On Pynchon's California Novels

[Jerome Park]

Thanks PK.  When I was younger I had the opportunity to attend lectures and
talks by people like Terry, but these talks were rarely filmed, and so I
scribbled notes and got lost or took no notes and tried to keep up but got
lost and from politeness just pretended, as I assume many others did, to
follow along. Now the Youtube and the Pynchon-List, Open Culture, and etc.
...can give, even me, a chance to participate, or at least spectate at my
own rate of return.

Wonder if you wouls care to elaborate on the pigeon analogy? Please.

And, do read the  Hanjo Berressem essay, all, it is not too difficult and
worth the effort.

Cheers,

JP

On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 4:21 PM, Prashant Kumar <
siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:

> The endgame to this line of reasoning is called the Quine-Putnam thesis
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Indispensability_argument_for_realism>,
> or the indispensability argument. There's some maths we know we need, like
> the number concept and say differential equations, the formalism in which
> we express the laws of motion, among other things. These tell you how
> things vary with respect to each other; the textbook example is the rate of
> flow of water out of a hole in a can --- differential equations let you
> express how the water level varies in relation to the flow rate. What the
> equation encodes is a continuously varying kind of causality, which we see
> in the natural world.
>
> That said, I don't think there's any necessary identity between a
> mathematical model of a thing and the thing itself. The can's always
> exceeds the model we could concoct for it, and even adding arbitrary
> complexity, modelling the fluid flow over the random edged geometry of the
> hole's rim, you're gonna be using equations that aren't exactly solvable.
> Nature doesn't have this problem. I think maths is a pidgin we use in
> congress with the universe.
>
> You can take equations born of physics and build intricate abstract
> castles. But things like patterns in the primes
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral>? Are they real, could it be
> otherwise? Terrence Tao <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtsrAw1LR3E> describes
> the primes as the atomic elements of our concept of number, since when you
> break down any multiplication operation the parts you get, 11 x 12 = 132 =
> 11 x 3 x 4 = 11 x 3 x 2 x 2, are prime. You want numbers, and quadratics
> generating creepy diagonals is what you get. Abstract mathematics tells us
> how our systems of quantitative thought are related, so it's almost a great
> corpus full of answers to the ``how could things be otherwise?"-type
> questions. Or as Feynman put it, physics is to maths as sex is to
> masturbation.
>
> On 21 June 2015 at 13:39, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> in some sense it can be both but in one old philosophical formulation the
>> distinction
>> Is expressed like this: Is Math the discovery of truths--reality,
>> --eternally, non-accidently true, NOT like what mankind make build ala
>> technics
>> .....sorta like Platonic Forms or Kant's notions of space and time.
>>
>> Or did we human beings create maths truths contingently,  any or
>> all--even number? In another version of our same universe, it could all be
>> different maths?
>>
>>
>> I will repeat that I think the difference between what we might call
>> natural math--giving no real answer to the above because irrelevant--and
>> the math that began with the concept of " imaginary" numbers in math
>> history plays a key role in the meanings of Against the Day.
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On Jun 21, 2015, at 6:09 AM, Erik Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> "Is math invented by humans, or is it the language of the universe?"
>>
>> Why can't it be both?
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> From: Jerome Park <jeromepark3141 at gmail.com>
>> Sent: ‎6/‎21/‎2015 10:56
>> To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Subject: Re: On Pynchon's California Novels
>>
>> If you've not read Hanjo Berressem’s “Life on the Beach", do give it a
>> go. I love it for a bunch of reasons, most of all for its clarity. It's not
>> easy reading, but the author does an excellent job of breaking down all the
>> complexities.
>>
>> A Projected world? Math.
>>
>> The Great Math Mystery
>>
>> Is math invented by humans, or is it the language of the universe?
>>
>> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/great-math-mystery.html
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2015/04/great-math-mystery/
>>
>>
>>
>> http://www.openculture.com/2013/06/does_math_objectively_exist_or_is_it_a_human_creation.html
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 8:27 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> http://www.berfrois.com/2015/06/on-pynchons-california-novels-sean-carswell/
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>
>>
>>
>
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