/lit/ - Literature

>hylics can't respond

>>16305599

>>15132243
>doesn't believe in mathematics
Blithering retard

>>15106298
>>15106316
yes all of it has been proven

From Road to Reality
The Mandelbrot set was certainly no invention of any human mind. The set is just objectively there in the mathematics itself. If it has meaning to assign an actual existence to the Mandelbrot set, then that existence is not within our minds, for no one can fully comprehend the set’s endless variety and unlimited complication. Nor can its existence lie within the multitude of computer printouts that begin to capture some of its incredible sophistication and detail, for at best those printouts capture but a shadow of an approximation to the set itself. Yet it has a robustness that is beyond any doubt; for the same structure is revealed—in all its perceivable details, to greater and greater Oneness the more closely it is examined—independently of the mathematician or computer that examines it. Its existence can only be within the Platonic world of mathematical forms. I am aware that there will still be many readers who and difficulty with assigning any kind of actual existence to mathematical structures. Let me make the request of such readers that they merely broaden their notion of what the term ‘existence’ can mean to them. The mathematical forms of Plato’s world clearly do not have the same kind of existence as do ordinary physical objects such as tables and chairs. They do not have spatial locations; nor do they exist in time. Objective mathematical notions must be thought of as timeless entities and are not to be regarded as being conjured into existence at the moment that they are first humanly perceived. The particular swirls of the Mandelbrot set that are depicted in Fig. 1.2c or 1.2d did not attain their existence at the moment that they were first seen on a computer screen or printout. Nor did they come about when the general idea behind the Mandelbrot set was Wrst humanly put forth—not actually first by Mandelbrot, as it happened, but by R. Brooks and J. P. Matelski, in 1981, or perhaps earlier. For certainly neither Brooks nor Matelski, nor initially even Mandelbrot himself, had any real conception of the elaborate detailed designs that we see in Fig. 1.2c and 1.2d. Those designs were already ‘in existence’ since the beginning of time, in the potential timeless sense that they would necessarily be revealed precisely in the form that we perceive them today, no matter at what time or in what location some perceiving being might have chosen to examine them.