Lakoff: Math is made up by your brain
Tonight I was on YouTube, and in my 'recommended videos' section there was a selection from the channel Closer to Truth asking physicist Max Tegmark the old granddaddy of questions, " Why is there something rather than nothing? " Tegmark goes on to expound on his view that the universe is fundamentally mathematical and that mathematics are discovered, not invented. Tegmark's view is an example of a view called mathematical Platonism , a form of mathematical realism which holds that: There are mathematical objects Mathematical objects are abstract Mathematical objects are independent of intelligent agents and their language, thought, and practices. There are several difficulties that this point of view faces, both conceptually (what, exactly, is an "abstract object" and how does it causally interact with the brain?) and given what we actually observe here in the physical universe. Alexander Vilenkin touched on Tegmark's ideas in his book Ma