Re: [Fis] The timings of meaning

Steven said:

>It is not clear to me that the case for natural numbers is so clear cut
>in fact - since the universe is not consistently, or ever, truly
>periodic. It seems to me that real numbers are, in fact, fundamental
>and that "natural numbers" are a distinction of human convention.
>Natural numbers are a convenience of trade, information in the universe
>is not so constrained.

Two points:
(a) Birds can relate to: one, two, three, a few, many. These may be close
to "natural numbers".
(b) The real numbers are:
     (i) vague, insofar as, e.g., 0.45 has no crisp interpretation. I
agree that Nature is vague, while we synthesize crispness (e.g. cardinals).
     (ii)intrinsically microscopic. I am certain that Nature instead
exists at many levels. If the reals are fundamental, then everything was
built from the bottom up. Some QM enthusiasts seem to believe this. But
others note that the wave function does not decohere unless it interacts
with 'some body', which must necessarily exist at a more macroscopic level.
Whatever exists, exist in a "somewhere" that provides boundary condition
information allowing a world to come into being (try to solve an equation
without values for the constants!).

STAN

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Received on Sat Mar 27 21:56:24 2004