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God created the real numbers

(www.ethanheilman.com)
136 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | 29 Aug 25 15:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | source
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getnormality ◴[29 Aug 25 20:01 UTC] No.45068734[source]▶
All math is just a system of ideas, specifically rules that people made up and follow because it's useful.

I'm so used to thinking this way that I don't understand what all the fuss is about, mathematical objects being "real". Ideas are real but they're not real in the way that rocks are.

Whenever there's a mysterious pattern in nature, people have felt the need to assert that some immaterial "thing" makes it so. But this just creates another mystery: what is the relationship between the material and the immaterial realm? What governs that? (Calling one or more of the immaterial entities "God" doesn't really make it any less mysterious.)

If we add entities to our model of reality to answer questions and all it does is create more and more esoteric questions, we should take some advice from Occam's Shovel: when you're in a hole, stop digging.

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cernocky ◴[29 Aug 25 21:39 UTC] No.45069706[source]▶
Ideas are real in the way rocks are if we are concerned with their informational being. They are real informationally - ideas and math participate in forming the world. Nowadays, LLMs, Search and other apps probably affect the world even more than any common rock. Which is more real?
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getnormality ◴[29 Aug 25 23:29 UTC] No.45070549[source]▶
I don't know what is meant by the informational being of a rock.
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1. cernocky ◴[30 Aug 25 09:41 UTC] No.45073304[source]▶
one way to think about rock is to acknowledge it as an informational entity. an entity which is likely more passive then lets say a human or an app, yet by simply being part of the environment, it changes what can be done in the environment. if it wasn't there and if it didn't had a certain shape, the opportunities of other actors in the environment would surely be different. after all rock can be used as a tool and even as a computer. if its still not intuitive, think about Aeolian Harp which is a passive statue, yet a musical instrument, or think how you could encode a perceptron or a simple neural net into a stone (through which a water or air would flow for example). now, even if any ordinary rock doesn't exactly encode neural net, it should be more clear that it still affects information flow. does it help?