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“The simplest answer is the one we immediately take as our own, as if we came up with it ourselves.” – Chuang Tzu
 
How do we know if something is true? Does correct mean it has to be “true”? If it’s true, does it have to mean something? How do we know anything if we know nothing beforehand about something we claim to know? Do we discover, or invent ideas? Do ideas come from another world? Are those ideas the same as the numbers and language we describe them with? Do we have to obey the truths we discover or invent?
 
Occams Razor is the main aim of any philosophical, spiritual, scientific or mathematical investigation – The principle states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove correct, but—in the absence of certainty—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.
 
This requires disclosure of beliefs. This is not to be taken in the context that we are competing to win or lose something, it’s just that we often have a number of perspectives and ideas that may all be correct, it’s just that we want the simplest one.
 
The question is, how do we get to this?
 
There are many important factors to take into account – we often use language and mathematics to create what is called a “schema”, which is an organised pattern of thought that organises categories of information and the relationships between them.
 
We use “syntax”, which is the study of principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages.
 
As regards language and mathematics – we can say that we use them both in the same way. The simplest way to understand both of them, is that we put numbers and words together to create a picture of reality – this gives us definitions.
 
There are two philosophers of mathematics and language who are worth taking note of here – Ludwig Wittgenstein and Blaise Pascal.
 
Wittgenstein looked at the definition method of “Ostensive Definition”, which is “meaning by pointing out an example”. As regards mathematics and language, again, we are attempting to create a picture of reality by constructing a sentence and the main aim is to bring forth a meaning from the definition and let us not forget that we must do this simply.
 
“So one might say: the ostensive definition explains the use—the meaning—of the word when the overall role of the word in language is clear. “
 
Schema, Syntax, Definition, Meaning and now Use!
 
Pascal then brings into this problem of explanation what can actually be known. Pascal divides definitions into two different types – essential definitions, which are self supporting statements that require no reference to understand their definition and meaning such as the word “Bachelor”, as all bachelors are unmarried males. Then there are an unnamed type of definition, which I will call empirical/falsifiable definitions – they are to be tested as correct or false, for instance, the statement that “all bananas are yellow” can be tested and invariably, we will see that all bananas are not yellow, some are overly ripe, stale or not quite ripe, which leads us to categorisation, or rather “abstraction”.
 
We require something called an axiom, or postulate, which is a premise or starting point for reasoning, when we use an axiomatic system, or method, we conjoin all axioms to create a theory.
 
Pascal saw these methods for making principles from postulations and premises as a problem, particularly in geometry and its’ axiomatic method, he looked much deeper into the question of how people become convinced of the premises for which later conclusions are based. Pascal said that achieving certainty in these axioms and conclusions through human methods is impossible. He asserted that these principles can be grasped only through intuition, and that this fact underscored the necessity for submission to God in searching out truths.
 
He said that discovering truths, arguing that the ideal of such a method would be to found all propositions on already established truths. At the same time, however, he claimed this was impossible because such established truths would require other truths to back them up—first principles, therefore, cannot be reached. Based on this, Pascal argued that the procedure used in geometry was as perfect as possible, with certain principles assumed and other propositions developed from them. Nevertheless, there was no way to know the assumed principles to be true.
 
In other words, we can only know something based on what we know already.
 
Mathematics as Human Invention: According to Wittgenstein, we invent mathematics, from which it follows that mathematics and so-called mathematical objects do not exist independently of our inventions. Whatever is mathematical is fundamentally a product of human activity.
 
Arithmetic does not talk about the objects it measures, it operates with them in the picture we create. This is contra Platonism that states : that the world was, quite literally, generated by numbers. The major problem of mathematical Platonism is this: precisely where and how do the mathematical entities exist, and how do we know about them? Is there a world, completely separate from our physical one, that is occupied by the mathematical entities? How can we gain access to this separate world and discover truths about the entities?
 
Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH) is: Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure. That is, the physical universe is mathematics in a well-defined sense, and “in those [worlds] complex enough to contain self-aware substructures [they] will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically ‘real’ world”.
 
The implications of seeing the universe or the “Ultimate Ensemble” in this way, is that numbers become the creator, creation and creating force without reference, or as Wittgenstein puts it – the signs and propositions do not refer to anything and therefore have no use, no value and we are looking at “infinite regress”, whereby we seek the cause of everything through numbers, as numbers are seen as the creation itself, but are existing also in another world, therefore there must be another world where the abstractions and forms of those numbers in that world exist and so on.
 
This is what Willard Quine called “Plato’s Beard”, or in his own witty terms “ it has dulled the edge of Occam’s razor for millennia” – meaning that the language and the numbers, he syntax, axioms, definitions and ostentive definitions were not of any use, as they wte merely explaning a context or concept as another world – literally.
 
In doing mathematics, we do not discover pre-existing truths that were “already there without one knowing” —we invent mathematics, bit-by-little-bit.  “If you want to know what 2 + 2 = 4 means,” says Wittgenstein, “you have to ask how we work it out,” because “we consider the process of calculation as the essential thing”
 
Pascal explains much the same thing, that we can only know something through something else, however the syntax, axioms, language, meaning and definitions are created purely by humans and don’t exist innately in the cosmos.
 
“The mathematician is not a discoverer: he is an inventor”  – Wittgenstein
 
 
 
Let’s take a look at time and weight, these are not fixed constants in the way they were conceived by the ancient Egyptians, nor was the measurements they used for length.
 
The market place and the use of the divisible numbers of 12 and 60 were what the Egyptians chose for the 24 hours of the day, to divide each day and night into 12 and to have 60 minutes in between, this relation comes from commerce and not what is written in the stars. It is the best possible way of explaining the day and the night and the movements of the Sun throughout the day, however that is the point, it is just the best possible explanation.
 
The Greek principles of numbers creating the cosmos also influenced the Assyrian and the Babylonians which later influenced the Jewish religion and the Torah, which is where “Gematria” obtains its’ name. They were always creating meanings from texts using numerology in order to find laws to be obeyed, following the principles that numbers are the absolute, geometry is absolute and that what the time and measurement says, must be obeyed.
 
Time and money then are intrinsically linked. Time has been observed within atoms, which have different timings of their minute orbits, giving us atomic time and even the speed of light of has been a development of time too. The interest within philosophy, science, religion and spirituality with time is that it is a moving set of numbers and as numbers are the best explanation, or rather perceived to be absolutely concrete, they must be obeyed.

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