Recent content by DaveC426913

Does it have to be exact moment? Most inventions go through refinement over time. Is one point more valid than all the others? Or more of a Theseus's Ship writ temporal?

That is where this is posted. It is the poster who is asking for explanations. I have DM'd them for confirmation about environs near their home.

The poster's boilerplate says PA. Zip code confirms it.

All right. The wolves act like a pack in tangible ways: inter-pack dynamics, pecking orders, etc. This is distinct from how they act around non-pack wolves, and they have been doing so since before we came along to apply groups to things. There is nothing abstract about the group that is a...

Eh. Fine. I thought we could distinguish between the confidence in paleobiology and the confidence in pack mentaility but OK, let's use an extant species. Now that we're using an extant species, the onus is you to to how that its group label is not a result of humans labeling it to be so...

I am on no way suggesting it is random. Please don't put that on me. I'm not some Creationist. Nothing I said should warrant that response.

My point exactly. So objectively not part of any human abstraction. Individuals in the herd behave in particular way because they are a group - strangers are not part of the group. It's a natural, concrete, distinction - between these things and those things - and it requires zero abstraction...

Agree. But I'm not sure it invalidates my point. Can someone show me the monster group in-the-wild? Not component of it; bnot elents that you surmise belnig in it. Can you show me the group itself? Would Tarzan be able to look at it (i.e. a human without a grounding in math)? If not, it's...

I'm not talking about the numbers themselves; I'm talking about "The" prime numbers - i.e. that 13 and 17 are part of a group. The group - "the primes" - was invented.

My distinction is: Discovered: it objectively existed as part of the world before humans came along. Does anyone want to hone that?

I'm not using the term "group" in the direct mathematical sense (becaue I think it would get too murky). I'm simply looking at any type of abstraction as the product of a thinking mind. A hadrosaur herd is objectively significant without any existence of a human mind.

Agree. Those are prime, and we see how it got that way. My point here is that nature does not have a "group" of primes that it picks from. The group of primes comes from a mind that has insight into why these two numbers can be considered to have similar properties. BTW, "evolutionary logic"...

Ergo: this is a philosophical question and is thus in GD.

Something that exists distinct from humans. A pack of hadrosaurs might be considered a natural group. Humans did not invent the peculiar bond between herd members. There are physical consequences to that particular proximal collection of things. The prime numbers are not a natural group. Just...

You just self-corrected. You could "choose any random axioms for your theory", but you don't - and the reason you don't is because certain "axioms lead to particuarly useful and interesting structures". Look, all types of categorizing are human-invented. We might group green things together...