Ask A Genius 728: Immutability of One
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/24
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Addendum to yesterday on numbers on the immutability of one.
Rick Rosner: So yesterday we were talking about numbers and arithmetic and I thought a little bit more and my thinking is still not particularly clear, but I would just like to add at least all whole number mathematics is just repeated addition. Multiplication is just shorthand for… if you’re multiplying six times eight, then you’re taking six things and you’re adding another six things total of eight times or seven times. You start with six and then you add another six seven more times and six times eight is just shorthand for that chore. The deal is that there’s something very consistent about a thing being one thing, a thing that exists; an apple, a baseball, and the oneness of it and the number associated with how many things do you have when it’s a thing? One; the oneness of it doesn’t change; It remains consistent throughout arithmetic and throughout real world manipulations that don’t destroy it.
You throw a baseball in a bag with other baseballs and the total number of baseballs in the bag is the number of baseballs that were thrown into the bag. It’s just addition of things that each has a number of one. It’s very much part of the world because of the consistency of things that exist and arithmetic builds on that consistency. I know we’ve talked years before on which came first, numbers or things in the world, and I think I came down on the side of things in the world. But the arithmetic is highly consistent and useful and that coincides with some of the basic consistencies of things that exist in the world, which includes each thing that exists being a thing, there being a number, an immutable number, that number being one associated with a thing that exists.
So I’m kind of talking in circles, but kind of not but there’s somebody who’s better at thinking about this stuff than I am could poke at to get to why one is a big deal and how arithmetic follows from just things you can do with just by repeated additions of one. Except to mention that when I was a kid there was a book that came out called Laws of Form. It was a skinny little book of kind of meta mathematical philosophy where this guy, I don’t know his name, tried to come up with the rules of all existence via arguments about form. And I tried to read it a zillion times and it didn’t get very far. Even if it had made sense, I don’t think I would have gotten that far because I was just a kid. But I would guess that the arguments are not that persuasive, but the idea of building all of existence from basic metaphysical principles kind of stuck with me. That seemed like a thing to try to do. I got to give credit to that little book that I didn’t understand.
[Recording End]
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