"flipper" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:38:56 GMT, "Rich Wilson"
wrote:


wrote in message
roups.com...
* "idea" isn't necessarily the right word there but I'm sure you see
what
I mean...

Amongst the almost uncounted thousands of English words, Idea is just
fine. And it is 'necessarily' the right word.

Accordingly, you trap yourself into necessarily-human concepts (no, I
am not going 'intelligent design').

That's EXACTLY what I was trying to get you to avoid... never mind.

Tree capillaries are nearly perfect
circles. Something dropped into still water causes near-perfectly
circular ripples which propagate based on pi-based relationships.
Molecules make up these circumferences and fit as perfectly as our
pen-or-ink efforts, or more-so. So, if nothing else, Nature understands
pi perfectly... and uses it. All the time. What humans did is merely
_describe_ it.

What you're saying there is that our current way of understanding the
universe, involving numbers, circles, ratios like pi and so on - is the
ONLY
way to understand it.

Not so. The 'real world' is the real world and our understanding of it
changes, hopefully in the direction of improvement, all the time.
That's how you have man not realizing pi exists and then discovering
it does. The nature of circles didn't change, man's understanding of
them did and pi existed whether man understood it or not.

I'll rephrase. You're saying there is exactly 1 way of thinking about the
universe that works and it's not possible that someone, somewhere could have
a totally different but equally accurate set of ideas. Because if they did,
how would you pick the one that was "real" and the one that was merely an
accurate theoretical model?


You would, presumably, deny that some other race or
species could start from scratch and come up with a totally different but
equally valid way of thinking about the world.

It doesn't matter how an alien would 'think' of it, the properties of
a circle are the properties of a circle. Whether we'd understand the
'language' they use to say the same thing is a different matter. And
we'd have just as much problem with their version of "apple."

I don't think you've quite got the gist of what I'm suggesting - it's not
different names for the same things, it's a different set of concepts that
you couldn't "pair up" with our own.


pi does not 'look the same' in binary, base 8 or base 16, as it does
in base 10 but it is still pi whether one says it in French or
Chinese.

OK, pi=pi however you write it. OK...

That's one reason why it's 'real', it is not 'just a concept'
and not an invention of the mind.

I could make up a number and argue exactly the same, and it would still be
made up.


That seems very unlikely to me.


By the way, I thought of a good analogy...

Your insistence that numbers exist is, to me, like insisting that numbers
are green. Or female. Or Welsh. The human brain lets us take a concept
like
colour from one type of object and stick it on to something else, whether
or
not it has any meaning in that situation.

And that is precisely what one can *not* do with mathematics because
it would contradict reality.

Alternatively you might invent something useful that way. For example, by
taking the idea of a square root and applying it to something that you
wouldn't normally apply it to, like -1.