>>4
Mathematical objects are just things defined by abstract rules, they always `existed' and will always `exist', you're merely discovering what happens if you take some rules (axioms) and try to go with them and see the resulting true statements in the system (theorems).
Will natural numbers suddenly stop existing if you forget how to count? What about if everyone in the world does? Just because you forgot how a system acts within a set of rules doesn't mean that the next time you think of that arbitrary set of rules you'll get different results.
A particular instance/implementation of a mathematical structure into a physical system capable of computation (which can only implement a restricted class of such mathematical structures) is not equivalent to the structure itself. Destroying the physical implementation that you created doesn't mean that the axioms would lead to different theorems next time you try to look at them.
Now assume the universe (multiverse or whatever you wish) is such a consistent mathematical structure, maybe it's a simple computable object, or maybe it's some weird thing allowing computation with infinities (this (real numbers or other infinite objects) would annoy me a bit as it would imply that each quanta of time it would compute an infinity of simpler calculations, but I'll leave my personal predictions out of this). If you could look at this presumably simple object defined by some simple axioms and within it you could find the information defining you right this moment. If you could put time t=current time (along with whatever other parameters would be required) into this equation and you had a way of calculating it (highly unlikely as you'd probably need more information than this universe can hold), you could see the instance of yourself sitting on the computer right now and posting on
/prog/.
Read this
http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646 to understand my viewpoint much better than I can make it in a post on
/prog/