>So in your view, anything that is a composite of two or more primitives is by definition "made up".
Yes. If we start calling higher order configurations "real" then we have to contend with all of the potentially imaginable subdivisions of the noumenon and either grant them all realness or find some arbitrary criteria upon which to deny some of those subdivisions the property of realness. If we grant that an insect is a real thing then I get to make up a new word, say, "kokirombo," that describes the front two-thirds of a grasshopper combined with the left half of a ladybug, some air, a pinch of grass, and the rear bumper of a 1998 Ford Taurus. You can come up with some arbitrary standard by which your gerrymandering of reality is allowed and mine is not, but there isn't anything that makes your standard more valid than mine. In practice we typically use usefulness as our standard for categorizing things, but dogmatically claiming this as the criteria for realness leads to absurd positions.
>Therefore, given a standard definition of natural numbers [1], any number except zero is made up?
I still haven't necessarily accepted zero as not being made up, but I think your Succ function implicitly depends on one being defined as well.
>They are actually, within the domain for which they are valid.
Strongly disagree. If you believe in quantum mechanics then you believe that things move probabilistically. I'm obviously arguing that every scale except the smallest is made up, but even if we hypothetically accepted the validity of larger scales then we would have to admit that there is an ever-so-vanishingly-small chance that any given cannonball will spontaneously jump three meters to the left thus deviating from it's Newtonian trajectory. The fact that you could launch cannonballs from now until the heat death of the universe without seeing this effect at a scale you would typically notice is inconsequential, Newton's equations are still merely a useful approximation and they are not isomorphic to the behavior of the noumenon.
Yes. If we start calling higher order configurations "real" then we have to contend with all of the potentially imaginable subdivisions of the noumenon and either grant them all realness or find some arbitrary criteria upon which to deny some of those subdivisions the property of realness. If we grant that an insect is a real thing then I get to make up a new word, say, "kokirombo," that describes the front two-thirds of a grasshopper combined with the left half of a ladybug, some air, a pinch of grass, and the rear bumper of a 1998 Ford Taurus. You can come up with some arbitrary standard by which your gerrymandering of reality is allowed and mine is not, but there isn't anything that makes your standard more valid than mine. In practice we typically use usefulness as our standard for categorizing things, but dogmatically claiming this as the criteria for realness leads to absurd positions.
>Therefore, given a standard definition of natural numbers [1], any number except zero is made up?
I still haven't necessarily accepted zero as not being made up, but I think your Succ function implicitly depends on one being defined as well.
>They are actually, within the domain for which they are valid.
Strongly disagree. If you believe in quantum mechanics then you believe that things move probabilistically. I'm obviously arguing that every scale except the smallest is made up, but even if we hypothetically accepted the validity of larger scales then we would have to admit that there is an ever-so-vanishingly-small chance that any given cannonball will spontaneously jump three meters to the left thus deviating from it's Newtonian trajectory. The fact that you could launch cannonballs from now until the heat death of the universe without seeing this effect at a scale you would typically notice is inconsequential, Newton's equations are still merely a useful approximation and they are not isomorphic to the behavior of the noumenon.