Math does not exist outside the mind. Looking for arguments on why or how it does exist outside the mind.
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Maths exists as part of nature/as one with it, so not as we know it.
The inside/outside argument prior to the age of reason thought that all ideas animated from the outside in, God being outside the insiders understanding. After that event where god “died’ supposedly, the insides of what’s inside didn’t die, but went into a sleepless sleep, everything was sourced beyond reason, to a kind of god in a vat argument, where the brain had absolute existence over the nothingness of the being of anything coming close as compensating in an emptied out box.
That coming to nihil, some ‘Thing’ had to be reinvented to fill that void.
The search began in CERN for the God particle, but then that series of simulations failing, higher alogarythmic assumptions came to a sudden halt.
No wonder recently Russia abstracted it’s researchers from CERN, proving they’re still committed to the material side of the equation,
So the reason is specific then, why ‘IT’ can only exist on the outside of the mind, inside of the brain. Design of configured calculation of how it’s displaced from an intuitive math, can not be a matter of conjecture.
Math paradoxically , absolutely can not exist outside of the mind.
Now if anyone else can follow this argument, then please don’t inquire, since by an answer that recycles into the question has been shown to be circular and non productive.
Outside is a math word.
And inside is a world of wonder, how that outside came to find the will to come back inside at least try
Do you mean numbers? A number represents a quantity, and quantities definitely do exist outside the mind. There are a finite number of cups on my desk right now, and that is an objectively true fact which does not depend on my mind or anyone else’s mind.
As for quantities, not only do they objectively exist and we represent or express the facts of this in what we call numbers, but these quantities form ratios to each other which results in a basis on which we can apply things like mathematics and language to extract real truths about the world around us.
For example, if we fix a quantity of length and call it “a mile” then we can use this to measure how many miles away something is. Now we can use it to measure how many miles away another thing is. Let’s say first thing measured is 10 miles away and the second thing measured is 5 miles away. Now we have extracted an objective truth: the first thing is twice as far away as the second thing.
Why is this important? Because the “2x” or “twice as far away” has no subjective or human-made units attached to it. It’s not “twice as many miles away” although that is also the case, but it is literally TWICE as far, in any unit of measurement you want to use. We just extracted a pure truth about the world that does not rely on any manmade units or subjective interpretations. This is especially true when we go deeper in applying more complex mathematics for example we might also apply some trigonometry to incorporate into our knowledge the curvature of the earth in order to gain a more complete picture of exactly how this distance is expressed, or we might measure objects out in space which are linear distances away and not sitting along curved planes relative to ourselves… but then we could also incorporate relativity theory to include analysis of the gravitational impact and how much spacetime curvature is really at play in our measurements.
The point is (and we do this with regular language too) once we establish consistently fixed units and use these to take multiple measurements of the world around us, then begin to ratio those multiple measurements to each other directly we begin to extract real truths about the world around us. The units fall away, so to speak. This is why people who claim things like “math is all relative, we just make up the words and numbers and arbitrary distances like “mile”” they are missing the bigger picture. This goes for regular language too, which is why all the linguistic positivists out there are also incorrect. The bigger picture is that the languages are only tools to be applied consistently to the world around us, in order for us to extract truths about that world. As long as the languages are consistent and fixed in their rules, and expansive enough to be able to measure lots of different types and sizes of things, and as long as the products of those linguistic measurements (whether in math or regular language) can be recorded somehow and consistently compared to one another, that is all that matters. The products of our use of these systems is what matters, which is to say the meaning that lies underneath them and to which they are being directly applied.
SO maybe you are right, math does not exist outside of your mind. Same with the English langauge. Well I mean these things can be written down physically and then said to exist outside of our minds, of course. But to your real point here, let’s say you are right. It doesn’t matter. Because in our own minds we are using these manmade systems to extract real truths about the world OUTSIDE our minds. So who cares if those systems and languages we construct are “only in the mind” or not, it doesn’t really matter does it?
Everything is mind.