TP or NP? Trial ballon goes up

Tue Jul 31 14:31:22 CDT 2012

Relevance? That your linkage (below) of "progress" (love the scare quotes)
with catastrophes and disasters might need some recalibration, as the
Rwandans managed to pull off a holocaust without much technology at all. I'm
sure the talking drums could have filled in for Radio des Mille Collines. 

I'm not quite sure what " every insight seems to be coupled with a score of
disasters by which to identify its full efficacy" actually means, but let me
put it this way:  we're living organisms, and we increase our numbers and
capabilities as much as we can get away with. Like algae, metazoans, ants,
and grasses before us, we do so on a scale that is changing the planet, All
of that would have happened, albeit more slowly, had we never come up with
technology, science, or math (there's a respectable theory that those
Gaia-loving Native Americans hunted most of the New World megafauna to
extinction long before mean old Columbus showed up.) We may or may not show
enough foresight to modify that behavior before we overshoot and crash. 

As you noted before, there's some, uhh, "tension" or "conflict" between your
stated views and your conduct of this discussion via computer and Internet.
not to mention the likelihood that your very existence and continued
survival have been enabled by technological agriculture, scientific
medicine, and cast-iron sanitation pipes forged in dark satanic mills
somewhere. 

Could you provide some pointers to help me distinguish the "dynamism of the
mind" in stitching together such discrepant "ideal" and "pragmatic" selves
from simple incoherence and posturing? 

From: Ian Livingston [mailto:igrlivingston at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 2:23 PM
To: Monte Davis
Cc: pynchon -l
Subject: Re: TP or NP? Trial ballon goes up

Yeeeeessss. Surely. Relevance?

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 8:41 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

I'm sure it was a great comfort to 800,000 Tutsi that they were being killed
with machetes and clubs rather than evil high-tech weaponry. 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Ian Livingston
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 10:47 AM

To: Monte Davis
Cc: pynchon -l
Subject: Re: TP or NP? Trial ballon goes up

Wm James says:

"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."

Which, of course, I answered in advance (to complete my sentence that you
cite above): The results of "progress" based on changing reality into
something else have been, well, catastrophic, to euphemize the result.

My point being that much of what we boast as direct results of al Zebra's
revolutionary contributions in mathematics has brought ruin to the planet on
a level only conceivable as divine wrath in that man's time. There have been
real advances in understanding the physical nature of things and how they
can be synthesized into dynamic agents of fortune, but every insight seems
to be coupled with a score of disasters by which to identify its full
efficacy. At the ideal level, I stand with the Luddites; at the pragmatic
level, I live in the world of my era. That tension is enough to provide
plenty of conflict, and plenty of insight into the dynamism of the mind (or
whatever scientists are calling the subjective perspective these days.)

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 2:36 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

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

-- 
"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

-- 
"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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