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Comment by heed | Hacker News Reader

We didn't create mathematics, we discovered it.

Is this backed? I mean, this is still and will forever be a debate, do we discovered or invented mathematics?

Geography analogy, some people can discover a continent for some bunch of people, but the only thing you can invent or create is a map.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

But would you instead argue that you discovered how to draw the map?

Did the Mandelbrot set exist prior to someone creating an image of it? I think so, so it was discovered. We're so used to fitting curves to data and things like that, that we think of mathematical objects as constructs rather than discoveries. By looking at something more complex like a fractal, it should be easier to see it the other way round.

"God made the integers, all else is the work of man." -- Leopold Kronecker

If mankind could come up with Math and Physics, it's more likely than mankind made up God too. The modern monotheist God isn't that old ,roughly 3000 years. "History" itself is between 10,000 and 20,000 year old. Gods come and go as men do and undo them.

But the only value in "coming up" with physics is that it corresponds to the external world - that it's not just a game inside our heads. That is, I don't think you can use mankind coming up with physics to support your argument - unless your argument is that mankind's idea of God also corresponds to the reality of what exists outside our heads.

My point is mankind can come up with powerful ideas.

> unless your argument is that mankind's idea of God also corresponds to the reality of what exists outside our heads

But all men do not agree on what God is at first place, or whether he exists or not. It doesn't make the idea of god less powerful(that's my point), however if you define "reality" as what men can experience, no men has ever experienced "God" and created a reproducible experiment of God. Therefore "God" cannot be a reality today. God is a philosophical question.

Yes and no. Yes, you can't run an experiment to prove God to five sigma certainty.

No, in that God is not (just) a philosophical question. There is a reality which exists. Either there is a God who actually exists in reality, or there is not. It is a question of what is the truth about what actually exists, not just a philosophical question.

> Either there is a God who actually exists in reality

Well, which/what "God"? the definition of God itself is purely a philosophical question. You can't ask yourself whether "God" exists or not, until you define precisely what you mean by "God". And men do not agree at all on what "God" is, even those that claim they follow the same religion. That's why you can't ask "science" to answer a question on a matter that has no formal definition to begin with. God is an idea first and foremost. a vague idea at best that bear no exact definition, thus a philosophy.

I come at this the other way around. If there is a God that exists in reality, then that God is the relevant one. If there is no God that exists in reality, then none of them are relevant. Again, the driving question is what exists in reality, not philosophy.

we created mathematics as a logical progression from axioms. We invented the axioms (they're about whatever seems "reasonable" to us) and they're the structure on which we build everything in mathematics.

Kinda both, right? Mathematics is a human-created formalism inspired by, and intended to explain, the natural world.

Mathematics is not the real world; it's a map, not the territory. But of course it's not surprising if a map resembles the real world...

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