 One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight steps. It's the number of steps right there. I asked you whether Pythagoras is right, whether the numbers are real. If you say no, then where do the numbers come from? I mean, I guess what, we just make them up. I mean, if they're not real, they're created by us. Again, we don't see numbers around. So the only possible place for them to exist is somehow just in our minds. Okay, I mean, that's the way it can go. But if numbers are just created by us, why does, so here's a claim involving numbers in mathematics, four plus four equals eight. Why is that true? If it's just something we make up. There's all kinds of things we make up that don't seem to be either true or false. I mean, here's the claim. Sherlock Holmes lives at B221 Baker Street or 221 B Baker Street. Is that true? Well, and if you go to 221 B Baker Street, you find a Sherlock Holmes souvenir shop, but Sherlock Holmes doesn't live there. And Sherlock Holmes has never lived there because, you know, he's fiction, he doesn't exist. Here's another claim. Sherlock Holmes lives in New York. Is that false? I mean, why? Is it false because Sherlock Holmes lives somewhere else? No, he doesn't live anywhere. And, you know, there was a TV series that depicted Sherlock Holmes as an addict living in New York, and not only that, but Watson, who eventually became his detecting partner, was a, how did they phrase it? Basically, she helped addicts with their addiction and portrayed by a woman, portrayed by Lucy Liu. So was that just false? I mean, it's fiction. Again, off the gray is a wizard. Is that true? If so, how? Are there any wizards? Well, no. Right, wizardry is a fiction. How about again, off the gray is a stockbroker living in Decatur. But is that false? If you say it's false, why is it false? Is he doing something someplace else? He's not in Middle Earth. Middle Earth is a fiction. You know, fictions, things we just make up out of our head, they're not really either true or false. I could say Smaug is a dragon. Okay. But I haven't really said something true or false because there isn't a Smaug or no other dragons. If I said Smaug is a unicorn, haven't said something true or false? If I say there are no dragons, then yeah, I've said something that's true because we look on the world, we look at all the animals that exist and we don't find any dragons. We look at the expectant signs of dragons, right? K is filled with gold and burnt corpses on the outside and we don't find those. So when we say something true or false, we're talking about what's real. When we're talking about fictions, it's neither true nor false. So if you want to say mathematics is just something we make up out of our head and yet four plus four equals eight is true, whereas four plus four equals 72 is false. I'm going to want to know why it's either true or false because anything else we just kind of make up out of our head isn't. What's the difference? Simply because we say so? Well, hey, today I say that four plus four equals 72, right, doesn't work that way. We tend to think of numbers as rather immutable. You know, numbers are not the only form that we use, right? My scientific investigation itself is a form. Scientific investigation looks at these physical particular things, okay, but is itself a form? Botany looks at trees, botany is not itself trees. The scientific method is not physical. It's something that we understand, we comprehend. We don't see the scientific method out there. If form really just is something we make up and therefore fiction either true or false, we're kind of in trouble because the scientific, you know, scientific investigation relies upon numbers. You can't do science without numbers. And if they're just something we make up, scientific investigation relies upon a fiction. The scientific method itself is not a physical thing. It's a scientific method, merely a fiction. So you can say that numbers aren't real, that's your prerogative. Plenty of people do, including a significant number of mathematicians. So you could say the scientific investigation, or you could say that form numbers are not real, they're just something we make up. But then you're under the burden of answering the question, how do we get truth or error out of what we just merely make up? On the other hand, if you say numbers are real, you might have an even more difficult problem. Now we say four plus four equals eight, okay. How do I know that? I take the concepts of four, addition, eight, and equality, and I have a true statement, four plus four equals eight. These are all concepts. These are all abstracts. I never see concepts or abstracts. If I want to say I know four plus four equals eight, how do I know that? It's not by observation. It's this thing we call comprehension, whatever that is. So if you say that numbers are real, that's fine. That's your prerogative. Plenty of people say numbers are real. Okay. Then how do we know? You know, we say that there's an unending set of numbers. Numbers never end. If numbers are merely something that we just make up, there isn't an infinite set of numbers because nobody can conceive of an infinite set. We can't count that high. So if numbers aren't real, there's no infinite sets of them either. Uh-oh. If numbers are real, we're talking about the existence of literally an infinite amount of things without end. They're not here because they're not physical. They're abstracts. Then we say we know them. It's a difficult question to answer.