The history of mathematics is largely absent from the “culture” of educated public, historians and mathematicians included… Like the rainbow, mathematics may be admired, but – especially among intellectuals – it must be kept at a distance, away from real life and polite conversation.
Ivor Grattan-Guinness
Science is build up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
Henri Poincare
This is the remarkable paradox of mathematics: no matter how determinedly its practitioners ignore the world, they consistently produce the best tools for understanding it.
John Tierney
A science is any discipline in which a fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.
Max Gluckmann
A theory has only the alternatives of being wrong or right.
A model has a third possibility: it may be right but irrelevant.
Manfred Eigen
The following statement is false.
The preceding statement is true.
This system is now revealed as a Strange Loop. If it is true, it is
false, and if it is false, it is true. This is not trivial. There are
hundreds of such strange loops recognized in logic and mathematics, and it
requires sophisticated knowledge to detect them when they are not as
obvious as this pair. Paul Watzlavik has argued (in Pragmatics of Human
Communication and How Real is Real?) that many types of mental illness
take the form of internalizing such a Strange Loop and trying to live out
its consequences. Alan Watts has proposed, even more grimly, in his
Psychotherapy East & West, that whole societies can become trapped in
such Strange Loops.
RAW
Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.
Gary Snyder
Abstract: The pace of scientific work continues to accelerate, but the question is whether the pace of discovery will continue to accelerate. If we were driving in the wrong direction – in the direction where no new ideas can be accepted – then even if scientific work goes on, the progress would be stifled. This is not to suggest that we are in quite such a disastrous position, but on the other hand, all is not well.
You have not snared her,
Scarecrow Death:
She’s in my pulse,
My heart, my breath.
Eye sees only
Local hardware;
Brain conceives
Nonlocal software;
Brain knows more
Than eye can see:
Brain can scan
Eternity.
Imagination – just like logic – sucks.
Realness is what we’re seeking.
Who ever has the ultimate power
to define
has the ultimate power
There is no royal road to logic, and really valuable ideas can only be had at the price of close attention. But I know that in the matter of ideas the public prefer the cheap and nasty; and in my next paper I am going to return to the easily intelligible, and not wander from it again.
Medewar observes that the standard form of presentation [...] represents the very reverse of what the investigator was in fact doing. In reality, says Medewar, the hypothesis is first posited, and becomes the medium through wich certain otherwise obscure facts (later to be collected in support of it) are first clearly seen.
But the account in the paper is expected to give the impression that such facts first suggested the hypothesis, irrespective of wether this impression is truly representative.
I had a feeling once about Mathematics – that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me – the Byss and Abyss. I saw – as one might see the transit of the venus or even the Lord Mayors’s Show – a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.
Sir Winston Churchill
Man, you only know you are laid, relayed and PARlayed, fucked, flustered and far from home.
black pothead
Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.
World as a background of obviousness is manifest in our everyday dealings as the familiarity that pervades our situation… (and every possible utterance presupposes this)
Heidegger
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