Re:How imaginary numbers were invented [video]
by delecti on Friday November 12, 2021 @12:04PM
(#29201653)
That's a pretty hard question to answer, and I think impossible to answer definitively (at least unless we met a civilization that did arrive at different concepts). It's kinda like the allegory of the cave; it's hard to envision another way of looking at the world, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's impossible for there to be one.
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Re:How imaginary numbers were invented [video]
by JackFr on Friday November 12, 2021 @12:30PM
(#29202043)
It’s a good question to think about.
A constant refrain of mine is that our brains have convinced us that they’re universal understanders, but we really don’t know that to be true.
Imagine the difficulty of dealing with aliens who have a different mapping of the physical universe, different than our mathematics, which is both true but literally and physically incomprehensible to us.