A Parallel Common Room (The Anti-Realist Victory Scenario)

Setting: Faculty common room. Evening.

Everything is slightly untidy, as if the furniture itself were skeptical.

The air smells faintly of black tea and existential disquiet.

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Scene I — Stray Frames the Issue

Stray (calmly):

If we are to answer whether numbers are “actually real,” we might begin by asking what it is to be real. Not metaphysically, but in terms of consequences for practice.

Blottisham (sputtering):

Consequences for practice? This is nonsense. Numbers are either there or not. That’s the question.

Quillibrace (dryly):

And yet, the sooner you concede that “there or not” is shorthand for “constrained coordination under formal rules,” the sooner we can move beyond the trap.

Blottisham:

Trap? I don’t see a trap. I see clarity.

Stray:

Clarity, perhaps, but at the cost of mistaking our relation to numbers for their independent existence.

Blottisham glances at the clock. Already uneasy.

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Scene II — Anti-Realism Makes Its Case

Stray:

Numbers are real only in practice. They exist where they hold, and only because the systems that produce them hold. Two plus two equals four not because of an abstract realm, but because the system constrains outcomes.

Blottisham:

That… that sounds like mathematics is just something we do. Like a game.

Quillibrace:

Not “just.” A highly disciplined game whose rules, once instantiated, bite. Necessity is emergent, not pre-given.

Blottisham:

Emergent? So numbers aren’t real unless we count?

Stray:

Precisely. Counting is the very act that brings them into operative stability.

Blottisham (grumbling):

This is deeply unsatisfying.

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Scene III — The Decisive Argument

Stray:

Consider: if all humans vanished tomorrow, would “four” still exist? Only as a potential distinction somewhere, not as an object. Without actualising systems, number is a ghost concept.

Blottisham:

So mathematics dies with us?

Quillibrace:

Not death. Suspension. Potentiality awaiting instantiation.

Stray:

All the explanatory power of mathematics derives from those instantiations, not from some independent realm.

Blottisham:

But physics still works, doesn’t it?

Stray:

Physics works because practitioners maintain systems that track consequences reliably. It is their coordinated activity, not abstract numbers, that sustains prediction.

Blottisham (mutters):

I was promised clarity…

Anti-realism is now cleanly installed.

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Scene IV — What Gets Distorted

Anti-realism’s triumph comes at a cost, visible in the distortions:

1. Everything becomes contingent
   Stability and necessity appear optional; their deep resilience is hidden under the label “practice.”

2. The child’s learning becomes perilous
   Counting is no longer a window onto objective truths — it is a fragile ritual of coordination.

3. Mathematical exploration loses transcendence
   Discoveries feel less like revelations and more like reconfigurations within arbitrary systems.

4. The explanatory authority of mathematics is relocated
   Not in entities, not in relations themselves, but in coordinated social and cognitive activity — which some may perceive as “thin” or “anthropocentric.”

5. Certainty is socialised
   What once seemed “inevitable” now seems emergent, dependent on observers or agents maintaining the system.

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Scene V — Blottisham’s Collapse

Blottisham (deflated):

So numbers… are nothing but agreements?

Stray:

Agreements actualised through disciplined interaction.

Blottisham:

I feel like I’ve been robbed of the universe.

Quillibrace:

Not robbed. Re-homed. Reality has shifted from “out there” to “in relation.”

Blottisham:

This is worse than losing a duel.

Stray:

Perhaps. But you now see what actually matters: the holding of the system, not the “existence” of entities.

Blottisham (sighs):

I don’t like it.

Victory is quiet. Anti-realism has won — but it has a strange, unsettling fragility.

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Scene VI — The Quiet Moral

Stray (to Quillibrace, after Blottisham leaves):

Notice the symmetry? Finch’s world distorts practice into ontology. Our world distorts ontology into practice.

Quillibrace:

And in each case, the comfort-seeking observer believes they’ve gained something fundamental.

Stray:

What we actually gain — clarity about constraints and relational necessity — is uncomfortable, not authoritative.

Quillibrace:

Exactly. The dichotomy dies slowly, regardless of which “side” is celebrated.

The clock ticks. No one is counting anymore. And yet everything holds.