TP or NP? Trial ballon goes up

[Monte Davis]

On "efforts to crystallize experience" [which in the case of algebra I'd
call abstracting or generalizing]. I've probably posted this Dewey/James
parlay from Experience and Nature before:

---

Genuine science is impossible as long as the object esteemed for its own
intrinsic qualities is taken as the object of knowledge. Its completeness,
its immanent meaning, defeats its use as indicating and implying.

   Said William James [Principles of Psychology, II, 605-606] , "Many were
the ideal prototypes of rational order:

teleological and esthetic ties between things... as well as logical and
mathematical relations. The most promising of these things at first were of
course the richer ones, the more sentimental ones. The baldest and least

promising were mathematical ones; but the history of the latter's
application is a history of steadily advancing successes, while that of the
sentimentally richer ones is of relative sterility and failure. Take those

aspects of phenomena which interest you as a human being most... and barren
are all your results. Call the things of nature as much as you like by
sentimental moral and esthetic names, no natural consequences follow from

the naming... But when you give the things mathematical and mechanical names
and call them so many solids in just such positions, describing just such
paths with just such velocities, all is changed... Your 'things' realize the

consequences of the names by which you classed them." 

 

Of course it demands both common sense and tact to recognize what you're
giving up in the abstraction process; the development of a science typically
involves so much analysis - breaking complex phenomena down to manageable
pieces - that you can forget the goal is to reassemble them into a richer
understanding of what interested you as a human being in the first place.

 

The old-timers here will recall that I've ranted on this before: Pynchon's
take on technology, science, and occasionally math is so much more
knowledgeable and interesting than a cheapjack-Romantic "unweaving the
rainbow," "we murder to dissect" blah blah blah.. 

 

From: Ian Livingston [mailto:igrlivingston at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2012 4:49 PM
To: Monte Davis
Cc: pynchon -l
Subject: Re: TP or NP? Trial ballon goes up

 

True, I admit it. And there are some mathematicians who write very well. So,
by way of atonement, I offer this old favorite:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re3-xo9bRc8

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 12:12 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
wrote:

Ian Livingston sez:

Algebra just makes no sense. I stand with Laurie Anderson on the principle
that x=x, not y base 8 times z to the minus fourth power. Efforts to
crystallize experience, which is fluid and non-repeating, are purely
mystical and have little real meaning. The results of "progress" based on
changing reality into something else have been, well, catastrophic, to
euphemize the result.

 

This sounds like engineers I've heard fuming about their frustrations in
English class:  "What was all that 'symbolism' crap about? Why can't writers
just say what they MEAN instead of going on about albatrosses and  white
elephants?"





 

-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds
the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason
is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for
the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the
streets." -- Will Durant

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