Re: [-empyre-] Viewing Axalotls

[Henry Warwick <henry.warwick@sbcglobal.net>]

The Voices in my Head tell me that on 3/20/04 5:29 AM, Jim Andrews at
jim@vispo.com wrote:

> Do you see the proposition that 2+2=4 as part of a political ideology? I am
> not sure how it can be conceived as a political proposition.
> 
> There is, in a sense, considerable baggage behind '2+2=4'. I read that crows
> apparently have a rudimentary sense of number, which must surely require
> some form of 'language' on their part, so in some sense they might
> comprehend that 'two' 'things' 'grouped' with 'two' 'other' 'things' is
> 'more than' 'two' 'things' 'grouped' with 'one' 'other' thing', and is 'less
> than' 'two' 'things' 'grouped with' 'three' 'other' 'things', but any such
> understanding would be quite different from an understanding that '2+2=4',
> which is a written proposition with all the baggage of writing and
> arithmetic behind it. Does writing itself constitute some political
> ideology? If so, how so?

1. 2+2 does not equal 4 in only a handful of specious cases: example - when
2+2 is in base 3 or 4, then, 2+2 would = 11 or 10, but the VALUE represented
would be identical in any case.

2. To insist that 2+2?4, *is* a political statement, and a distinctly
depressingly fascist one: viz. Orwell. 1984.

3. A very interesting discussion about the reality of numbers exists in an
Excellent Book: "The Number Sense" by Stanislas Dehaene, a French
mathematician and neuroscientist.

4. There is no point number 4.

5. If someone tells you that 2+2?4, and a bunch of your BS detectors don't
go off immediately, I suggest you have them re-calibrated.

6. Dehaene's fundamental findings are that discreet values do exist in the
universe and are countable by intelligences other than human. This means
that addition and subtraction are also properties in the universe. However:
this doesn't permit the calculus, as it is as much a function of our
language center and complex reasoning capacity as it is of any instinctive
number sense. 

7. This leads to a classic problem in mathematics between the neoplatonists
and formalists of the world versus those who see mathematics more as a
social construction. I think Dehaene's research doesn't answer this problem,
but it does clear some of the brambles: if numeracy is a fundamental
property of  complex functioning species (as it has been shown to be with
apes and crows and other creatures) then we know that this "number sense" is
innate and ahistorical.

We can then look at other aspects of how this number sense is used by
various societies over time and the inhabitation of this sense by the
language function by various societies in time to greater or lesser degrees.

Some societies count similar to this:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, more, a lot, while
other societies develop differential calculus. I'm sure there are political
considerations behind those differences, but that's a different discussion.

I hope the above is useful.

my very best to all on this fine list,

HW


"There are 10 kinds of people in this world: People who can count in binary
and people who can't."