This essay made me think a lot of Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"
Why I Like Math [pdf]
31–33 of 33 posts
Re: Why I Like Math [pdf]
#32Conway's Game of Life on a universal scale. Entertainment for Olympus, or a simulation to find an answer / stave off an inevitability?
The laws of physics and mathematics as the author sees them provide the substrate that seems to imply hard determinism; chaos theoreticians revel as the chaos of the now is reduced to causal determinism predicated on initial conditions and the base laws of the system, all interconnected.
But why quantum uncertainty? Why does observed light exhibit particle behavior while unobserved light exhibits wave behavior? Why does observation collapse the waveform? Are the quantum and classical reconcilable into a theory of everything? Einstein would hope so, but who knows what's really going on. In the end, it seems human knowledge is still, ultimately limited, with a vague sense of having experienced an indescribable "oneness" as the big kahuna of the panaceas.
What if it were fractal? What if there was no "end" but just an infinite regression with deeper and deeper questions with ever-escaping answers? An infinite game, consuming disorder, systematizing into local order - life's eternal war waged against entropy, helplessness, meaninglessness until ending and recurring. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing; pure comedy, where the only thing that seems to make us feel alive is the struggle to survive - whether through religion, philosophy, or mathematics. Still makes for some great art along the way; life as a beauty-generator in the void. /rant
Re: Why I Like Math [pdf]
#33". . . these Magic-Eye moments single-handedly define faith for me."
A Unix fortune today gave me this great quote by German philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich:
"Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith."
The broader paragraph, on what kinds of certitude we seek in life and the judgments we must make upon them, is striking:
"The affirmation that Jesus is the Christ is an act of faith and consequently of daring courage. It is not an arbitrary leap into darkness but a decision in which elements of immediate participation and therefore certitude are mixed with elements of strangeness and therefore incertitude and doubt. But doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. Therefore, there is no faith without risk. The risk of faith is that it could affirm a wrong symbol of ultimate concern, a symbol which does not really express ultimacy (as, e.g., Dionysus or one’s nation). But this risk lies in quite a different dimension from the risk of accepting uncertain historical facts. It is wrong, therefore, to consider the risk concerning uncertain historical facts as part of the risk of faith. The risk of faith is existential; it concerns the totaliy of our being, while the risk of historical judgments is theoretical and open to permanent scientific correction. Here are two different dimensions which should never be confused. A wrong faith can destroy the meaning of one’s life; a wrong historical judgment cannot. It is misleading, therefore, to use the word 'risk' for both dimensions in the same sense."
Matt Stone's essay resonates here I think . . . mathematics goes beyond historical judgments and gets to existential concerns too.