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Comment by gmuslera | Hacker News Reader

If Mathematics is a language to describe reality, maybe numbers are not its whole alphabet. Inherent complexity, things that are not discrete, and emergent properties may not be described adequately with numbers, and maybe a different alphabet or even language is needed.

Numbers may be (or not, it may depend on our biology) a good initial concept, but maybe something else may be developed, something more "correct" to deal with the tasks of describing reality, something like metric vs imperial units.

The idea of integrating time to your vision of reality in the way it is used in the Ted Chiang's The story of your life (the movie Arrival was based on it) could be a good approach.

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Almost all of modern mathematics is not about numbers, although a lot of the objects studied can eventually be related to numbers in some way.

It's not about numbers, but it's built on concepts which wouldn't exist without numbers as a foundational abstraction.

There may be entire categories of representational concepts which we abstract poorly, or don't abstract at all, or possibly don't perceive at all - because from our point of view the relationships are so complex and remote they're effectively invisible.

I've been thinking about this since I read about the Pirahã people. The concept of number enables engineering and business (accounting) (and perhaps timekeeping). Someone unfamiliar with numbers would find it very difficult to function in modern society and a group of such people wouldn't build modern civilization (unless they discovered numbers, which someone did at some point, of course). Now, here's an example of my crazy dream: imagine the possibility of currently inaccessible ways of perceiving or thinking, that, if they were to become available, would enable a four year old child to gain an understanding of, for example, elementary particle physics from zero to phd level in mere minutes. Of course, that way of thinking might be so different that said understanding might make no use of (our current) mathematics or the concept of elementary particle at all.

It's an aside, but it's worth remembering that mathematics was not humanity's first attempt at explaining reality. For a very long time we tried to explain it using will. There were a multitude of beings, all with their own different motivations, and they could be angry, or happy or jealous or any other emotion, and it was these feelings of theirs that guided their actions and explained how everything came to happen.

> If Mathematics is a language to describe reality, maybe numbers are not its whole alphabet.

Who would claim they are? Mathematics initially co-evolved with our ideas of numbers, but many other important objects have been thought about for a very long time now.

An analog computer with huge resources would better use geometry than numbers to do calculations and obtain exact results. For example, calculus was first discovered thousands of years ago using geometry:

https://youtu.be/GAcUZ3my6E0?t=480

Actually such computer would look like a universe, moving particles around in a continous space.

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