Question: why does knowledge exsist and where did maths come from>?

Christina Pagel answered on 26 Jun 2013:

Hi Erin!

I suppose knowledge exists because things exist – and once something is there, things can be known about it and that’s what knowledge is. Some might argue that to have knowledge you need to have life to know it – so maybe knowledge exists because stuff exists AND life exists to experience it.

Philosophers argue about whether maths is invented or discovered – for me, maths is a way of expressing the relationships we see around us in a logically consistent way (for instance force = mass x acceleration in physics or area=width x height for a rectangle). A force still exists (like gravity) whether we understand it or not, but maths is a way of writing down your understanding of it… as our understanding changes or increases often the maths we use to describe relationships or tings changes too (so the maths for how newton understood gravity is different to the maths Einstein used to understand it)…