Re:Bret Victor's favourite books
by williamcotton on Sunday April 13, 2014 @03:00AM
(#7580529)
You've touched on something incredibly deep here.
Fact and fiction are one and the same in storytelling, that is, in the conveying of ideas from one person to another.
A mathematical system of symbolic logic is just a strange loop. It is a fiction. It is rooted in nature, in the world that we observe, but so is a poem.
There's been a trend since the Enlightenment to split the world in to RATIONAL SCIENCE and OTHER THINGS. The goal was mainly to finally remove all of the religious mumbo-jumbo and superstition from the realms of science. In the process however, we ignored our qualities of perception and language. Not only is the majority of what is important and true in our lives expressed through words and feelings but it also colors every aspect of mathematics and science. It basically took those fields eating their own tails to realize the ultimate folly of their philosophical pursuits.
Thoughts like these are often misinterpreted as attacks on reason and rationality. They are merely illustrations of the limitation of pure reason, a topic that has been broached by the great thinkers time and again. The lessons never seem to sit. Language and metaphor are constantly shifting yet our written records are set in stone, destined for misinterpretation.
But life without folly, without mystery, what life is that?
Fact and fiction are one and the same in storytelling, that is, in the conveying of ideas from one person to another.
A mathematical system of symbolic logic is just a strange loop. It is a fiction. It is rooted in nature, in the world that we observe, but so is a poem.
There's been a trend since the Enlightenment to split the world in to RATIONAL SCIENCE and OTHER THINGS. The goal was mainly to finally remove all of the religious mumbo-jumbo and superstition from the realms of science. In the process however, we ignored our qualities of perception and language. Not only is the majority of what is important and true in our lives expressed through words and feelings but it also colors every aspect of mathematics and science. It basically took those fields eating their own tails to realize the ultimate folly of their philosophical pursuits.
Thoughts like these are often misinterpreted as attacks on reason and rationality. They are merely illustrations of the limitation of pure reason, a topic that has been broached by the great thinkers time and again. The lessons never seem to sit. Language and metaphor are constantly shifting yet our written records are set in stone, destined for misinterpretation.
But life without folly, without mystery, what life is that?