[amarte]

Imagine an interview with a great painter. The painter is asked about the nature of painting and he responds that when he sets out to work in his studio and his brush strokes a canvass, he is discovering the fundamental nature of reality. He doubles down and exclaims that, in fact, reality is actually JUST lines and curves and shades and colors, and his proof is, well, look at how accurate his paintings are! Let's pretend that he actually is a very skilled painter, and many critics have marveled at the extent to which his paintings are indistinguishable from his subject matter. Still though, the interviewer clears his throat after an awkward pause and continues on to the next question.

To me, math is a medium of description much like painting or writing. It's units are not colors or words but points. A point, or "that which has no part", is much finer and carries with it far less baggage than something like a word. Points can be assigned numerical values and played with in clever ways. You can even sprinkle a fine dust of them over anything observable and create a copy of it to arbitrary degrees of precision.

I know math is far more than just the study of points, but I'm not convinced that math is anything more than our capacity to distinguish and describe extended to its limit. I also don't mean to belittle the accomplishments of mathematicians and theoreticians, I just think it's more reasonable to say that math is JUST the limit of description than it is to say that reality is JUST math.

After reading through some of the comments, I think many of us are on the same page.

[bloomberg2020]

Agreed

The crux of it is obvious: math is true from the perspective of a human consciousness

It’s defined after cognitive measure.

I won’t say it’s whittled down.

I would say ... it’s sight, sound, touch... attempt at quantifying our qualified experience

All the best math nerds were often deeply gifted and practiced forms of human art: poetry, music, sculpture... and many artists good at math, Brian May, for one example

IMO to get math one needs to build all those abilities

It’s really the people I know that don’t do that see math as a boring toolbox of rules and points

Not saying you’re not that

Math is not a thing like a rock because our ability to behave like more than a rock gave us the ability to define math. It has to be more than a simple this or that