ecargo13 Mar 2006

Well, this starts to get a little beyond my comfort level in terms of what math actually "does" vis-a-vis reality. But "reality"--our understanding of what that means--shifts at any given point in time, doesn't it? And some of those shifts resulted from mathematics. So--is that bringing something 'new' (in terms of our understanding of reality) into being, as art does? Or is it just discovering what already exists? I honestly don't know. It's certainly an debate that's been going on (among much keener minds than mine) for a long time. Platonism or Formalism or something else entirely? Godel talked quite a bit about math being interpretive of abstract reality rather than empirical reality. Maybe that's not such a bad place to start thinking about this stuff.

My head hurts.