. . .

(from elsewhere)

Prof Wildberger:

I love that you’re trying to de-platonize mathematics, and return it to the sciences.

Mathematical platonism uses a grammar and semantics of fiction (it’s technically a ‘Fictionalism’). And I can understand why some people have a natural tendency, out of historical bias, and out of the influence of hermeneutics (religious and scriptural interpretation) to fictionalize mathematics.

In doing so they convert it from a science of measurement of constant relations in increasing dimensions into a linguistic ANALOGY – thereby obscuring (losing) the causal properties of mathematics (measurement of constant relations in increasing dimensions using positional naming).

And that is the reason it’s both difficult to teach people (when it should be trivial), and forces us to rely on memorization rather than ‘understanding’. Where “understanding” means ‘in the context of existential reality, and therefore an extension of existential reality.