A constant rearrangement of words on paper and screens. Ten to the 573 power of possible sentences in our English language..new ways of saying old things and new things that have never been said. How is it that this largely self-contained activity, like working a jigsaw puzzle, can tell us something about reality? When we interact with the words, are we interacting with a transcendent reality? Or are we only locked inside some vast self-referential matrix of information? From whence this revelatory power of merely rearranged words?
(Oct 20, 2017 05:24 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ][...] How is it that this largely self-contained activity, like working a jigsaw puzzle, can tell us something about reality? When we interact with the words, are we interacting with a transcendent reality? [...]
Even the creations falling out of the procedures of a symbolic or formal system that's supposedly aloof from tangible or manifested things can't completely divest itself from its roots or inspiration in the latter.
The "pure mathematics" or non-applied view regards such as a self-contained system floating on its own, its complexities arising from or proven as coherent with and traceable to its base principles. That mathematics is also contingently useful for human endeavors, descriptions or simulations of the world, and can even predict items or construct discoveries concerning encountered reality thereby being just a fortunate coincidence.
But actually the system's ancestral properties / rules were extracted from the physical environment and our need for measuring objects and recording events, with the empirical or specific content eventually stripped or generalized away to make them abstract. No surprise then that even if "running and floating on its own" independent of the world, the output of purist mathematical thought still finds practical applications -- its abstractions oscillate back to converge with the concrete affairs of its genesis.
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