Contrary to what SteveLandsburg says in his reply, I think you are exactly right. And this is how our disagreement originally started, by me explaining why he's wrong about complexity.

Scientists use math to compress our description of the universe. It wouldn't make much sense to use something infinitely complex for data compression!

So, to the extent he's talking about math or arithmetic in a way that does have such complexity, he's talking about something that isn't particularly relevant to our universe.