>>13985428the way i put it made it hard to understand. in any case, it is pretty hard to elaborate because the whole issue is hard to understand or reason about.
as for the analogy, energy is not a real thing. it is not made of atoms or fundamental particles, it is not something you hold in your hand. energy is an abstraction, something that "doesn't really exist", but is useful because it is intricately tied to the material world to such an extent that we can use it reliably to make predictions about the natural world.
but it is still related on the natural world, dependent on it. energy as an abstraction comes from the natural world's laws and physics. but it does not really exist. another analogy i like to use is the idea of blood pressure: it "exists", but not really. blood pressure is a numerical abstraction of little blood cells flowing through your vein.
but blood pressure still depends on the natural world, because it is an abstraction OF the natural world. it comes AFTER the natural world, to describe it.
quantity, on the other hand, appears to come "before" in a sense. despite the extreme utility (another rabbit hole: what is sometimes called the "unreasonable utility" of mathematics), where it is ubiquitous in science, it does not appear to be a result of the natural world's laws or physics, at least as we conceptualize them now.
humans look at two cows and count two cows, a discrete quantity. a quantity of two. but to nature, at the lowest level (that we understand now) these two cows are just collections of fundamental particles, and saying that these two cows are two cows is arbitrarily identifying a set of fundamental particles that is useful to humans. this is "abstracting" the true nature of these cows down to quantity.
quantity is discrete when looking at nature at the quantum level, and though i'm not a quantum scientist and might be talking out of my ass, there is still an air of inappropriateness about ascribing quantity to nature. (1/2)
