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Comment by orcasushi | Hacker News Reader

I know a PHD in math that claims math is invented by ourselves and not any universal true. So well, depends who you ask. Also some of these programming utilities may outlive some math proof. Time will tell

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Of course they are universal truths. We may have made up the rules/abstractions/symbols to represent the underlying but a proof will hold in any part of the universe. Infact, math will hold in any universe. You could change every fundamental physical property of the universe and those proofs will still hold.

Those are wild claims that you can't possibly prove. They are typically assumed to be the case to the extent that we even think about them but in the end are largely unanswerable philosophical questions.

It’s not a claim, it’s a pretty self apparent fact. To wrap your head around this, as the simplest example 2+2=4 doesn’t change anywhere or under any different physical law. It’s as universal as you can get. There’s nothing philosophical about this.

It is a claim, and you can't test it. If physical laws varied between galaxies you wouldn't know unless we were able to measure it. So the current bound on physical phenomena is whatever the resolution of our observational data is, coupled with our models that match it.

How are you going to get observational data for a different universe? Does such a thing even exist? What is its nature? You're operating well outside the bounds of human knowledge.

What you are actually saying there is that you can't imagine 2+2 being anything other than 4. That's perfectly reasonable but it's not the same thing.

There is no circumstance where 2+2 does not equal 4. It is a literal fact.

At the most fundamental level, you can only have a discreet or a non-discreet universe. If it’s discreet, there are countable things and 2+2 = 4 is true. In a non-discreet universe there are no countable things, but the universe itself is countable. If the universe were non-discreet and infinite, you could still count the infinities so it’s still true.

You are making a number of assumptions there seemingly without realizing it even after I explicitly called it out. I'm not sure what to say other than to suggest that there's an entire field, analytic philosophy, concerned with such matters.

You literally can't prove that you aren't a brain in a vat so I have no idea how you expect to make sweeping claims about the fundamental nature of reality. It is certainly convenient and practical to take certain basic assumptions as fact in order to go about higher level tasks but that does not make them so.

Even if you were a brain in a vat this would be true. Even if the simulation disallowed the number four or groups of four it would still be true. How are you not getting this? What does philosophy have to do with anything. Pretty much everything in this universe is debatable and can be questioned, except this. Anyways I’m dropping out of this. You don’t come back with anything except a sense of wonder and a wide eyed gaze.

Noticeably you still have yet to defend any of these wild claims you're making. You've now resorted to personal attacks rather than engage with what I wrote.

If you are so certain of your claim then why are you seemingly incapable of defending it using logic and reason?

> What does philosophy have to do with anything.

If you took the time to look up the field of analytic philosophy to see what it's about, particularly with regards to metaphysics, that would presumably answer your question. There are literally treatise on the underlying nature of numbers and mathematical concepts (among other things) and you will find that there are multiple competing views on the matter.

When someone says "hey it seems like you're unaware of thing" and you think "WTF even is that" it is at that point generally a good idea to think to yourself "hey maybe there's something important that I don't know here" and then at least perform a topical check of the thing.

Sure, technically you are correct, i cant prove that im not a schizophrenic hallucinating everything including 2+2=4 and including this discussion. But starting from a reasonable point of beliefs that we accept it is fair to say 2+2=4 will just hold universally when counting discrete things.

> 2+2=4 doesn’t change anywhere or under any different physical law.

How about python3:

   >>> input() + input()
   2
   2
   '22'

or if you insist:

    >>> .2 + .2 + .2 == .6
    False

It only means that you have no imagination.

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