>
>Marylou Jenkins wrote to William Elliot about "Existence Exists"
 WE> never  ending sequence of integers: 0, 1, 2, 3,
 WE> ...  These
 WE> have been proclaim by another as merely imaginary.
 MJ> I am writing a paper on the philosophy of reality and existence. Do
 MJ> you think the relationship between mathematics and reality is actual,
 MJ> that is do we get out mathematics from studying nature, or does it
 MJ> somehow arise from consciousness? 
 MJ> Marylou Jenkins
 Hello Marylou,
 
 Nature is consciousness - or rather, consciousness is part of nature.
 Whether or not mathematics is simply our consciousness looking in a
 mirror - or a symbolization of the concreteness of reality - is still
 all dependent upon our conscious mind to make the determination; which
 makes the answer in all pertinent respects, irrelevant.  We cannot know
 the answer to your question; however, there will be many opinions.
 
 There are clues which indicate that mathematics is probably an extension
 of our own natural consciousness - what Thomas Aquinas coined "our
 common sense"; which is not the common sense we think of nowadays, but
 an actual sense we have in common with one another - the sixth sense -
 which is only our consciousness making sense of what the other five
 senses tell us.  Since we all draw, generally, the same conclusion
 that 2 + 2 is 4 in base 10, we assume by this that all of our minds work
 the same way, generally.  But to decide that there is something called
 a 2, is a mirrored reflection of the reality we sense together - and 
 not _proved_.  The number 2, then, is not a concrete "thing" - but
 rather a symbol derived directly, and most importantly: _only_ from our
 common sense.  No matter that we can count two stones or apples on our
 table - the number itself is simply a representation, not of concrete
 apples or stones - but a symbol representing how many there _are_.  
 The conclusion that there are a certain number of stones or apples,
 is not a concrete conclusion - but an ordinal one determined by
 the conscious mind _alone_; besides this, it requires a grammar -
 an arithmetic - to symbolize the quantity, or the fraction, or the
 sum.  In this way, language and mathematics as a language, both
 have the restriction placed upon it - that is: they are only
 qualifiable in the strictest possible way by the capabilities and
 the intuitiveness of our conscious minds; they are not dependent upon
 what is real or unreal - only upon how we sense with our common sense.
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
... 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
--- GEcho 1.11++TAG 2.7c
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