re: Joe Rogan’s latest guest - Terrance Howard - it’s a doozy

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I'm far from defending Howard here but it seems as though his point with the 1×1 thing is due to the system and taught/trained behavior. In essence saying math is man made and open to frickery as all things man made are. His point of multiply, it's meaning and how 1×1=1 does make sense in a way. You have one multiply it by one then you still have one. Not exactly logical. Just accepted. When something multiplies you never end up with what you started with. Except in math. Just spit balling. Maybe I'm just as high as he is.

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Math is man made in the same way that colors are man made in that both intend to describe and reflect the natural world, but neither influence what it describes.

You, like Mr. Howard, are struggling with 1x1=1 because you learned math as an abstract, arbitrary construct instead of a descriptive language. Fortunately, multiplication is an operation that’s easy to shift into natural language, so easy that it’s common for people to do so, albeit in an unusual construction: times.

At its most basic, multiplication is taking anything and then describing how many times over that thing exists in this context. An elephant, one time? You’ve got one elephant. An elephant, three times? You’ve got three elephants. Two elephants, four times? Eight elephants.

It’s not arbitrary; it’s descriptive.

So with apologies to Mr. Howard, no matter what you start with, if you have that thing one time, you’ll have exactly that thing. And if what you started with was exactly one thing, if you have it only one time, what you’re left with is…

Just that one.