If our society is built by mathmatics that can be seen as wrong by aliens, how would they percieve our reality and how would they explain the complicated structures we have built using our mathmatics?
Nope. More likely they'd skip the concept of "1" and "+" and "3", but that's also more specific than what I'm saying.
What I said was that your stated evidence doesn't support the claim you made. Multiple people didn't come up with the same branch of mathematics completely independently. They did so from the same foundations.
[EDIT: Oh yeah, also said that aliens may be using compeltely different math. See below for explanation of that.]
> how would that even make sense?
I've no idea. That's the point.
> If our society is built by mathmatics that can be seen as wrong by aliens,
There's a difference between wrong and incomprehensible.
Think about some of our foundations:
- We think of numbers as deterministic. We've come to understand that the universe is probabilistic.
- We think of numbers as continuous. We've come to understand that the universe is discrete.
- We think of a table as a distinct thing. It's actually a bunch of atoms bonded together that are constantly shedding and gaining atoms. Oh, and that table over there is welded to the floor, so it's actually bonded to the floor in the same way, yet we think of the floor (and entire building) as a different distinct object.
These new ideas are comprehensible to us, but kinda weird and foreign. Suppose instead of starting with the naive view of determinism, continuous space, and distinct "platonic" objects, you start with the weird reality where those aren't true. What will your mathematics look like if your foundational mathematics is based on that?
Do you think in terms of "1" and "1" and "2", when you don't think of two tables as two items? Do you think of deterministic addition when your perception of the universe is non-deterministic?
And these are just variations I thought up using my human brain based on things that human brains have managed to understand. I'm saying "hey, completely differently structured brains could think in a way our human brains don't understand". "But that makes no sense to my human brain" is pretty clearly not a refutation, and asking for an explanation of it also misses the point.
""" [C]onsider a meteorite which, instead of deciphering the outer-space Bach record, punctures it with colossal indifference, and continues in its merry orbit. It has interacted with the record in a way which we feel disregards the record's meaning. Therefore, we might well feel tempted to call the meteorite "stupid". But perhaps we would thereby do the meteorite a disservice. Perhaps it has a "higher intelligence" which we in our Earth chauvinism cannot perceive, and its interaction with the record was a manifestation of that higher intelligence. Perhaps, then, the record has a "higher meaning"-totally different from that which we attribute to it; perhaps its meaning depends on the type of intelligence perceiving it. Perhaps. """