Quite simply I’m too indecisive to know where I stand. I feel like I’m ready to accept most schools of mathematical thought, even if they are is complete opposition.
None of the traditional schools really encompass all things I want to meditate on; I like to treat metaphysical assumptions like axioms, so I love the idea of priority monads and ordering an ontology based on logical dependency-trees and prerequisite axioms, although I’m self aware enough to understand this is faith developed to help make sense of how the rules of space-time could spontaneously self-assemble; I have no valid reason to assume the universe should work in the way that’s easiest to conceptualise.
I don’t think we should project our faiths onto other people, in mathematics or broader spiritual journeys, especially children or people new to a idea, so naturally I could only ever recommend people investigate themselves, by practicing math in all areas of life and applied to thinking of all types of things.
I think Nominalists have the easiest position to argue:
Mathematic, now dominated by computers and discrete calculators, is pretty clearly limited by finitism; Most programming languages won’t let you talk about an infinite set, Haskell programmers will be quick to interject they can, and I love you for it, but Haskell Curry himself was still a nominalist/formalist, and the infinite lists used by functional programmers, obviously aren’t actually infinite under the hood.
All programming is formalism, the computer can perform symbol manipulation processes, nothing else, the result is just data, and it has no intrinsic meaning.
The conceptual space attemptng to be conveyed via any code isn’t actually contained in the code, only a rough simulacrum of it.
It seems apparent the mental space in which we perform high-order meta math is confined to our head, but that’s not really evidence that system doesn’t exist mind-independent, we can’t ever directly observe numbers but we can observe matters tendancy to conform to shapes that arguably are the main substance of that matter.
I think numbers and mathematics as “sayables” probably stop existing when we stop thinking about them and our inate capacity to abstract and simulate mechanical processes with symbols is a fallible biological technology developed through brute force, but occasionally it will allow us to conjure models that can conceptualise a more accurate simulation of an objective reality which will always have facets that are proveably unknowable until we don’t discover real-number computers.
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