Motivation behind numbers

Question

I hope this is the right place to ask this question...

My question regards the motivations behind forming numbers and their connection to physical objects. What I am not asking about, is a rigorous formulation of the natural numbers. Instead, I am curious about the perhaps more philosophical step before. Let me explain:

Generally, when we want to construct the integers (and eventually reals) we motivate the task by saying that a number represents a collection of items, addition of these numbers represents the combination of these items and so forth. (I guess this is sounding a lot like set theory as well). My question is how are these fundamental connections between numbers and the physical task of counting rigorously constructed. The way I have written it (the stuff in italics) is riddled with mysterious language such as “collection,” “combination” etc.

Of course in a purely mathematical context, this is unimportant. However, I think it’s still valuable to appreciate how abstract concepts in numbers all still hail from the mundane (yet seemingly hard to define) task of counting things.

*often times when we think of the physical models behind mathematical results, we arrive at this simple notion of “counting objects. Is this really the most precise way we can define this connection" *

For example, we “count” a collection of five apples as, well, five apples...

Answer 1

The best way to motivate counting in the way you are talking about is to consider it in terms of the concepts of "Bijection" and "Abstraction".

A bijection is pairing between different classes of things. For example if you had a pack of dogs where you gave each dog in that pack its own unique name. You can uniquely refer to that dog by it's name and when seeing that dog you can recall that dog's name.

Abstraction is the removal of the specifics to create a model whose rules are more universal. So for example consider the act of herding sheep past a gate. As each sheep passes though the gate you place a stone in a bag. Again you are creating a bijection between stones and sheep. However there is nothing really identifying one sheep from another (or one stone from another).

Further more when you use this method of using stones to record other items such as bushels of grain, etc the rules of how the stones operate don't change. This allows us to take the next step and abstract away the stones and just use the rules.

This turns out super useful if you are the government of an agrarian culture that has just developed agriculture and needs a way to record how much food you have in your store houses.

Answer 2

Not really an answer, just remarks (but you have not really asked a question either):

I found it enlightening when I read (in my case, for the first time in Frege's Grundlagen der Arithmetik) that numbers are not something that applies to physical reality, but to concepts. You are already working with abstractions when you get to apply numbers. Simplified example: There is no such thing as "three apples". There's some visuals, smells, sounds. But your mind at some stage has developed the concept "apple", i.e. the idea that there is something that can be called apple, and something that cannot be called apple (e.g. a pear, or cigarette smoke, or a memory of your grandmother); and of the former concept, there happen to be three on the table.

In a Kantian view, numbers are not part of the "Ding an sich", but part of the way our reason orders reality. As shown in Q the Platypus' answer, numbers come up once one has the concepts of "collections of objects" and "bijections between such collections". Neither of these concepts are a part of physical reality; they are ways how our mind makes sense of the world.

As an aside, it's maybe interesting to think about how e.g. concepts of continuous motion, or measurement, actually come earlier in childhood development than the natural numbers. In a way, some properties of the continuum (the real number line) are even more basic and intuitive than counting objects. So you might as well ask, what's the relation between the idea that something is "bigger" or "smaller" than something else to physical reality, or the idea that if two things are not the exact same size, then one is bigger and the other is smaller, and that then there is always something whose size is between them ... is that grounded in physical reality?

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Addendum: In the comments, user Shahab links to the question https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/q/49807/40478 where several comments and parts of answers raise points maybe better than I could do it. In particular, I want to quote from one answer by user "Ben - Reinstate Monica":

Remember that numbers (of any kind) are an abstraction that is used to describe concrete aspects of reality. To say that a mathematical object "is part of reality" is false in the concrete sense, but it can be true in the metaphorical sense that aspects of reality are accurately described by those abstractions. In the case of complex numbers, part of the confusion here comes from incorrect understanding of what they are ("but they're imaginary", etc.), which leads people to set them apart from other types of numbers, and imagine they their "existence" is somehow stranger than the "existence" of the real numbers, rational numbers, etc. [and here I add: natural numbers!]

and in particular this comment by user Dan Bryant:

As an aside, I challenge the implied presupposition that natural numbers of mangoes are inherently physical. Natural counting is certainly intuitive, but it presupposes that we can clearly and unambiguously identify mangoes, separating them into individual objects to count. I suggest that this is non-trivial and only appears obvious by virtue of the way our cognition and perception function.

which, if I'm not mistaken, is exactly what I tried to convey with my "apples" above.