Post by johnbc on Sept 14, 2020 13:43:57 GMT
The mathematical and natural sciences are a byproduct, a secretion of the search for wisdom, nothing more. The closer to the spiritual and moral center of the human being, the more a subject is demanding and serious. To be a philosopher, in the essential and not conventional and bureaucratic sense of the word, you have to be a mature, centered and self-conscious man, a spoudaios. To be a mathematician or chemist, just be a talented teenager, a “nerd” with a certain IQ.
Studying a lot of mathematics tremendously develops the ability to reason about what doesn’t exist
The search for mathematical accuracy is an Ersatz of intellectual seriousness. The most mediocre of computers has more mathematical accuracy than the entire universal wisdom. It is not surprising that Bertrand Russell, the ultimate advocate of reducing philosophy to mathematical logic, was always a neurotic teenager. It is true that in many parts of his work he seeks to mitigate his youthful excesses, but the result is just an irritating inconclusiveness — the supreme sum of imprecision.
The most serious distortion of human intelligence is to substitute mathematical reasoning for the logical analysis of real things. Mathematics can only be usefully applied to real things after they have been properly analyzed and conceptualized. Now, the logical analysis of real things, in turn, presupposes a whole constellation of cognitive faculties operating in harmony — perception, memory, imagination, feeling, will — , while mathematical reasoning requires only… the ability to reason mathematically — an sectorial skill that computers can imitate perfectly and sometimes with advantage.
Intelligence as such, in the fullness of its functions, cannot be replaced by one of its varieties in particular without the entire cognitive framework being deformed, just as the health of the body as a whole cannot be replaced by the mere integrity of an organ in particular. Leibniz already taught that all the measurements and calculations in the world, no matter how accurate they are, cannot tell us what a thing is. A concept consists exactly in saying what a thing is, and, if you don’t have the right concept, all your measurements and calculations about it will be an imaginary construction on an imaginary basis, most likely false. People of deformed intelligence, incapable of an adequate cognitive treatment with the real, can become attached to their special ability and make it a fetish, pretending to possess superior and more or less esoteric knowledge, precisely to camouflage their inability to know. This happens even among prestigious scientists and philosophers, let alone among their underdeveloped ape artists.
Studying a lot of mathematics tremendously develops the ability to reason about what doesn’t exist
The search for mathematical accuracy is an Ersatz of intellectual seriousness. The most mediocre of computers has more mathematical accuracy than the entire universal wisdom. It is not surprising that Bertrand Russell, the ultimate advocate of reducing philosophy to mathematical logic, was always a neurotic teenager. It is true that in many parts of his work he seeks to mitigate his youthful excesses, but the result is just an irritating inconclusiveness — the supreme sum of imprecision.
The most serious distortion of human intelligence is to substitute mathematical reasoning for the logical analysis of real things. Mathematics can only be usefully applied to real things after they have been properly analyzed and conceptualized. Now, the logical analysis of real things, in turn, presupposes a whole constellation of cognitive faculties operating in harmony — perception, memory, imagination, feeling, will — , while mathematical reasoning requires only… the ability to reason mathematically — an sectorial skill that computers can imitate perfectly and sometimes with advantage.
Intelligence as such, in the fullness of its functions, cannot be replaced by one of its varieties in particular without the entire cognitive framework being deformed, just as the health of the body as a whole cannot be replaced by the mere integrity of an organ in particular. Leibniz already taught that all the measurements and calculations in the world, no matter how accurate they are, cannot tell us what a thing is. A concept consists exactly in saying what a thing is, and, if you don’t have the right concept, all your measurements and calculations about it will be an imaginary construction on an imaginary basis, most likely false. People of deformed intelligence, incapable of an adequate cognitive treatment with the real, can become attached to their special ability and make it a fetish, pretending to possess superior and more or less esoteric knowledge, precisely to camouflage their inability to know. This happens even among prestigious scientists and philosophers, let alone among their underdeveloped ape artists.
