An idea which has picked up some traction in some circles of pure mathematicians is that numbers should be viewed as the “shadow” of finite sets, which is a more fundamental notion.
You start with the notion of finite set, and functions between them. Then you “forget” the difference between two finite sets if you can match the elements up to each other (i.e if there exists a bijection). This seems to be vaguely related to your thing about being invariant under permutation—if a property of a subset of positions (i.e those positions that are sent to 1), is invariant under bijections (i.e permutations) of the set of positions, it can only depend on the size/number of the subset.
See e.g the first ~2 minutes of this lecture by Lars Hesselholt (after that it gets very technical)
This is great!
An idea which has picked up some traction in some circles of pure mathematicians is that numbers should be viewed as the “shadow” of finite sets, which is a more fundamental notion.
You start with the notion of finite set, and functions between them. Then you “forget” the difference between two finite sets if you can match the elements up to each other (i.e if there exists a bijection). This seems to be vaguely related to your thing about being invariant under permutation—if a property of a subset of positions (i.e those positions that are sent to 1), is invariant under bijections (i.e permutations) of the set of positions, it can only depend on the size/number of the subset.
See e.g the first ~2 minutes of this lecture by Lars Hesselholt (after that it gets very technical)
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Ooh, I like that formulation. It’s cleaner—it jumps straight to numbers rather than having to extract them from counts.