Re: [FRIAM] The Unreasonable Reverence of The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in theNatural Sciences

[Steve Smith]

Very well said, methinks.  An approach needn't even lose it's utility to poke fun at it, it merely has to  lose "Universal Utility".   I believe many folk remedies, crafts, knowledge fall into that category.   They become "vestigal" knowledge for entire generations until circumstances drift far enough (or abruptly enough) that they become the only or best (known) answer to a given problem (again). Come the revolution, we'll all be chewing willow bark and slippery elm to relieve what ails us, and laughing at our forefathers who thought all medicine had to be manufactured and shipped in a bottle.  In the meantime, such remedies seem somewhere between "quaint" and "absurd". glen e. p. ropella wroteth circa early c21: Thus spake Steve Smith circa 04/26/2009 06:06 PM: Nicholas Thompson wrote: Why should nature give a fig for the tricks we play with our words? The Anthropic Principle might have a play in this. I think this is the fundamental reason for the unreasonableness. Math, like any other language, helps us be goal-oriented. And anything that helps us be goal-oriented will _seem_ true to us, regardless of whether it is true or not. This is the situation for just about any method: burning witches, hunting Communists, making marijuana illegal, worshiping mythical beings, meditating surrounded by crystals and incense, voodoo dolls, murdering people in foreign lands, torturing enemy combatants, etc. If it focuses our attention and allows us to maintain focus on some objective, then, as a tool, it _is_ useful and will _seem_ true. When it ceases to be useful, we will be surprised, sit back, and wonder why we were so enamored with it before... and many of us will even poke fun of and deride those people who still find it useful.

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