🧵 esoteric platonism

Anonymous at Mon, 22 Jul 2024 01:45:56 UTC No. 16291717

Okay what the hell IS form? When I do a mathematical proof there are extremely hazy and vague notions of the pieces involved, and somehow those hazy outlines manifest all the details and turn into a concrete proof. It is absolutely bonkers that mathematicians can have a vague idea for a proof from 20 miles away and somehow all the details magically work out. Maybe a good example of this is Godel's incompleteness theorems.

These vague notions and hazy forms literally have to exist in their own right, separate from "concrete mathematical objects" otherwise it would not be possible to manifest a mathematical proof from 20 miles away out of such vagueness.

This may not be everyone's experience with mathematics, but this is absolutely what my experience has been.