Posted by
Sarbajit Roy (testing) on
Sep 21, 2012; 1:19am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Cognition-and-Calculus-WAS-faith-zombies-and-crazy-people-tp7580628p7580656.html
wrt
> My history of modern philosophy is TERRIBLE but it seems to me that
> Descartes’s notion that a mind is the sort of thing that can be seen
> veridically only by the mind-holder leads to the calculus. Was my high
> school math teacher (who was also the football coach) correct to tell me
> that the Cartesian plane is where the calculus was born?
The Cartesian "plane" may (or may not) have been where calculus was born,
but Hamiltonian calculus was where it all came together for 3
dimensional "space"
When Hamilton asserts "The quotient of two vectors is GENERALLY a
quaternion" it opens up an infinity of possibly queer (hermaphroditic
???) non-quarternions. Previously he worked out that "The product of
two Right Quarternions is generally a Quaternion""
Now if we extend this to octonions we end up with Fano planes which
are ever so much more interesting than mere Cartesian planes
On 9/20/12, Nicholas Thompson <
[hidden email]> wrote:
> I agree, here, that faking X is one organizational level above doing x.
> What tempts us to error is the notion that mental states are instantaneous,
> rather smeared over time and space.
>
>
>
> I sometimes wonder what the relation is between how we think about cogntions
> …. Thoughts, feelings, motives, etc. …. And how we thing about velocity.
> Perhaps because of speedometers, we think that speed is a thing that can be
> true at an instant. But speed does not live in an instant, it LIVES in the
> domain of delta-T. I have wondered for years about the relation between
> our contemporary notions of mind and the calculus. The calculus allows us
> to squinch down things that live in the domain of Delta-t into instants.
> Similarly, our way of talking about feelings, motives, thoughts, etc.,
> squinches these patterns of activity down into instants, when they
> themselves live in the domain of delta-t. Not to mention, the domain of
> delta[delta-t] and the domain of delta[delta[delta-t]], etc., ad nauseam.
> My history of modern philosophy is TERRIBLE but it seems to me that
> Descartes’s notion that a mind is the sort of thing that can be seen
> veridically only by the mind-holder leads to the calculus. Was my high
> school math teacher (who was also the football coach) correct to tell me
> that the Cartesian plane is where the calculus was born?
>
>
>
>
>
> Nick
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