I don't think I need to argue that specific point. I'm criticizing your argument, not presenting a positive one of my own.

Yes, really. In particular, from your point of view, numbers could be a mere side effect of the development of our perceptive capacity. That is, our sense of numbers isn't actually something that is driving evolutionary benefit, but is rather something that evolved alongside something else that was *actually* the evolutionary benefit.

As I said, you have a lot more work to do. And I'll poke you again for the outright nonsense of your DNA argument as an example of you not realizing just how poor your argumentation is.

Correct. You tried to set up an argument that math doesn't exist if the universe is one substance (which then morphed into an if and only if statement). I'm showing you how this argument fails. I've even given you an argument structure that's better, and you haven't yet even started to consider it.

I'm starting to think that you really are setting out to prove math does not exist because you can't seem to focus on the argument that you've projected yourself to be making.

Math describes what numbers can do. I suppose one can argue that a description of a real thing is not the real thing, but only a description. But that’s like arguing words are not words in a dictionary because a dictionary only contains descriptions of words.

Descriptions are real, but aren’t the real thing they describe does seem true....

So is a description of what descriptions do, a real description?

The way this is going, it appears ignorance is also your destination. So be it.

If anyone wants to read about Kant's view of mathematics:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-mathematics/

Also

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1426

One day soon the reframing of physics that will explain QM and geometry will rebuilt Philosophy too.

I will try to read Kant moreover the immense difficulty i have when reading philosophy given the instant objection based on present day science and math that reveals conflicts hard to relax and ignore while reading the rest. As a result it takes tremendous effort to constrain this frequent objection and observe the thinker in their own time enjoying their brilliance while silencing momentarily revolting thoughts regarding their logic's foundation and arguments. It is very tough indeed to play this game.

I reckon Einstein will feel as old then like Newton today.

Whether relations exist or not is not a trivial question. It cuts at the belly of the edifice of thought that you've presented.

You brush it off in barely a paragraph. As if its a footnote to your train of thought.

Bertrand Russell struggled with this idea for many years. He refused to indulge Platonism for a long time. His student Wittgenstein, and a few others weren't so reluctant. Russell eventually couldn't get around it. Relations, like numbers, like adjectives, like many other "abstractions", are mind-independent.

In fact, this debate dates back many years before Spinoza. You can trace it back to the problem of adjectives. Plato and Aristotle, of course. In short, adjectives brake the laws of physics. Blue, as a colour for example, exists in multiple places at the same time (sky, ocean, blueberries, etc.). Physically, it is impossible for any one thing to exist simultaneously in multiple places. Yet this is what we observe. This is problem.

As a side-note, where do adjectives belong in your very narrow ontology?

Interestingly enough though.

The title of this thread is oddly fitting.

Mathematics, neither subjective, nor objective. Present, yet unreal.

P.s. this may confuse some people. The argument I've presented implies that I believe mathematics to be objective. No.

Just because it is mind-independent, does not automatically mean it is objective. It is not. It does not exist "objectively" in the world, in the sense that a tree or rock does. It is neither subjective, nor objective.

It is eternal.

Not bad VeeD. 37 is eternal. Red is eternal (or the nanometers it represents). If the natural laws are eternal.

That other thread about imprecision in math is contrast.

When you build a bridge, math can describe the bridge before you build so it ends up built to hold it’s lifetime weight. Math describes the bridge and the weight it can hold in relationships.

Is math the bridge? Is it more than bridge since it also described weight it can hold while that weight may not even have been born yet?

And do you want math to describe the weight a potential bridge can hold imprecisely?

I find math boring, no offense, but I like it. It’s real enough that by using it we learned to describe bridges very accurately before we use them.

The bridge exists. The math we use to design or describe it is just a model.

The math the universe uses to keep it standing is reality.

Perfect.