On 14 Mar 2014, at 22:25, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 5:22 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
On 14 Mar 2014, at 10:11, Kim Jones wrote:
On 14 Mar 2014, at 1:12 pm, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Information must be made evident through sensory participation, or
it is nothing at all.
Craig, you have just explained to me the basis of my discalculia.
No one else has ever managed to do that in all my 57 years.
Music was always instantaneously understandable to me because of
the way it gained my deep sensory participation whereas mathematics
was always just a bunch of squiggles on paper that to me were as
dry as dust and as terrifyingly remote as Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Math evoked no sensuous universe of qualia - for me. I have often
felt that for those with a high degree of numeracy, that the
hieroglyphs of mathematics evoke the same sensory participation as
music does for me. Bruno, for example composes and reads
mathematical sentences with the same ease as I have in listening to
even quite complex music and writing it down from ear in standard
music notation.
So one could play you some Ferneyhough, say Shadowtime, and you'd be
able to score it on first listen? I know nobody that has an ear that
good, but then every person makes me wrong every day anyway :-)
I guess you know that you are answering Kim, here.
Not really. To be honest, it is work, a lot of work.
Read: musicians don't have to work much.
I did not say that! But listening music is slightly easier than
studying math.
Math is often compared to music without sounds or instruments, we have
only the partitions, and have some work to do for getting it.
Music seems universal: even animals and plants seems to enjoy it
without much special learning. But this does not mean the musician has
no work to do for that!
That's often true with the best of us in monetary, career terms. Not
always, mind you, but sometimes PR does play into these things. Wow,
shocker there, huh?
What is PR?
And then I have just plugged in works made by people certainly more
gifted than me.
Here, the two professions are similar: steal what you can to make
money (play beatles covers for weddings, maths for engineering
etc.), or try to build your own stuff (very frightening, people will
steal from you, hate you if you survive and find stuff, and nobody
will understand ;-))
Yeah OK. usually we don't steal: we refer to the original papers, but
this common practice is sick from "perish or publish".
Researcher should perhaps acquire some special status, and be paid,
even when not discovering anything. A fundamental researcher should
have the right to never publish. That would be immense benefits for
the middle run ... (some activity reports can be asked, to avoid
abuses).
For most mathematicians, it is a question of patient learning. There
are virtuoses,but most mathematicians can be quickly out, when going
out of their expertise.
There are very few genuine global-universalist in music if any. If
there are, there is always doubt of mise-en-scene of appearance from
some point of view.
OK.
Gauss said that mathematics is simple, because everyone can
understand, and that's true, but to solve a known problem, you need
complex circumstantial event. Now, we know we are confronted to a
ladder of very complex problems, and even genius like Ramanujan
couldn't solve the Riemann hypothesis, which is just pi_1, the
negation of a sigma_1 proposition.
Doing math is simple, like swimming is simple, but then that does
not mean that crossing the ocean is simple, and in that sense, math
is infinitely difficult.
Or impossible. In music, especially when you consider who is
listening. If the listeners are full of insecurity and doubt, you
know it will be hard money on that evening. Thankfully the opposite
is also true; the good and the bad is you have to present your songs/
results to people who have 0 relation to it. That gets quite real.
Especially because everybody is the ultimate expert on music, while
everybody fears math from school trauma.
But still some try to take a universal shot and some even appear
sincere like when stating: "I am not really crossing the global
ocean musically... It only appears this way because I am doing x,y,
forgetting z, etc." but then they usually miss a note, which often
makes for better music than the consistency fetishist who misses no
notes, but who's notes and playing become empty reductionism somehow.
OK. I can relate. Math and music are similar on this.
Beauty needs a bit of false mixed into its truth, to get all the
irreducible good stuff like funny, melancholy, tastefulness, nuance,
love hate, drama etc.
I am not sure, but I think this can be true for "math" too. Already
adding some falsity to PA can bring interesting true theorems, as
shown by Eric Vandenbussche.
Arithmetic is perversed already. Lies seems unavoidable.
Music and creative acts reflect somewhere the naive faith, that God/
transcendental cause is not ugly; which might be vain, of course.
But musicians are often a bit dissident on this; if God is ugly and
truth just points to our vanity... then f*ck God and truth because
for this dream we need 1000 vain musicians, with 1000 instruments,
smoking 1000 herbs, playing 1000s of songs and thousands of people
dancing and peopling, even if there are 7 billion too many of us
idiots on this shoddy sphere in the dark.
Gosh...
We get the truth in the wars, deaths, self-destruction etc.
anyways... so no need to worry about not finding it. Truth is often
brutish, impolite, not punctual etc. anyways... Overrated + bad for
sexual appetite.
Truth seems like the worst, except for all the lies ....
But finding reflections of it, in which tunes, wearing which
clothes, what style, mannerisms, your inner attitude, tits, and
balls; how you meet your kobayashi maru, what ride you'll sport and
the infinite redundant things, with all this going on, is enough...
OK.
the musician bets this nonsense counts as much as truth. But not
without a lot of precision, appropriacy, and great work. Guitar
Ninja Laughter Style. PGC
Probably,
Bruno
I sometimes refer to myself as a "mathemusician".
:)
There are many relations between math and music. Too much, so thats
a whole topic. I point often on the relation I do know, which is
that numbers, written in a base, already code melodies (cf musinum).
Then there is the pythagorean link between numbers and frequencies,
which relates wave theory and number theory. By that aspect QM seems
more pythagorean than computationalism, for which the universal
number might look like a dissonance.
For each part of of math, there might be a corresponding music. Both
math and music are large, there is something for any taste and
sensibility, I think.
Bruno
I'll now watch the clip you posted!
Kim
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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