Originally Posted by
Xei
Firstly, you can assign some kind of special ontological status to the number: you may be so impressed by the abstraction that you say that the number 3 is 'real'. Whether this is correct naturally depends on what you define 'real' to mean; if you mean a specific, solid entity, then clearly the number 3 is not real, and neither is the number i, for that matter. If, however, you mean an abstraction that behaves in a consistent manner, then the number 3 is real, and so is the number i.