Kenny wrote:EssentialSacrifice wrote:Consider this hypothetical if humans had 6 fingers on each hand instead of 5 = So math concepts/facts would not look very different at all... just the math language.
Are you seeing the forest for the trees here Ken. Our man-made definitions have no bearing on the actuality of universal reality... words like math are simply our definition of explaining what is actually happening.
It happens... just so.. whether we define it or not, in a precise, repeatable understandable way mathematically.
My point was if humans had 6 fingers on each hand instead of 5, I don't think the sum of 7x2 would still equal 14
You're completely missing the point. Review Mrs K's post. This objection to yours would be like me saying, "I don't think that if you grew up in Spain rather than America, that dogs would still be dogs!" Well, obviously, you wouldn't call dogs "dogs." You'd call them
perros. But that wouldn't mean that dogs would not be dogs, that
perros would not be
perros, and most importantly, that those linguistic terms would not refer to the same reality.
And that is what you are missing in this thread. Whatever the base is, whatever the mathematical language, the fact you are not grappling with is that this language does NOT simply refer to a human construct; rather, it refers to something that answers in reality itself. Dogs are real things, and we refer to them by the word "dog" or "perro" or whatever. Now, unicorns are not real things. The word "unicorn" (or whatever equivalent in whatever language) does not refer to anything that answers in reality, but it only refers to a human construct.
So here's the problem for you: why does 2+2=4 (in whatever language/base you want to use) work? Answer: because it answers to something
in reality itself. What, then, does it refer to? What are the objects that these types of statements refer to?