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1 sacred trick for moral regeneration + Performance of mathematics vs thinking maths

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C C Offline
One Sacred Trick for Moral Regeneration
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/02/09/one...#more-5771

EXCERPT: Post-enlightenment culture has almost completely conquered the western cities, leaving a them swimming in a rich and diverse memetic soup. From within this soup a new society is emerging, its members pejoratively called “Social Justice Warriors”. To avoid falling into the trap of pre-existing connotations we can refer to this emerging society as the “Identity Affirming Society.” Identity affirming society shows a striking resemblance to more traditional religions and societies, with specific adaptations, particularly around the concept of cultural appropriation, that make it more resilient to the dissolving forces of post enlightenment culture from which it is emerging. How do unique cultures – the Amish, for instance – protect themselves from being subsumed by the surrounding culture? A clearer view of how the ideas of cultural appropriation are used can be reached by comparing it with the more rigorously mapped views regarding intellectual property, as both cover similar territory.

Societies are finite games, games that introduce goals, rules, constraints on behavior and provide a scoring system. They are among the games we engage in so completely that we forget participation is optional, and the rules arbitrary. Most fully formed societies attach their rules to six instinctively used pillars of ethical behavior, each a thematic set of constraints that participants in the society must follow (or flaunt). Durable societies use these constraints to reinforce
boundaries between societal insiders and outsiders.
Vice and Virtue in the Age of Whole Foods

Post-enlightenment culture is not a durable society. It is a highly virulent pattern which which swept the earth like a wildfire, only embracing three of the six pillars: fairness, liberty, and compassion. Obedience, loyalty, and purity, the three pillars ignored by post-enlightenment culture, are most readily associated with boundaries and individuation of the society. That these would be re-emerging fits thematically into the zeitgeist of our era, a period dominated by a focus on boundary issues....



There’s more maths in slugs and corals than we can think of
https://aeon.co/essays/theres-more-maths...n-think-of

EXCERPT: [...] But can we say that sea slugs and corals know hyperbolic geometry? I want to argue here that in some sense they do. Absent the apparatus of rationalisation and without the capacity to form mental representations, I’d like to postulate that these humble organisms are skilled geometers whose example has powerful resonances for what it means for us humans to know maths – and also profound implications for teaching this legendarily abstruse field.

I’m not the first person to have considered the mathematical capacities of non-sentient things. Towards the end of Richard Feynman’s life, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist is said to have become fascinated by the question of whether atoms are ‘thinking’. Feynman was drawn to this deliberation by considering what electrons do as they orbit the nucleus of an atom. In the earliest days of atomic science, atoms were conceived as little solar systems with the electrons orbiting in simple paths around their nuclei much as a planet revolves around its sun. Yet in the 1920s, it became evident that something much more mathematically complex was going on; in fact, as an electron buzzes around its nucleus, the shape it makes is like a diffused cloud. The simplest electron clouds are spherical, others have dumbbell and toroidal shapes. The form of each cloud is described by what’s called a Schrödinger equation, which gives you a map of where it’s possible for the electron to be in space.

Schrödinger equations (after the pioneering quantum theorist Erwin Schrödinger and his hypothetical cat), are so complicated that, when Feynman was alive, the best supercomputers could barely simulate even the simplest orbits. So how could a brainless electron be effortlessly doing what it was doing? Feynman wondered if an electron was calculating its Schrödinger equation. And what might it mean to say that a subatomic particle is calculating?

The world is full of mundane, meek, unconscious things materially embodying fiendishly complex pieces of mathematics. How can we make sense of this? I’d like to propose that sea slugs and electrons, and many other modest natural systems, are engaged in what we might call the performance of mathematics. Rather than thinking about maths, they are doing it....
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