Quote:
Originally Posted by Aerozord
That would mean math isn't empirical fact. Language is something humans created to describe what they are observing. "River" is an actual thing, it can be observed and interacted with. The word "river" is not. It has no meaning besides what we ascribe to it and could just as easily call it any number of other things. If math is a language we use to describe what we are observing than if there were no humans to say "there are two apples" than the concept of two wouldn't exist.
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Mathematics are the things humans describe those concepts with, but the things that they describe are intrinsic. Fundamental. They don't go away or change just because they're inaccurately described.
You can call a flowing stretch of water a lake, instead of a river if you want, but it won't actually become a filled basin of water just because you do. Nor would it have not been either of those things had none of us ever existed to describe them as such. Even if you change the definitions and swap them around, the concepts those terms described aren't any different. Only the particulars of how human beings talked about them.
Whether or not there are humans around to describe the quantity of those apples, they remain. Whether or not someone is there to hear the tree falling, the impact still sends out a shock wave that could be heard if someone were present to interpret it.