I had the opportunity to listen to Paul Churchland when he gave a talk last Friday, on Cognitive Enhancement, at the University of Texas at Dallas. He used the time to address, not enhancement drugs or exercises, but the enhancement effects of language and symbol. I poked around today to find more more on the […]
|
|||||
|
I’ve thought that one of the reasons it’s difficult to resolve questions about the nature of mathematical reality is that we’re not exactly clear on what it means to ‘perceive’ something. Trying to establish whether or not even the data of our senses is somehow independently ‘real,’ has fueled centuries of philosophical debate. I found […] I started today by taking a look at what might be the latest on what cognitive scientists were saying about mathematics. The broad scope of cognitive science includes the investigation of what Mark Turner calls (in the title of one of his books) “the riddle of human creativity.” When exploring the origins of conceptual systems, […] In a recent post I said that one of the things that dissuades us from accepting the existence of a truly Platonic mathematical world, or believing in the timeless existence of its forms independent of human minds, is the habit we have of distinguishing ourselves from the rest of nature, despite all the evidence we’ve […] I just flipped back and forth between reading about 18th and 19th century developments in mathematics (analysis in particular) and 18th and 19th century transitions in art. The language of art history and the language of math history is very different. It does feel a little like going from color to black and white, or […] Many of this week’s circumstances are limiting the time I have to write but I would like to point to a few sources that contain very nice accounts of what is known as the foundational crisis in mathematics. One of them was written by Paul Bernays in 1935. Understanding the nature of some of the […] Let’s ask again, “What is the nature of the bridge between sense perceptions and concepts? It’s a simple question to ask, but a fairly difficult one to answer. Raphael Nunez contributed a chapter to the Springer book, Recasting Reality: Wolfgang Pauli’s Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science. A pdf of the chapter can be found here. […] |
|
||||
|
Copyright © 2024 Mathematics Rising - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
|||||
Recent Comments