THE TRUTH ABOUT COUNTING

摘要

He is flabbergasted. How, he demands, can Connes be a materialist and still think like that? How could a physical brain make contact with such an "archaic reality"? But Connes doesn't budge an inch. He happily admits that the "tools devised by mathematicians to understand mathematical reality" are a human invention, formed (or "tainted," as he puts it) by history. But that has no effect on the "raw reality" the tools are used to investigate. In fact, he suggests, the physical world is created out of the mathematical one—an idea that the numerical mystic Pythagoras propounded more than a century before Plato.