[ExI] Ramanujan

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Sun Mar 2 04:25:00 UTC 2008


Bryan writes

>> 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.

Well, "tools and crafts" doesn't include math on most people's usage
of these terms. Mind, there is no *right* and *wrong* meaning to
be ascribed to any given word, except what it conveys in the common
parlance. Sure, math is a tool in some ways, but that is not what the
wikipedia meant.  No one could call Smale, Wiles, and Kolmogorov
(rest his soul) "leaders of technology".  It's just a vocabulary and
concept mismatch.

>> 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

Well, no one, at least no one until recently, approached it as a
math problem. It's a game, or an art.  People can be very good
at it who are lousy at math.  Others can be very good at math
but can't play chess for the life of them. They're really separate
talents.

>> 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?

Take N. F. Fyodorov, for example.  His concerns really did
relate to cryonics and hence to transhumanism. Other writers
of the 19th and early 20th centuries also clearly expressed
transhumanist ideals. Ramanujan?  No way.  If you want to
say he did, then you are reduced to claiming that every
mathematician is a transhumanist, and other equal absurdities.

>> There is no real commonality. Except maybe the very, very
>> common human urges to understand and to create, which
>> typify intelligent people everywhere...
>
> What is transhumanism but the urge to self-create?

Wikipedia says:

Transhumanism (sometimes symbolized by >H or H+),[1] a term often used as a synonym for "human enhancement", is an international 
intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of new sciences and technologies to enhance human mental and physical 
abilities and aptitudes, and ameliorate what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as 
stupidity, suffering, disease, aging and involuntary death. Transhumanist thinkers study the possibilities and consequences of 
developing and using human enhancement techniques and other emerging technologies for these purposes.

But what I referred to, namely the urge "to create", applies especially to
musicians, poets, artists, novelists, web-designers, and can characterize
the thinking, often, of scientists, mathematicians, engineers, business
leaders, and so on.  Your term "self-create" seems a tad ambiguous.

Lee




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