(urth) barrington interview

[Lee]

>Antonio Marques: It's not a matter of the concept not depending on the actuality. It's a matter 

>of what you call 'concept' being how the human mind responds to actuality. We've been saying

>this for days and folks still come back with misdirected replies.


I wonder if this might boil down to the mind-body debate. When I think of the concept of math

being done or even contemplated, I think of it as being done by others whom I perceive to be using

their primate brains encased within skull and skin. Not the sort of tool that has the obvious potential 

to produce a universally applicable scheme of understanding. From the outside, the brain seems to

be a tool designed for solving primate living problems right here on earth.


Perhaps others think of math more in terms of mind than brain. And when we use our own minds

we don't feel the limits of primate structure and flesh and blood construction. In our own minds we can

feel limitless in our perceptions. A "mind" person can think of math as something we have discovered

out there, rather than something we invented.


I like Dan'l's answer a lot because he acknowledges his belief in a universal truth to be part of his

spiritual beliefs.  It is easy to view spiritual beliefs as a function of mind rather than a brain function.


>Rick Norwood: You keep talking about the universe! Math doesn't give a fig for the universe.


Makes sense to me. As Antonio suggested, math originated as a tool for counting stuff and no matter how

elaborate it may have become, that essentially remains what math is doing. We may try to use math to 

understand the universe but I see this as inherently a means of taking what we can see of the universe 

and putting it into a packaging we can understand.


>Thomas Bitterman: The argument about [the limitation of] brains seems to rest solely on their historical development.  

>This is the Genetic Fallacy.  If you could provide some justification for your conclusions based on the current properties 

>of the brain, and not how it got to be that way, that would be different.


The discussion of the human brain's evolutionary origin and developmental process was meant only to illustrate

the "current properties" of the brain. To describe not only that the human brain has limits but what those

limits might be (as related to solving mammalian living problems on earth).


I could say the human brain is incapable of directly perceiving the strong and weak nuclear forces. And it seems

illustrative to point out that we can't because it either isn't possible or because it served no evolutionary or 

developmental purpose for us to perceive these forces directly. But the key concept remains "limitations".


I guess I could just skip all that and make the simple statement that we can only understand what we can understand.

Math is a great tool for helping us humans understand things that are difficult to understand. But it can't explain to us

things which are impossible for us to understand.


Perhaps it boils down to what I suggested above. I think math is a tool invented by the human brain, while others

think math is a universal principle which has been discovered by the human mind. I'm not sure there is a common

ground of understanding between these two views, but perhaps just identifying them helps.