Dear Luis Patiño-Cuadrado,

On my page you asked that I read your essay. And asked if I thought math was the symbols. I replied that I haven't spent much time trying to define math, but that I generally think the symbols formalize the underlying relations. If you read my essay, you know that I understand math as deriving from physical reality, not the other way around. In my end notes I discuss how counters create numbers, and, per Kronecker, all of math follows.

I generally view math as "the language of nature", but languages can describe reality or present fictions. I believe that Mandelbrot is elaborate fiction. Beautiful, stunning, but probably related to nothing in reality except the images we create physically.

As you appear to note, counting is everywhere, from DNA to cells to computers to animals. Counters are easy to construct, and are ubiquitous. Numbers can be mapped into and onto all physical realities, and even non-physical such as Mandelbrot.

I dearly love mathematics, but I am not a Platonist.

There is no harm that I'm aware of in being the Platonist, so you should probably just enjoy it.

My best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

6 days later

Dear Luis,

I read your essay only yesterday, but I really enjoyed it, for the originality and depth of your vision. Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH, since it excludes the uncomputable real numbers (which are almost the totality of the numbers), seems to me after all a particular version of the "It from bit" perspective. Instead your point of view expresses, although in a very concise manner, the depth of Cantor's and Gödel's results, whose implications are perhaps not yet been fully understood.

In 2015 FQXi contest (and before also in a book), I suggested the hypothesis that space and time are sets of (properly ordered) real numbers:

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2330

Your idea goes even further and extends the mathematical origin to whole reality (including emotions, feelings, moods, etc.). It is not an arbitrary hypothesis (I consider it possible that self-consciousness is a mathematical function, self-referential and uncomputabie), but it is very difficult to verify.

PS: I read in a previous post that you have serious problems of material subsistence, and I'm so sorry for that. I have no academic position. If I had one, or I were, hypothetically, in FQXi Board, I would try every way to help you to continue your research, because I think you deserve it.

Sincerely,

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