# three views

**Three ways to take the ladder**

Platonism: the top is the actual numbers, which exist apart from any rulebook. The cost is explaining how minds ever reach them.

No top: the ladder keeps going, and “true” always means true relative to some level.

The universe as the biggest system: if reality is the whole, nothing is outside it. Then either reality is not a formal system, or nobody inside can know all its truths.

Connects to:
- [the ladder](https://mapideas.org/i/tr_ladder)
- [closed loops](https://mapideas.org/i/tr_loops)
- [any top?](https://mapideas.org/i/tr_q1)
- [reaches reality?](https://mapideas.org/i/c_reality)
- [numbers out there?](https://mapideas.org/i/tr_q3)
- [Gödel’s view](https://mapideas.org/i/c_disj)

Sources:
- [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/)

Source: https://mapideas.org/i/tr_views · open on the map: https://mapideas.org/#tr_views