Why is it easy for man to grasp eternal ideas pertaining to the domain of math (the truth of which is can be demonstrated by its successful application in the natural sciences), but quite hard when those ideas are reflected through the natural world itself? Is it because mathematical ideas are naked, bare from any imperfect material representation?
>>24941077It seems to me that plenty of wise men have grasped the essence of natural things quite well. These are always necessarily more complex though, since they both include and exceed mathematics.Now, you might reply that there is great disagreement about this but I would simply respond that there is today great disagreement about mathematics, with many smart people who have studied for many years claiming it is naught but a system of more or less arbitrary "games" selected for by "usefulness" and 'social pressures." The same sorts of sophistries leveled against natures have all come around to be leveled against mathematics and logic eventually. So we either accept some notion of virtue and wisdom, and dismiss the sophists as fools, or else we join the sophists and reason becomes about "games" and power relations, all the way down, and man (and his desire) is the measure of all things.
>>24941077maths isn't real and was originally invented so niggers could count trade seashells for coconuts. at best you could say mathematics has infested so many other fields where it doesn't apply and other people, in an unconscious sense, that unconscious mathematical patterns and theories have been inserted into disciplines where they don't belong
>>24941077>the truth of which is can be demonstrated by its successful application in the natural sciencesThat's not how math works. >but quite hard when those ideas are reflected through the natural world itself?You phrased that really poorly and I have no idea what you wanted to ask. If you are wondering why you can't prove mathematical ideas through observing natural world, then the simple answer is that natural world doesn't contain infinity (and even if we did we couldn't observe it in finite time). If you are wondering about why people are surprised by unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences, then honestly - it beats me, I think it makes perfect sense that mathematics, which is a study of abstractions through which we think about objects, would occasionally come up in natural sciences which also include us thinking about objects through abstractions. I honestly have no idea why some mathematicians are so dumbfounded by the fact that their study of abstractions (which were originally based on real world - numbers, shapes) occasionally loops back to real world. My best guess is that to get good at modern mathematics you basically have to spend years studying a very particular and abstract subfield in a vacuum and you don't have time to stop, look around and think about philosophical underpinnings or possible real world applications of what you are doing.
>>24941077>surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circleSomeone refute this
>>24941077You've never met a size queen and it shows.
>>24941077Nietzsche made a passing remark about the natural world showing imperfections from the get-go. Now it can be argued there was more of a sense of ordered perfection from those such as Leibniz but one was mathematician, the other worked in the domain of language.
>>24941077Natural science explains the world by simplifying and abstracting it. Math is about as abstract as abstractions get, and contains just the barest parts used to describe complicated things.But these are still just abstractions. Math does not exist in reality, it exists in your head. A photon doesn’t know how fast to go. The Earth doesn’t consult a physics textbook for equations before or orbiting the sun. A rock doesn’t know what 2+2 is. They simply do what they do because they are what they are.
>>24941099The philosophy about the foundations of mathenatics is quite independent from the philosophy of general science. Did you read someone who talks about these "games" in the philosophy of physics or biology?
>>24941099>man (and his desire) is the measure of all thingsThis is so obviously true that I don’t know how the fuck anyone could believe otherwise
>>24941173>My best guess is that to get good at modern mathematics you basically have to spend years studying a very particular and abstract subfield in a vacuum and you don't have time to stop, look around and think about philosophical underpinnings or possible real world applications of what you are doing.You are talking about some professional, pure mathematicians who are short of time, but there are plenty of applied mathematicians concerned primarily wity real world applications and plenty of non professionals studying mathematics in their free time that also spend time on the philosophical underpinnings. Moreover, there are quite a lot of philosophers of mathematics, for example the series Cambridge Elements in the Philosophy of Mathematics, which is being published frequently. If anyone would like to learn more, my suggestion is to start here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/
>>24941479Apart from terrorism and luddism, there arent that many worthwhile endeavors for someone like Teddy. This is like asking a librarian if burning books is a worthwhile endeavor
Mathematics is just the archetypal expression of the nature of relatedness as such. Of course it can be used to model the natural sciences, but how useful that model is depends on what the person wants to represent with it. It only does well with highly simple equations like physics. When you get highly complex models with lots of variables like in climatology the model is extremely unreliable.
The real question is why can Nature be explained through mathematics? Why is gravity not random at every point, following a different equation every 5 or 6 kilometers? Why is the heat equation constant and why does light spread uniformly instead of zigzagging randomly in a direction?
>>24941527Then you're under demonic influence.
>>24941099>guy who just read plato for the first time
>>24941682The speed of light has dropped since its first definition.
>>24941077>Why is it easy for man to grasp eternal ideas pertaining to the domain of mathIt's not. You (and most others) spent about 10 years studying math for hours every week. And what does an average person have to show for it? Addition, multiplication, fractions and some 2D geometry. The lucky ones remember quadratic formula processes and some very basic trigonometry, but if you ask them what a discriminant actually is, they'll change the subject. If there are real eternal ideas in math, most people understand close to none of them.>Is it because mathematical ideas are naked, bareThey aren't bare, they're just formalized. "As above, so below" is just as bare and arguably just as timeless, but since we spent years trying to learn the formalization that math uses, we are biased to consider it cleaner.>>24941682>The real question is why can Nature be explained through mathematics?It can't. But we designed it to come close.
>>24942082>And what does an average person have to show for it? Addition, multiplication, fractions and some 2D geometry.This is very useful though. Before public education average people struggled with large numbers. I don't mean that they had difficulty doing math with them, I mean that they had a hard time counting in the hundreds. They would use tallying techniques to do so instead. Multiplication and division were actual skills.It's actually mind-blowing to think that the typical human in the past couldn't read or even do what we consider basic math, yet today everyone can.
>>24942136It's super useful and very impressive! But if we're discussing "grasping eternal ideas", I'm not sure a whole lot of that has happened... An average joe uses AI without actually understanding it profoundly and I think the same goes for math.
>>24941432Imagine shooting arrows at a point. Some will land above, some bellow, some to the left, and some to the right. However every arrow will be related in some way to the distance from that point, so while they won't be the same distance they will be related to a circle, which is itself defined as every point a certain distance from a center point.Now imagine that this analogy doesn't matter because reality is completely outside of your puny gnomic comprehension and bound by axioms and laws that can only be grasped by contemplation of the pure forms and a burning away of the non-essential. Imagine a world where 'numbers' and 'ratios' don't exist, or barely make of an infinitesimally small part of total space on a line. Imagine vector matrices capable of 'copying' sentience by simply running enough random iterations. Imagine you are a tiny bug and your tiny bug antennas are incapable of even sensing the world around you as it really is, so you scurry about in the dark looking for a grasshopper or grain of rice to bring back your bug-lair perfectly unaware of the awe-inspiring enormity that exists around you.>>24942067True, but without fines to enforce it I doubt it will make much of a difference.>>24942136You should see mathematicians trying to multiply large numbers.
