to get away from my thoughts <| sep |> So you ' re telling us they ' re evil ? <| sep |> it ' s not illegal to use tor , but you do get flagged by the NSA . <| sep |> My thought is that structures of maths that we know about exist regardless of whether we notice it or not . This goes for other animals . Another example is honey combs being hexagonal in shape in order to get the maximum efficiency for wax used to store honey . Whether you call the structure a hexagon or not , or even notice it , it is still there . About your edit , I feel that maths is both a projection of our understanding and a result of the kind of universe we live in one that is consistent . Take the example of placing one rock and then another in the corner of the room . If nothing interacts with the rocks before you come back there are still two rocks . This would have influenced our ideas about counting , as objects do not just vanish for no reason or more appear out of nowhere there is consistency .