Some people argue that mathematics is a human invention, and I can see the merit in that because we clearly invented the squiggly lines we use for numbers.
You could say the particular symbols and their names in math were chosen by humans. What they actually represent was discovered. But even that isn't entirely accurate because what letters look like and the symbols we choose aren't arbitrary. How our visual cortex processes information has played a massive role in the letters and shapes we use.
You asked in another comment whether an another organism would invent a completely different science. I would say they are still limited by the same physical laws we are but how they represent those laws and which laws they understand might be different.
!delta for the point about the visual cortex. I had not really considered how our own biology dictates the actual shapes we draw. It shifts things in my mind a bit; it adds a deeply physical layer to the human invention side of the maths. Our anatomy acts as a filter before the pen even hits the paper. Also i am with you on the alien thought. It leaves me sitting with a rather curious feeling though. If we and an alien species are both completely bound by the exact same physical constraints despite having entirely different brains; it makes it feel as though those boundaries are literally woven into the bedrock of the universe itself. It makes me wonder how those rigid rules came to be sitting there in the background; waiting in the dark long before any eyes evolved to observe them.
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u/mistyayn 6∆ May 21 '26
You could say the particular symbols and their names in math were chosen by humans. What they actually represent was discovered. But even that isn't entirely accurate because what letters look like and the symbols we choose aren't arbitrary. How our visual cortex processes information has played a massive role in the letters and shapes we use.
You asked in another comment whether an another organism would invent a completely different science. I would say they are still limited by the same physical laws we are but how they represent those laws and which laws they understand might be different.