I am afraid you are an empirical materialist and I am more a rational idealist.
What we will have here is "failure to communicate" due to profound differences in our underlying metaphysical assumptions about "reality" and "existence".

If you are in the garden with an amorous prospect I suggest you do not express your feelings in terms of neurons, chemical neurotransmitters, PET scans and Skinner's behaviorism.

I still maintain that the fact that the universe is rational, ordered and predictable and expressible in mathematical terms is a philosophical or metaphysical problem worth pondering rather than dismissing.

Idealism is dead, and for good reason, too. When you say amorous, I'm assuming you mean a significant other. Well I am an empirical materialist, but your interpretation of my perspective on life and beauty is very skewed. I value beauty and love in the same way that you do, but I also know how to classify things according to their relationship to the universe and reality. It's called logical clarification of thought.

My apologies, I am sure you do.

The point would be more that the things you do value (love, truth, beauty, the good) what Kierkegaard would call subjective truths you classify as not "real" having no "existence".

The things which have little value to you rocks and other material objects do "exist" and are "real" objective truths.

It is called "materialism" not necessarily "logical clarification of thought".

I have a broader notion of both reality and existence and in truth so do you.

But I say that the nature they were raised in was rational from the outset.

Mathematics is not 'just a language' and neither maths nor language work by 'corresponding to objects of perception'.

OK, let try this

Numbers have coherence, they are the result of logic and reason.
Numbers have correspondence, all natural laws are expressed in numerical form.
Numbers have consensus, universally taught and correct results universally accepted.
Numbers have all the properties of truth.
Does truth exist?

OK, let try this

Numbers have coherence, they are the result of logic and reason.
Numbers have correspondence, all natural laws are expressed in numerical form.
Numbers have consensus, universally taught and correct results universally accepted.
Numbers have all the properties of truth.
Does truth exist?

I'm not devaluing subjective ideas and concepts. I'm simply saying that they exist only as abstractions, not as objects.

Nature may have some internal system about it, but the system of reason used by humans does not perfectly correspond to it -- our reason is uniquely human, and this is why scientific discovery has refined how we think about nature. It was perfectly "rational" for Aristotle to intuit that heavenly bodies moved in circles and earthly bodies in straight lines. But he was wrong -- his own reasoning was inconsistent with nature.

Math is abstracted out of sense experience,

:brickwall:
Is that an argument of some sort?

you mean like 'one is the loneliest number....?

Aedes argument is that all our notions are derived from experience of what exists. However philosophers cannot demonstrate that mathematics is founded in empirical experience of the world.

Some essential part of it must always exist 'a priori'.

However the basis of Aedes objection is really religious in nature, because he believes that everything must be explicable with reference to evolution. Because evolution has become your religion.

That may be, but somehow my notion is that mathematics, like reason and logic, are hardwired into our experience (indeed into nature itself).

Somewhat in the same way that Hume suggests causality is a universal notion and Kant suggests that time and space are intrinsic mental features. They are not dependent on experience.

But I say that the nature they were raised in was rational from the outset.

Well, people are smart enough to built tv, and microwave. I think people ought to have gotten something right.

abstract from what?

You don't need to be a philosopher to know that there is no such thing as a human who has not had empirical experience. And you don't need to be a philosopher to know that a child has years of concrete sensory experience before developing the capacity for abstract thought.

This still does nothing to prove that the basis of mathematics is empirical.

A creature has years of concrete sensory experience and never develops abstract thought. A child has the capacity to learn because humans have the innate ability to do so.

I am inclined to think that the account given by empricists of the nature of human intelligence is no longer even coherent.

If rationality and mathematical ability were explainable only with reference to natural selection...

And in fact if we are to believe that all of our faculties are merely due to the accretion of incremental changes through millenia of evolution.

Whatever your definition for "truth", (mathematics would seem to meet all the proposed definitions). So it would seem to me (weak though my intellect might be) that if one thinks truth "exists" so do "numbers"

Classically rationalism versus empiricism hinges on the notion that knowledge can be developed a priori independent of sense perception experience. That is not to say that every rational formulation is also "true" or corresponds to the "real" world but some of them do. Several great ideas have been developed through thought experiments and only empirically verified later.

My argument is that what exists and what real are not the same. I am saying that our rationality and the rational activity of consciousness (= the soul) is the foundation of reality.

Reality is beyond the division between subjective and objective because it must include both. Empiricists attempt to define in such a way that it only includes the objective.

Aedes argument is that all our notions are derived from experience of what exists. However philosophers cannot demonstrate that mathematics is founded in empirical experience of the world. Some essential part of it must always exist 'a priori'. However the basis of Aedes objection is really religious in nature, because he believes (like I suspect everyone else on this forum) that everything must be explicable with reference to evolution. Because evolution has become your religion.

You think they did that by sitting around thinking until the idea popped into their heads? Or did they build upon scientific research and engineering?

The fact that we look at the world and see quantities. We see one rock or two rocks or three rocks. We count on our fingers. We enumerate, add, and subtract. Multiplication is simply a shorthand for addition, and division is the reciprocal of multiplication. Numbers as abstract concepts came out of this world experience. And I'm still waiting for the 18th century rationalists to point out the person who invented mathematics without ever having had sense experience

Good idea to start with a distinction between ideas, but bad idea to not give any motivations for it. Why the distinction?

Objective, and subjective are epistemic notions (related to how we know something), thus, they cannot have anything to do with reality at all.

It is a standard line to think of numbers as an "abstract of" something, but what? Numbers have properties, and in general, if something has properties, then it exist. Modern philosophy say numbers are "abstract objects". They have no causal interaction with physical matter, but they still exist. The party line is divided between platonist, and the nominalist.

Numbers have properties, and in general, if something has properties, then it exist.

They have no causal interaction with physical matter, but they still exist.

The party line is divided between platonist, and the nominalist.