If you’ve been reading my posts, you’ve probably figured out that this blog is motivated, to a large extent, by my fascination with what mathematics can help us see about the source, targets and bewildering range of human cognition. My expectations rest on the idea that what we have come to call the human mind […]
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I was still a graduate student when I first imagined that mathematics was actually outlining our cognitive potential (what we could see and understand). I considered writing a paper called An Asymptotic Approach to a Theory of All the Things, convinced that as the mind grew it would continue to approach the reality behind perception, […] I asked myself a naive question just the other day: “What is a thought?” I wondered about it when, during a workout, I saw my mind drift, and a chain of unrelated memory fragments were brought to my awareness through spontaneous, even nonsensical associations. Their shared presence was prompted, perhaps, by words or by something […] When I first became interested in studying mathematics an artist friend of mine expressed his disapproval by characterizing mathematicians as people who made bombs. Although I didn’t know very much mathematics at the time, I knew enough to know that he was wrong. But I was reminded today of one of the ways his mistake […] I followed a lead today that came at the end of Clifford Pickover’s The Math Book. The last of Pickover’s 250 milestones in mathematics is Max Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, which Tegmark published in 2007 in both scientific and popular articles. The hypothesis is that “our universe is not just described by mathematics – […] I have tried to make the argument, in some of the things I have written, that mathematics experiments with the ways we are able to ‘see.’ But there is a great deal of complexity in what it means ‘to see.’ ‘Seeing’ and ‘reasoning’ are not easily unraveled. An infant’s ‘intuitive physics,’ the subject of recent […] Hearing about visual processes, from neuroscientists and artists alike, consistently brings mathematical thoughts to mind for me – like Samir Zeki’s descriptions of how visual images are constructed, or the Impressionist painters’ attention to the sensations in the eye rather than the subject of the painting, and, of course, Poincaré’s suggestion that visual space has […] I see mathematics as associated with a searching, instinctual will, whose direction is shaped by our biology. I find some of its roots in the way our visual system constructs what we see, or in the way grid cells (neurons lit by location) tell a rat where it is, or the way ants can find […] This blog is motivated in part by my conviction that life itself is far more mysterious than we are yet able to ponder. And it is mathematics that has often redirected my attention back to that mystery as its wealth of conceptual possibilities shows me more of what we don’t understand. David Deutsch very nicely […] |
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