Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How inevitable is the concept of numbers?

writings.stephenwolfram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 211 posts

Re: How inevitable is the concept of numbers?

#91

Post by Someone »

mrkstu wrote: post #32
orobinson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well by that logic if you have nothing, there's nothing you can do to it, so you will always have nothing, which reconciles quite nicely with multiplying numbers by 0 resulting in 0.

Yep. Q: "How many times has it rained this week?" A: "It has rained zero times " Zero is a perfectly natural state.

I think humans could predict solar eclipses and solve quite a few differential equations before they managed to give that answer. The normal answer to that question was “It hasn’t rained this week” or even “What do you mean? It hasn’t rained this week”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmagupta#Zero: ”The Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta is the earliest known text to treat zero as a number in its own right, rather than as simply a placeholder digit in representing another number”

That book is from around AD 628 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta)

Re: How inevitable is the concept of numbers?

#92

Post by mensetmanusman »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #90
mrfox321 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is tautological. Do we really know if adaptation is responding to discrete classifications of environmental pressure? There could be other ways to describe how systems adapt. You are ascribing a lot to how you think it emerged. I think your opinions are great, but I just have a hard time having beliefs about things that are as fundamental as numbers.

Another perspective could be that we are creatures emergent out of the physical and chemical processes of the universe. There is some similarity or equivalence to some of these processes with mathematics, which allows us to model a subset of physics/chemistry with mathematics. Because physics/chemistry can create us using rules that follow math (or even some undiscovered rules), this same physics/chemistry gives us t…

Physics creates us, universe creates physics, … creates universe

Re: How inevitable is the concept of numbers?

#93

Post by im3w1l »

gmuslera wrote: post #38

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…

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.

Re: How inevitable is the concept of numbers?

#95

Post by codeismath »

I think numbers are wonderful and cool abstract thingies. We grow up being taught them (in my case Arabic numerals in base 10) and they become such part of our being that we start to think that we know what “5” is. Then I was introduced to Roman Numerals. Didn’t like those much. That one taught me that 4 is more related to 5 than it is 3. Then some of us learn a base 2 number system or base 16 number system and for a brief moment we question whether we actually knew what “5” was. And then we may learn about Peano and the successor(s…) of zero. Did we really know what “5” was then? What is five-ness really? Perhaps fiveness is a set within a set within a set…

Every interaction our human minds have with fiveness is with a representation or encoding of 5. With each new representation, I’ve experienced fiveness slightly differently.

But I like computers and math. For me, the best to experience oneness with the fiveness is through computation with Lambda Calculus and Church Numerals. Very fond of that encoding.

Re: How inevitable is the concept of numbers?

#97

Post by marcodiego »

Tainnor wrote: post #84
marcodiego wrote: post #82

There is a brazilian tribe (piranhã) that knows no concept of quantity besides one, two an d many. Also, in their language, verbs are not flexed related to time. This is probably du e to their lifestyle that needs no long planning, discussions about the past or managing m ultiple instances of the same resources.

Basically every single claim about Pirahã (not Piranha) needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt. There's just not enough people who have studied the language and the claims are so strong and unparalleled that we really ought to have more evidence between making any conclusive statements.

Hmmm... I stand corrected. Although I lived in the Amazon region for a few years (1993 to 2002 in Rondônia), never formally studied any native language and mostly blindly believed the wikipedia article on Pirahã people[0] and probably mixed things from the Hopi language time controversy.

Thanks for such info.

Ironically, my English was mostly learnt from people from Europe who came there to conduct researches. This is amazing and sad at the same time. But the fact that some tribes can whistle names, words and entire phrases and use such skill to communicate while hunting in the jungle is something I was told from an native speaker, can't remember what tribe or language it was; probably Caripuna or Suruí.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Verbs

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy

Re: How inevitable is the concept of numbers?

#98

Post by routerl »

codeismath wrote: post #95

I think numbers are wonderful and cool abstract thingies. We grow up being taught them (in my case Arabic numerals in base 10) and they become such part of our being that we start to think that we know what “5” is. Then I was introduced to Roman Numerals. Didn’t like those much. That one taught me that 4 is more related to 5 than it is 3. Then some of us learn a base 2 number system or base 16 number system and for a…

In fact, you're talking about digits and numerals, not numbers. But this actually drives your point home, I think.

Re: How inevitable is the concept of numbers?

#99

Post by TeMPOraL »

mrfox321 wrote: post #72
Bancakes wrote: post #36

NASA found it simpler to explain numbers with hydrogen atoms than peano arithmetic for their voyager.

Does "easier" equate to "universal". I think it does, just thinking about your statement out loud. Since to humans, explaining numbers with hydrogen would be harder, I think. The common ground between humans is larger, so we can rely on something less fundamental and abstract.

This was about finding some kind of common understanding to anchor the rest of the message to. Hydrogen, being the most abundant element in the universe, is likely to be known and studied by any civilization advanced enough to detect Voyager or its signals.
Post reply on HN