Could humans live without mathematics? If this includes the concept of quantity (which you say it does for the purpose of this thread) then humans have probably never lived without it. That kind of reasonsing vastly predates humanity. Captive capuchins (neotropical monkeys) will even revolt from their trainers if they are aware of unequal pay (rewards) between trained animals. The most recent common ancestor between new-world monkeys and humans was almost 30 million years ago. So clearly this concept pervades many species (and not merely the Primates, read about elephants, dogs, and dolphins).
So no, humans didn't invent mathematics as you define it and no, humans could not live without their understanding of quantity.
However, by humans I mean humans as societies. Individual humans could easily live without any understanding of quantity at all. This is because people frequently support disabled individuals. But in general, a human society could not survive without an understanding of quantity. How else would hunter-gatherers know when to stay and when to go? Let alone other cultures (like the far east and west) with their ever-increasing dependence upon complex math-based technologies.
Scorpion0x17 wrote:
CommieChipmunk wrote:
eh, yeah.. we need math. Our buildings would fall over, how would money work? Ratios, proportions it's all part of modern day life. Without it, we probably wouldn't have computers...
I guess you could argue that it's "unimportant" for our existence, but that existence would consist of hunting with blunt objects..
We had sharp objects before we had maths.
Yeah, thats incorrect, we started using tools well after we were using our knowledge of quantity. I don't believe we could have been decent hunter gatherers without being able to ration food and estimate yields of different resources.
"Hunting with blunt objects" is what we were doing when our brains ballooned and we began talking and carefully sculpting stone for various purposes. It is actually extremely difficult to survive without the luxuries (and safety nets) that our highly populated and networked societies offer. The average person today is probably less intelligent than their ancestors 2000 years ago. Culture accumulates genius technologies but less is always expected of the individuals.
I would say most of technology up ot the last 2 centuries depended much more upon spatial and linguistic reasoning than math. However the explosion in the use of computers and complicated machinery recently has shifted many cultures' technological needs to mathematics.
Last edited by Marinejuana (2007-03-15 23:50:59)