[ExI] Ramanujan

[Lee Corbin]

Bryan writes

>> Well, there are many, many people who are totally into math,
>> philosophy, logic, reason and number, but who abhor anything
>> even remotely connected with longevity research, cryonics,
>> expanding human capabilities, and---hold your breath---
>> technology (!).  And I don't think that those things are as
>> intertwined as you do. Lots of math fiends, for example,
>> totally disdain anything philosophical.
> 
> Technology, when broken down to its elemental forms, can mean anything 
> from the integral symbol to the device that brings back the (nearly) 
> dead. Is the mathematician not an inventer of technologies, just as the 
> longevitist, the cryonicist, the programmer or logician?

It seems to me that you are using some words very non-standardly.
Pure math, for example, is never considered technology. You should
not use "technology" to

> mean anything from the integral symbol to the device that brings
> back the (nearly) dead.

on pain of simply being misunderstood by practically everybody.

> If they [some people] want to refute the well-studied connections
> between philosophy and mathematics, and computation

The people who love math and despise philosophical activity are
hardly interested in *refuting* any such thing. That would be philosophy,
after all.  And as a subject, philsophy is so broad, that many philosophers
simply are totally uninterested in math or technology (beyond, as you say,
that it serves them well enough to keep the electricity flowing so that
they can read). 

> ...and they may despise it, yes, but how does that make it 
> any less true or false whether they give their support or not?

I agree.  Relationships and truth, of course, do not depend on
anyone's support, recognition, or agreement.

>> Now exactly how they can be like this beats me, but that's
> 
> Oh, are you claiming that since they reject technologies, they are not 
> transhumanist? Since they have such a specialized niche that they cut 
> themselves off?

Yes, and yes.

> Arguably, the transhumanist problem space can be mapped 
> to other niches and environments in ideaspace, and therefore there are 
> other representations of transhumanists than simply those who verbally 
> reject technology (no matter how much they like their own biological 
> technology, *ahem* self-replication?).

I suppose that anything can be mapped to anything. The play 
Hamlet can probably be mapped to fourier analysis in one
way or another. And I would not be completely shocked if
someone who was an expert on Hamlet and also really, really
loved fourier analysis spoke of connections he saw. But
that would be merely a reflection of how his own brain
mapped things.  In high school I loved math and chess,
and I swear, I used the very same neurons for both. I
simply could not understand how some people could be
very good in one, and be terrible, try as they might, in
the other.  But for me to have said that chess is very
mathematical would have been a mistake.

>> He was totally amazing, all right, but only in the narrow area
>> of pure math.  I expect that if he'd been born in the West,
>> or in India now, he would have turned into a much more
>> conventional---but still tremendously, tremendously good
>> --- regular mathematician.  I think that Hardy thought so too.
> 
> I am not saying that he would have otherwise transcended via 
> technological replacement of his body or anything like that, I know I 
> can't make that argument nor do I want to. But instead I am suggesting 
> that there is some commonality in the problem space that he worked in, 
> and it is that which makes him somewhat transhumanist.

The commonality you see between Ramanujan's math on the
one hand, and transhumanist concerns and investigations on 
the other, really, I contend, just reflect the way *you* think.
There is no real commonality. Except maybe the very, very
common human urges to understand and to create, which
typify intelligent people everywhere (and even some not
so intelligent ones).

Lee