[ExI] Ramanujan

[Bryan Bishop]

On Saturday 01 March 2008, Lee Corbin wrote:
> > 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.

Wikipedia:
> Technology is a broad concept that deals with a species' usage and
> knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects a species' ability 
> to control and adapt to its environment.

> > 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.

Chess *is* very mathematical. Certainly you are aware of the problem 
solving mathematics for chess, but I am talking about the basis of 
chess itself. It is a graph, it is a topology in particular, one where 
you can describe, what, 10^50 possible state spaces, with 
various 'moves' or translations from one state to another, making it 
essentially an operator algebra of one kind or another (ooh, maybe a 
cellular automata can be used to model it). Not necessarily a Lie 
group, but that's getting close. What would the binary operations be? 
That gets complex, there's probably a better entity to use as a 
prototype to represent the game of chess. This is why you are able to 
play chess with DNA molecules, or with electrons in your computer. 
There are some seriously intense mathematicians out there that can show 
you how those electronic circuits in a processor directly correlate to 
graph theoretic "topological conversions" (speaking extremely loosely) 
to the algebras. Now, these same sorts of conversions do not always 
work (assume the same coherency in processing), so that's why not 
anything can be mapped to anything, that's why I cannot be mapped 
immediately to my death. And so what if it's "merely" showing how his 
brain mapped things? Not all maps are useless (and in this case, there 
must be a coherency to these wild mappings that the man makes, whether 
Hamlet, Dark Prince of Denmark, or Oedipus, or Godot).

> > 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.

How could it do otherwise?

> 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).

What is transhumanism but the urge to self-create?

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/