Quote:
Originally posted by asaris
You're confused, Mantus. It might be true that numbers are just symbols. But they're symbols of two things; the statement 2+2=4 means that if you take two things, add two things to them, you'll have four things. Your so-called counter examples only serve to show that we can be mistaken about whether or not we actually have two things.
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Perhaps Mantus' examples didn't quite illustrate what he was saying, but what he says about numbers generally still stands. The division of bits of the universe into two apples, a tree, a field, a county, some planets, some stars, a galaxy, some more galaxies, protons, tau leptons, neutrinos, etc. is entirely a construct of the human mind and only relates to our conventions on how we reference different bits of what we perceive.
To cite arithmetic as an example of absolute truth is missing the point somewhat. That 2+2=4 is simply fact and convention, but number doesn't even exist outside the human mind. Any truth which depends on a few neural signals in some bits of fluff on a dot in a speck in a quasi-infinite sea of dots and specks, doesn't seem very absolute to me.