Re:What Even Is a Number?
by dragonwriter on Tuesday February 19, 2019 @06:03PM
(#19203841)
> Unicorns. Kirin. Narwhals. Rhinos. So you have two independent origins in culture for such a creature, plus two appearances of something similar in nature.
It's not at all clear that the cultural constructs are independent of each other or real world creatures. Particularly in the Western case, some of the earliest Greek accounts of the unicorn as well as Marco Polo’s account confirming its existence and difference from the contemporary evolution of the image stem from the distant East (from the European perspective) and clearly are describing a rhinoceros. They are also very similar to accounts of the Kirin.
Kirin is giraffe and upset Confucius as it should not appear in his chaotic time.
Re:What Even Is a Number?
by dragonwriter on Tuesday February 19, 2019 @08:06PM
(#19204685)
Some accounts of Kirin, yes, appear quite likely to be giraffes, others are nearly identical to the Western accounts of the monoceros of distant India (one of the original of the unicorn legend) and are almost certainly accounts of rhinoceros.
We can only be confident of that if they're in this universe. Also, this is only a conjecture. It's just something some of us imagine would be true. You can't elevate such an idea to the level of empirical data.
So, does the fact that something is discovered (rather than invented), and can be discovered many times independently in identical fashion, confer it some sort of elevated ontological status?
Unicorns. Kirin. Narwhals. Rhinos. So you have two independent origins in culture for such a creature, plus two appearances of something similar in nature. Does that confer it some sort of elevated ontological status?