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Do you find some mathematical activities useless?
04-07-2018, 11:08 AM (This post was last modified: 04-07-2018 11:15 AM by pier4r.)
Post: #43
RE: Do you find some mathematical activities useless?
(04-07-2018 09:18 AM)Gerald H Wrote:  I presume you adhere to the group that claims Michelangelo discovered David in a stone, the figure was there all the time?

Well why not? (Interesting that you created a similar example like Aristotle. The "sculpture in power" of a piece of stone)
Again, mine is one of the possible perspectives. I am not claiming that this should be THE perspective. It is my current perspective of choice as it appears quite solid to me.

One could argue like Berkeley and say "look, neither you nor my body exist. it is all a dream of mine". That is another perspective again.

Someone else can say "nah, I believe everything is chaotic" and so on.

Slide Rule posted a list of the most common ones.

Quote:You belittle human creativity, allocating creativity to a different realm of existence.
Not at all. It is you seeing my approach as belittling.

To make an analogy for me some are like playing a very strong game of chess. Can you enumerate all the possible chess games under X moves? Sure (well, with enough time and resources, plenty of them. Optimized sysRPL programs help since the search space is huge)
Nonetheless to find/discover the proper moves in reasonable time you need plenty of what we call creativity.

Some moves may require enormous amount of creativity that only few people with very particular conditions can achieve each hundreds of years.

But this doesn't change the fact that those moves are there waiting to be discovered, it is not that one creates them out of thin air. They are legal moves allowed by the game.

Same with reality. Some entity (god, the universe, whoever you want it is not the main matter here) may - I don't want to claim the truth. This is a possible idea of the many ideas that can exists on the subject - set the rules. And we live according to them.

The David was one of the possible sculptures that could have resulted by the work of Michelangelo. He was great enough to take a path that lead to the David as we know it.

Could I have worked on the same block of stone? Sure. Could I have taken the same decisions of Michelangelo that lead to the David? Not even if I try 1 billion times. Maybe not even if I try forever, as I can end up exploring only a certain type of combinations missing out the important ones.

There is a short story of Borges. The immortal. He gives an interesting idea that living forever is boring, as living forver one could achieve everything. I reflected about it and I am mostly agreeing with him. But it is also true that only having one type of infinite resource (time) doesn't help that much. For example if one can keep in mind only a certain amount of concepts one may be unable to find revolutionary concepts on his own, since he will be limited by his abilities even if he can try over and over.

(04-07-2018 10:42 AM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  (" damit sie mit ihrem Hurenlohn ihre weise Mutter unterstützen kann.").
Interesting perspective.

Wikis are great, Contribute :)
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RE: Do you find some mathematical activities useless? - pier4r - 04-07-2018 11:08 AM



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