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throwoutwayyesterday at 7:47 PM1 replyview on HN

You're also wrong

"Math is something humans invented"

Majority of mathematicians are platonists and believe arithmetic was existed and was discovered and was not "invented".

"There is no logic per se"

There is logic to it! Most logicians are mathematicians at heart. See Russel, Godel, Hilbert, etc

"no beauty of Mathematical Logic"

Mathematicians do focus on beauty. Entire books have been written on this. G.H. Hardy in A Mathematician's Apology even said math MUST be beautfiul

"Proofs are religious things"

What are you going on about...


Replies

cfiggersyesterday at 8:39 PM

Consensus may give a hint to what is or isn't reality. But consensus—even expert consensus—does not determine reality. Experts can be wrong. Most of the experts, even, can be wrong simultaneously.

Philosophy is the exercise of testing ideas for oneself in the laboratory of one's own mind.

When I test the idea that math is discovered in my own mind, from my own perspective, with my own experience and education brought to bear, I find it unconvincing.

When you test the same idea in the laboratory of your mind, with your experience and your education applied, and get a different result, that is interesting. Your result is relevant information to me. If nothing else, it's a good prompt/trigger for me to revisit my earlier conclusion and see if it still holds.

But your disagreement—or indeed, the disagreement of a majority of trained mathematicians—does not constitute an automatic reason for me to conclusively determine that you/they are right and I am wrong.

I still have my own examination of the concept, with my own supporting and detracting arguments. And the result of my examination continues to be that math being invented is the significantly more persuasive view.