kenneth udut on platonism

Ulla Mattfolk platonism – I looked through my notes and found a cew things :

a) a 2014 musing:

Points and Lines are Fictional things, yet we depend on them for everything it seems. Thoughts?

a) 2015.

I temporally rested on this spot, which is somewhere between nominalism and fictionalism, but not to stay there.

— 2015 me —

 Hartry Field seems to be a fan of:

Nominalism:

“a metaphysical view in philosophy according to which general or abstract terms and predicates exist, while universals or abstract objects, which are sometimes thought to correspond to these terms, do not exist”[1]

which I gathered from a book Hartry Field became well known for:

“Science Without Numbers: The Defence of Nominalism”, Hartry H. Field, 1980 [2]

which appears to be “Fictionalism within the Philosophy of Mathematics” [3]

and led me to this very interesting statement, which is not Field’s:

“Given that there are no compelling arguments against platonism, the next question one might naturally ask is whether there are any good arguments against fictionalism (and hence, if platonism is really the only plausible alternative to fictionalism, in favor of platonism).” [3]

—

c) late 2015: plato may have been slightly shackled by his language as we are by our languages in effectively expressing concepts. so not a “language makes concepts” stance but that while helping express them it also gets in the way too.

d) later in 2015

I was seeing mathematical platonism as a form of magical thinking with a religious quality and yet, well here:

2015 me

Well, the thing is, there *could be* absolutes. But discernment isn’t always so simple.

For example, if you hold to an absoluteness of True and False, you’ve just replaced one supernatural thing for another, artifacts of Platonism as expressed via Aristotle: definer of Western Civ, but even as expressed as far in the future as Aquinas, he STILL held to Platonic idealism, as did 500+ years of Philosophers and thinkers since in the West for the most part.

This doesn’t invalidate them. That’s the point – what’s to invalidate?

Some people put Logic as foundational. But it’s not.
Some people put mathematics as foundation. But it’s not.
What is?

Differences-between is what keeps everything from being the same. Most differences between things are minor, which is why analogies and metaphors work so well. Some differences are much larger, in such cases it is harder to find analogies/metaphors.

But there’s always some sense that one can make one between any word pairs – if nothing else, that they ARE word pairs, but usually one can do a little better than that.

Point is: It’s not that there’s necessarily no absolutes but as long as we have to put conditionals in place to keep the absolutes in place, they’re not absolutes.

e) then, for a few years, I think I went from the assumption that mathematics is modeling and the modeling is performed by and for human use and our machines and works for us at our scale

f) 2022

i tried very hard to meet mathematical platonism half way:

“i’m attempting to justify a form of mathematical platonism from a computational perspective.

its not easy for me because i don’t believe in the platonic realm per se

but i think i can meet it half way”

—

now 2024

my conclusion so far:

I accept time. what flows forth will necessarily have a time or event-change basis. our need to find abstract structures is an artifact of how our brain simplifies information. we can’t handle the uniqueness of all things.

but thankfully, when there are “groups of”, new affordances emerge so new configurations and possibilities occur.