms of intelligence, I Think there are some true nincompoops on this forum, some real mouth-breathers, and I would not lump Jack into that evolutionarily-stunted demographic.

********
This guy thinks the fact that cicada reproductive cycles are based on prime numbers, and that Honey bee combs are hexagonal are not random or coincidental. It supposedly points to an underlying reality concerning numbers and mathematics.

Humans Didn’t Invent Mathematics, It’s What the World Is Made Of

Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in the world, but it doesn’t “exist” outside the minds of the people who use it.

But the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece held a different view. Its proponents believed reality is fundamentally mathematical. More than 2,000 years later, philosophers and physicists are starting to take this idea seriously.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/singul...hematics-its-what-the-world-is-made-of/?amp=1
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Jack said:
Well, in my experience, the first thing Mothers do, is count the fingers and toes on their newborn. So, it might spring from there. (?)
(Yes, agree about Cypress. Does bring actual 'thought' to the Forum)
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Neuroscientists supposedly suggest human beings cannot intuitively quantify a set of anything beyond four. Four seems to be a limit where our mind can view a set of objects and intuitively distinguish size quantitatively. Higher than four requires counting, and until the late Bronze age we just had not developed a sense of numbers to do anything more than rudimentary counting.

Some stone age and bronze age human societies only had a concept of three numbers or quantities: one, two, and "many".

The contention by some is that e, Pi, the Fibonacci sequence existed all along. Humans did not invent them as a mathematical language to enable us to talk about nature. Those numbers were discovered by us, and always existed as a part of reality independent of human consciousness.
 
Cypress said:
Neuroscientists supposedly suggest human beings cannot intuitively quantify a set of anything beyond four. Four seems to be a limit where our mind can view a set of objects and intuitively distinguish size quantitatively. Higher than four requires counting, and until the late Bronze age we just had not developed a sense of numbers to do anything more than rudimentary counting.

Some stone age and bronze age human societies only had a concept of three numbers or quantities: one, two, and "many".

The contention by some is that e, Pi, the Fibonacci sequence existed all along. Humans did not invent them as a mathematical language to enable us to talk about nature. Those numbers were discovered by us, and always existed as a part of reality independent of human consciousness.
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"How did the Sumerian written counting system change over time?"
https://www.papertrell.com/apps/pre...tent/SC/52cafed582fad14abfa5c2e0_default.html

Could be true. Somebody came up with something along the way to use. You know, like instead of using a hand to dig, somebody came up with 'shovel'.

I'm sure Pi always existed. It took some smart guy to 'discover' it for our use. Kinda' like the Pythagorean Theorem. (3, 4, 5 Triangle)
 
I'm not sure what this thread is about,
but legal lottery tickets have really crushed the numbers industry,
forcing former runners to turn to drug dealing instead.
 
Jack said:
"How did the Sumerian written counting system change over time?"
https://www.papertrell.com/apps/pre...tent/SC/52cafed582fad14abfa5c2e0_default.html

Could be true. Somebody came up with something along the way to use. You know, like instead of using a hand to dig, somebody came up with 'shovel'.

I'm sure Pi always existed. It took some smart guy to 'discover' it for our use. Kinda' like the Pythagorean Theorem. (3, 4, 5 Triangle)
Click to expand...

It seems reasonable that, having ten digits on our hands, humans societies would have all ultimately come up with natural counting numbers.

As soon as commerce started, it even seems humans would have come up with rational numbers, because fractions become an integral part of commercial transaction.

The interesting thing is why human societies became interested in studying numbers for their own sake, in an abstract way, outside of mere convenience for commerce and counting.

The irrational numbers, the various concepts of infinity, the transcendental numbers are not something we would have stumbled across strictly due to the needs of commerce, and there are a lot of open questions about them today.
 
Cypress said:
It seems reasonable that, having ten digits on our hands, humans societies would have all ultimately come up with natural counting numbers.

As soon as commerce started, it even seems humans would have come up with rational numbers, because fractions become an integral part of commercial transaction.

The interesting thing is why human societies became interested in studying numbers for their own sake, in an abstract way, outside of mere convenience for commerce and counting.

The irrational numbers, the various concepts of infinity, the transcendental numbers are not something we would have stumbled across strictly due to the needs of commerce, and there are a lot of open questions about them today.
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We needed something like calculus.
 
AProudLefty said:
We needed something like calculus.
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Yes we did, but humans were studying numbers in an abstract way for their own sake, independent of commerce or engineering, long before Newton and Leinez invented the calculus.

Supposedly, the Pythagoreans and ancient Indian mathematicians saw something almost mystical in numbers, that they somehow represented a deeper truth.
 
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