[david_w]

This. It is discovered in the same sense that humans "discover" facts about humans via science- we're not born with perfect self-knowledge.

It is "created" because there is no guarantee that our efforts correspond to reality. In that sense we are just playing in the sandbox of what we can conceive.

The fact that mathematics corresponds so "unreasonably" to objective reality is because what we call objective reality is mediated by our brain's own idiosyncrasies and limitations of thinking.

It's no more surprising that external objective reality is mathematically predictable and describable than it is that our eyes can see shapes and some, but not all, light. That's the purpose of eyes and they tell us enough of what we need to know that we can survive.

Our brains are exactly the same thing- they tell us a story in a way which helps us to survive. Actual reality may be beyond our capacity to conceive of or worse, may seem like nonsense to us because it's aggressively illogical or specifically contradictory and reality therefore makes no "sense" to us.

[SkyBelow]

>It is "created" because there is no guarantee that our efforts correspond to reality. In that sense we are just playing in the sandbox of what we can conceive.

But doesn't this dance kinda near the notion that I am a brain in a vat and none of you exist (read this question with me as the speaker or with yourself as the speaker)?

I would say our brains do have limits. I can't well envision a 4D object. But once we reduce things down to simple logical axioms and constructs, these exist as much as anything can be said to exist. Even if I was a simulation that didn't even have a brain, much less eyes, the concepts I come up with would exist more than the flesh I incorrectly thought I had.

[david_w]

>>But once we reduce things down to simple logical axioms and constructs, these exist as much as anything can be said to exist.

I agree.

But this assumes logic and at least the principle of non-contradiction: not both A and not A - is how reality "really" is.

We can't get past the idea that it must be this way because only provable nonsense lies on the other side of this assumption. But our brains may be fundamentally unable to process ultimate reality and the nonsense a contradiction represents may be a statement not about reality but our brains, our thinking.

So logical contradictions aren't actually nonsense, they're the sound of us hitting the walls of what our minds can conceive of. All animal have such limits. We assume those limits look like darkness- stuff we can't peer into. What if they look like impossibility instead?

That's the point of view I'm entertaining here. I am not saying this is true. It certainly isn't useful or provable as far as I know, but it is possible.

The practical value of such an exercise, if it has any (and I think it does) is to twofold.

One seems to expand my imagination to the maximum extent pops me out of the assumptions that frame my thinking and this seeps into my thinking about things, technical problems, generally.

Two it confers humility and a certain openess and makes me less judgmental. So that, for example, when I hear or read people with claims to spiritual knowledge I don't automatically blow them off as crazy / bitter / ignorant because what they're saying "makes no sense".

Thinking and talking about Ultimate Reality capital U capital R, ought to fill us all with humility if we're being intellectually honest by our own standards. Yet, I find people totally lack that humility. They make huge pronouncements about Ultimate Reality which they can't really be sure of, and the effect this has on the world, and how we think of each other, and therefore how we treat each other, and even the effect on one's own mind, is one of diminishment generally.

Mea culpa, I was one of those people and I didn't like it.

If you get down to the core of knowledge and how we know something, this is what's really there, and it's good to be reminded of it.