TP or NP? Trial balloon goes up

[Prashant Kumar]

I still don't agree that the math in AtD is satire. I just don't see it.

Math is world-building, just of a very arcane kind. Mathematical
relationships, abstraction, it's all part of the world. One of the most
interesting developments in my field has been the discovery of an emergent
excitation (a kind-of-particle) that obeys laws from category theory,
arguably one of the most abstract (and seemingly unphysical) subfields of
higher math.

Wigner was right.

Prash

On 31 July 2012 08:47, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I like the Dewey/James parlay....actually read (some) of this book once
> upon a different past....but have noactive memory of this..
> I think it wonderful---and perhaps another one of those buried
> influences---that the phrase is "to crystallize experience" when we
> think of some meanings of the word 'crystal' in TRPs work....
>
> I, too, think TRPs take on just about everything, including math in AtD,
> is never cheapjack-Romantic--in fact
> he scores a certain Romanticness in History in AtD....I think AtD is
> massively knowledgeable and interesting
> in the ways he uses--and makes fun of, mostly---math. Like Swift in
> Lilliput--or with the learned men. "I know your husband is a genius, m'am,
> but he is
> an idiotic one"---[Gulliver, from memory so..]
> As with "perverted' sexual relationships in GR, the perversions of math
> are rife in AtD.  From imaginary numbers on in AtD, mathematics is another
> trope
> about our self-alienating distance from the physical world, certain values
> to live by, other human relationships' meanings and more, I submit.
>
> I know no one else is rereading at the moment but from memory or when you
> do, make the case for higher-level math in ATD that is
> not part of the ridicule?  I can't see it.
>
> It is no accident, as Ian observed and as the verbal footfall of a
> finished argument, that P has math given up by main characters in
> order to live...Yashmeen so clearly it is almost heavy-handed, imho, yet
> in his way, TRP encodes tons of nuance (as usual) entertaining us
> with his theme.....
>
> Modernism has as a theme, the abstraction from life.  We can name writers.
> No one else presents it like TRP that I have read.
> No One.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>   *From:* Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
> *To:* 'Ian Livingston' <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
> *Cc:* 'pynchon -l' <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> *Sent:* Monday, July 30, 2012 5:36 PM
> *Subject:* RE: TP or NP? Trial ballon goes up
>
> 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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