On Mar 4, 3:07 pm, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote: > > I personally still at the position that there are some material objects, > atoms, molecules, crystals, etc., that are independent from the mind.
If you assume that the human mind is the only sense in the entire cosmos then there are going to be a lot of strange conclusions that come up. Think about the hundreds of billions of galaxies...the billions of organisms on this planet alone.. were all of them utterly blind and deaf to their own existence for their entire history until the moment that Homo sapiens began to take an interest in them from their home on this remote speck of dust? "Thereafter I have got suddenly a question, why mathematical models (physical laws) are working at all to describe the Universe when there was no mind. " It has to do with levels of perception, or what I call perceptual inertia. Worlds. The more intelligent you are, the more worlds you can make sense of. The more you can make sense of the motivations and processes of lesser worlds. As the collective intelligence of our species has concentrated the knowledge available to each of us, we gathered meta-perceptual commonalities. Mathematical models are actually common perception/participation strategies as characterized by ourselves as outside observers. We are made of matter, so we see ourselves reflected in a particular way in matter. A way which is both intimately familiar and alien to us. The problem is that matter is only half of the story. We are also made of ourselves. We need mathematical models to plumb the depths of mysteries which are beyond our own frame of reference. Mysteries that cut across distant levels like physics and chemistry. The closer we get to our own level of perception however, the less mathematical models tell the whole story. Biology, zoology, anthropology, psychology, all benefit from mathematical models to some extent, but they fall short of modeling what it is to be alive, to be a person, etc. Mathematics is by definition an exterior facing manipulation. It begins by counting on our fingers - an exterior computation which transforms part of our body to a true set of objects - generic, recursive, controllable. Our fingers are not a mind. They are the beginnings of the mind offloading its grunt work onto objects. It is a way of generalizing part of ourselves to make it seem like it is not part of ourselves.' Right now, in the post-Enlightenment era, our success with mathematics has been so impressive that we have begun to imagine that we ourselves have a mathematical basis. It is a little like following the counting of the fingers back into the brain to find where smaller and smaller fingers are counting. If we try a sense-based model instead, there is no problem with mathematics being both a high level symbolic experience within a human cortex as well as indirect experiences of low level microcosmic events or other events which can be detected and controlled externally with physical instruments. This is what sense does. It jumps to conclusions. It ties levels together figuratively. We want to move our hand, and we just do it. We don't have to consciously transduce a signal through neural and muscular fibers. We couldn't find a muscle fiber even if we wanted to. This is what mathematics does for us, it extends our minds figuratively outside of our native scale of perception, so that we can, in a way, make more of the universe part of our figurative body. Of course, just as we control our limbs without knowing what is really going on under the skin, we should not mistake our success with controlling through mathematical models for understanding the truth - particularly the truth of our own native perceptual frame, which as much more subtle and non-mathematical potentials. It could well be the case that introducing our external control schemas into our own world is having increasingly toxic consequences, draining the significance out of culture and promoting an unstoppable drone of financial computation which consumes the whole of civilization. We may find out that our mastery over our universe has a Sorcerer's Apprentice side which reduces itself to an automaton even as it automates everything around it. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
