Did it ever occur to you that the guy, or "guru", might have a dream too?
Anyway, it's a good essay and I like it, but...although not a guru, my business is also to do my thing, to dance my dance. If you profit from it, fine; if you don't, you might not notice it!
So don't critisize me. For whatever I'm doing, I need to do.
Anyway, it's a good essay and I like it, but...although not a guru, my business is also to do my thing, to dance my dance. If you profit from it, fine; if you don't, you might not notice it!
So don't critisize me. For whatever I'm doing, I need to do.
Konnichiwa,
We all have.
Actually, everyone is a Guru, a God, you name it, at least potentially. The indian marriage vows include the acceptance of ones partner as "Highest Guru"....
Sayonara
Peter Daniel said:
We all have.
Peter Daniel said:
Actually, everyone is a Guru, a God, you name it, at least potentially. The indian marriage vows include the acceptance of ones partner as "Highest Guru"....
Sayonara
An interesting question that is a lot harder to address than is immediately apparent. A general treatment of the problems surrounding proofs of such statements as 1+1 = 2 can be found in "A Metaphysics of Elementary Mathematics" by Jeffery Sicha. The first quarter of the book is a good way to get one's awareness of conflicts among mathematical philosophies raised. I've read it, sailing over it's surface, gazing into but not plumbing it's depths. Even at that level it's a worthy read.
BTW shouldn't this thread be in the "Off Topic" forum?
eStatic
BTW shouldn't this thread be in the "Off Topic" forum?
eStatic
Konnichiwa,
How can you possibly be "Off Topic" in "Everything Else".... ?
I mean even "Life, the Universe and the Rest" are only scratching the surface of "Everything Else"!
Sayonara
eStatic said:
How can you possibly be "Off Topic" in "Everything Else".... ?
I mean even "Life, the Universe and the Rest" are only scratching the surface of "Everything Else"!
Sayonara
At least in my household I could be regarded as "guru" on certain days😉Kuei Yang Wang said:
eStatic said:
Technically, it should, as it does not deal directly with audio or video. However it seems interesting enough to keep it in the open. Unless of course, people start complaining.
Kuei Yang Wang said:
that one, and Chinese fortune cookies and General Chao's Chicken belong to a category of things about a culture that are only known to those outside of that culture.
I always wondered how the proliferation of internet might have helped the spread of those kinds of "things".
eStatic said:
Don't think so. AFAIK the Everything Else forum is intended
for everything else not suitable in the other audio forums.
As I remember, the Off Topic forum, was created after that
quite heated thread on the Iraq war, and is intended mainly
for more controversial topics like politics and the off-topic threads
are not shown in the list of recent threads, you have to go
there explicitly to see what is posted.
Edit: Maybe I am wrong here since Peter is a moderator and
seems to have a slightly different view.
It all depends on the approach of the mods. Technically, this is an Audio/Video board and everything that is talked about here should be related somehow to that.
If someone wants to discuss baybees or resonances in the platforms or wires, this should be done in everything else forum as there are no special section for tweakes.
Now, it's been commonly approved that people can discuss everything they feel like in everything else section, but if some topics become less desirable, offensive, or not suitable to majority of members, they are being moved to OffTopic section. Some people, who are more carefull in choosing the discussion platform, start their own threads in OffTopic section right from the beginning. The only disadvantage of that is that the threads are not visible on a main Forum's page. So if you want more exposure to your subject, you should use Everything Else section and it's up to mods to decide if it should be there or not.
At least this is how I understand that.
If someone wants to discuss baybees or resonances in the platforms or wires, this should be done in everything else forum as there are no special section for tweakes.
Now, it's been commonly approved that people can discuss everything they feel like in everything else section, but if some topics become less desirable, offensive, or not suitable to majority of members, they are being moved to OffTopic section. Some people, who are more carefull in choosing the discussion platform, start their own threads in OffTopic section right from the beginning. The only disadvantage of that is that the threads are not visible on a main Forum's page. So if you want more exposure to your subject, you should use Everything Else section and it's up to mods to decide if it should be there or not.
At least this is how I understand that.
Peter,
yes I suppose it is hard to draw the bordelines even for you
mods. Many topics have no obviously right forum to post in,
so one has to try figuring out the most appropriate/least
inappropriate one to post in. Maybe there should be two
everything else forums, one for audio and one for non-audio
and keep the off-topic for the more controversial political and
similar discussions?
Anyway, as I said, I started this thread only because the other
one was closed down and millwoods account was set up not
to receive emails, so I had to use a forum that made the thread
visible.
yes I suppose it is hard to draw the bordelines even for you
mods. Many topics have no obviously right forum to post in,
so one has to try figuring out the most appropriate/least
inappropriate one to post in. Maybe there should be two
everything else forums, one for audio and one for non-audio
and keep the off-topic for the more controversial political and
similar discussions?
Anyway, as I said, I started this thread only because the other
one was closed down and millwoods account was set up not
to receive emails, so I had to use a forum that made the thread
visible.
It is fine and it's actually quite an interesting thread.
If it was started in "Off Topic", it might not turn out this way😉
If it was started in "Off Topic", it might not turn out this way😉
OK. So.... uh getting back to 1+1, are y'all platonists or nominalists. And don't everbody speak at the same time neither. 😉
eStatic
eStatic
eStatic said:
Specifically about mathematical platonism, I have this to say: most of the math professors I had were mathematical platonists. The argument tends to go something like: since our physical world corresponds to only a subset of mathematics (the subset necessary to describe all of physics), yet we have mental access to much more than that, then the rest of mathematics must correspond to some platonic world of absolute mathematical truths. It's almost like an excuse for studying something that probably has nothing to do with reality.
Some, like physicist and astronomer Tegmark have gone as far as saying that surely every possible (consistent) mathematical system must have a corresponding physical universe.
Of course all of this is completely unnecessary, as all of mathematics our minds have access to actually has a fairly obvious and trivial correspondence to our physical universe: our minds are the result of actions of our brains, which are parts of the physical universe and behave according to the laws of physics; thus the correspondence can be establised by looking at any mathematical thoughts and the physical foundations of their neural correlates.
Prune said:
That seems to be reductionism. I've not seen that applied systematically to mathematical philosophy (which I say only to reveal the extent of my ignorance). I'd be glad for sources.
BTW I am a reductionist determinist and I still find the correspondence between reality and math kinda "spooky" at times. Does it ever bother (make uneasy) other reductionist types out there?
eStatic
eStatic said:
That mathematics is useful for cacluating things about the real
world is a belief, just as the models of the real world are.
however, so far, at least standard calculus has stood the test
of times very well and has an impressive predictive power when
used together with the usual physical models.
I don't know what about math that bothers you. Maybe
constructive mathematics is for you? The constructivists are
bothered by things like infinity, claiming that "A or B" is true
without being able to tell which of them is true etc. They have
proven almost all of the theorems of standard calculus based
on their set of axioms and definitions, which for instance does
not include true real numbers in the way we know them.
Prune, thanks, a nice description of platonism there.
That's soooo weird. It has definite though Caliban appeal.
The word "belief" in the above quote is possibly problimatic to me. Could you elaborate on what you want that token to convey. Perhaps you could relate it to how you would use the word axiom?
No, it's not the math; it's how well it fits reality. Almost too well? Maybe it's just a personal problem?
eStatic
Prune said:
That's soooo weird. It has definite though Caliban appeal.
Christer said:
The word "belief" in the above quote is possibly problimatic to me. Could you elaborate on what you want that token to convey. Perhaps you could relate it to how you would use the word axiom?
Christer said:
No, it's not the math; it's how well it fits reality. Almost too well? Maybe it's just a personal problem?
eStatic
eStatic said:
This is not a problem for a reductionist. The main argument agains reductionism is multiple relizability; however, there have been numerous attacks on that and it is not a settled issue (and in any case, consensus scientific truth does not make). Indeed, many scientists (unlike most philosophers) are reductionists, such as this guy. To paraphrase Penrose, I wear my scientist's hat more often than my philosopher's hat.
Some interesting discussion on multiple realizations can be found for example here.
eStatic said:
I used "belief" in a loose sense, but what I mean is that
mathematics is just an axiomatic system and has nothing
per se to do with the real world. On the other hand, standard
calculus has developed as a result of attempting to model
the real world togther with certain physical models, and this
seems to work well for almost any engineering task etc. So
I guess this may perhaps be an answer to your second
questions. although calculus is a theoretical and axiomatic
system, it has been deliberately developed for the task of
modelling the real world. Howver, it is not so much the math
that fits the real world, I would say, but rahter the physical
models, but they have been tested and refined over a long
time. Maybe it it would be possible to come up with some
completely different way to model the world which require
a different kind of mathematics, but that would have a similar
predictive power. In that case our standard mathematics would
not fit well at all.
I use "axiom" in the logical sense, an assumption which is
treated as a truth within the system and which is not based
on/derived from any other assumptions. (Well, often we don't
require axioms to be strictly non-overlapping or independent,
but truly redundant axioms are usually omitted.)
Prune, thanks again, the MRT paper is very interesting to me. It will take a while for a layperson such as myself to digest this.
And Hi Christer, please be aware that I am shooting from an aging hip here.
I confess that it has been a long time since I examined the details of the scientific method. But it seems to me that the assertion "...mathematics is useful for cacluating things about the real world..." is a tested and proven theory within the framework of science regardless of the fact that mathematics can and often does exist for its own sweet self. Please correct me if I'm wrong, or have missed the point here.
As a counter example consider Hilbert Space. It was, if I recall correctly, developed as a purely abstract/aesthetic endeavor and thought to have no correlation to reality. Since the rise of quantum mechanics it has been shown to be formally equivalent to the Heisenberg uncertainty matrices and the Schrodinger wave equation. I also have the impression that it has become the formalism of choice for practitioners of QM. And, if true, all this is surely passing strange.
Yes, one errs big-time when one takes the map for the territory.
Questioning my thoughts regarding physical models: Is it not true that once one moves away from the realm where Newtonian mechanics applies, that is, into the realm of un-intuitive physics, models of existence are primarily or entirely mathematical? I.E. many of the crucial concepts require, in order to be persuasive and complete, mathematical expressions consistent with their defining empirical data? Is there not an essential level of abstraction in such physics where the math IS the physical model?
eStatic
And Hi Christer, please be aware that I am shooting from an aging hip here.
Christer said:
I confess that it has been a long time since I examined the details of the scientific method. But it seems to me that the assertion "...mathematics is useful for cacluating things about the real world..." is a tested and proven theory within the framework of science regardless of the fact that mathematics can and often does exist for its own sweet self. Please correct me if I'm wrong, or have missed the point here.
Christer said:
As a counter example consider Hilbert Space. It was, if I recall correctly, developed as a purely abstract/aesthetic endeavor and thought to have no correlation to reality. Since the rise of quantum mechanics it has been shown to be formally equivalent to the Heisenberg uncertainty matrices and the Schrodinger wave equation. I also have the impression that it has become the formalism of choice for practitioners of QM. And, if true, all this is surely passing strange.
Christer said:
Yes, one errs big-time when one takes the map for the territory.
Questioning my thoughts regarding physical models: Is it not true that once one moves away from the realm where Newtonian mechanics applies, that is, into the realm of un-intuitive physics, models of existence are primarily or entirely mathematical? I.E. many of the crucial concepts require, in order to be persuasive and complete, mathematical expressions consistent with their defining empirical data? Is there not an essential level of abstraction in such physics where the math IS the physical model?
eStatic
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