Why mathematical truths exist with or without minds to consider them
In this video interview from the long-running interview series Closer to Truth, the US presenter Robert Lawrence Kuhn asks Scott Aaronson, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, a single question – ‘What can you say about the nature of truth?’ From that starting point, Aaronson makes a case for what he calls the ‘autonomy of mathematical truth’, arguing that, whether agreed upon by humans across cultures, advanced species across planets, or even with no one to contemplate them at all, the truths of arithmetic are universal.
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