more space lost and found

[Joseph Tracy]

Math doesn't rub me the wrong way. I think it is an amazing tool for thought, design, statistical analysis, high speed modeling, digital tools even skillful play. But I do think it is like words  or embedded cultural patterns, in that it is such a powerful descriptive and functional tool that we can easily mistake the the qualities of the tools for the qualities of the world.  I think the idea of science is to let nature test our ideas  and tools so we know what we can rely on. That said, I am no math whiz. I have never advanced above a rudimentary facility with algebra.  I also think there are ways of knowing that are real and testable but that don't seem to use mathematics.I my memory is right, the Dogon tribes seemed to have known things about the dual star system Sirius in the 1800s that were not confirmed by western science  till later.
Intuition is something frequently credited to Einstein. He seemed to have used his intuitive response to the work of other physicists along with imaginative mental pictures as much as his facility with equations to work out his ideas and theories.

To me intuition is that mental faculty which probes into incoming data and sees an explanatory pattern that needs to be considered and perhaps tested.  But there is another kind too, that part of us that feels deception and falsehood, no matter how skillfully masked.   


On Feb 8, 2012, at 5:21 PM, Richard Fiero wrote:

> If I had a point, it was that our intuition fails to identify much of anything other than whether it is day or night, hot or cold, and where the bathroom is.
> We can have no expectation to imagine other dimensions. Joseph however was saying something a little different. Possibly that math rubs him the wrong way. We have no reasonable expectation that mathematics describes anything about reality. There is no positive proof of that other than it seems to work. We do long division but that is not math. It's just a set of steps that appear to give a good enough answer. I fail to understand why one might read P who puts a lot of period mathematics into his books: M&D, GR and AtD. I'm also very curious about Maxwell's Demon. I see the demon at work in every free marketer's notion of an invisible hand and in the military funding of operations research.

I too am curious about Maxwell's Demon. I get the idea when I read it but it seems too speculative to be useful so there is something I'm not getting. Also I don't find it inherently memorable so I  have to go back to read to even think about it. But maybe someone can bring greater clarity through the Lot 49 use.