a great deed of elitery

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This is an appeal to authority. I can't believe you go on and on about being a trailblazer and then turn around and blindly say "x is true because y said so"

It has been shown that the calculi in his book were basically the same as zeroth and first order logic, which seemed pretty obvious at the outset even to a dumb-as-dirt engineer like myself. That is the point of contention. Or at least it is now, now that you drew attention away from that garbled PoMo-looking mess you posted on the first page.

In other words: My knowledge is better than yours, and you are not allowed to be proud of what you know.

You haven't provided any concepts that explain what you mean, just skirted round the issue. If we are so ignorant why not show us what you mean?

Existence is transient and subjective "I think therefore I am but do I really think or do I only think I think?". Truth is objective. It exists without needing to be observed but it can only be perceived subjectively therefore we cannot perceive pure truth only as close as approximation as we can find. So no existence is not truth.



It depends on your definition of existence I believe the more proper question would be "Is the perception of structure that I derive during the existence I believe I have objective enough to be considered real (IE "true")?"



Yes but who's logic are we talking about? Yours? Mine? The fevered Lovecraftian dreams of a person high on LSD?



No. Human built structures (IE buildings) are made to approximate human geometry but pick up a rock and you find chaos built atop natural forces that ignore geometric design (the forces that shaped it can be described mathematically but lack the order necessary for geometric descriptions since they are invariably built upon impossible absolutes such as perfect spheres and perfectly flat planes).

People are always trying to mix math and philosophy and calling it revolutionary but they fail to understand that they are two sides of the same coin and mixing them leads only to irreconcilable conflicts or worse you start taking things on faith and it becomes religion. Math is our attempt to objectively quantify our world philosophy is our attempt to subjectively quantify ourselves.

EDIT - damn forgot to scan my proof at the school library

Saying that math is about 'objectively quantifying' our world is true, but not the whole truth. Especially in modern times, math isn't only about numbers. There are whole fields of math which deal with symbolic data (e.g., category theory) and there is also topology, which isn't so much about quantities as it is about qualities (of shapes), as opposed to geometry, which is mainly about looking at the definite quantities of shapes.

So math definitely isn't only about numbers. A definition somebody else gave, which I like even though it is a little vague, is: "Mathematics is the study of all the possible kinds of structure." Finding a shortest path, for example, definitely requires numbers to compare the costs of paths. But the framework you use to find shortest paths itself, a graph, is made out of vertices and edges (typically directed in this case), not numbers. In this case, the numbers are only associated with the edges of what is not really a numerical structure.

BTW, since my absent-minded ass forgot to scan in the proof, here's a nice article I wrote on one of my favorite algorithms to hold you over:

http://math.wikia.com/wiki/Dijkstra's_algorithm

And that's exactly what I said, the synonym of structure is form, which is also a shape, which is also... geometric FFS. When I speak about geometry I mean it in the sense of existing structure, not in any other sense.

You spent a lot of words coming back to what I stated correctly the first time - it's about structure, that is forms. So yes math is the study of existent structure and it's many forms.

Can we rephrase that into language a mere mathematician could understand?

I see the "existing" and "existent" words - so ZakFiend wuld like to restrict mathematics to never producing any new concepts. It couldn't, because they wouldn't have been "existent".

There's "geometric" in there, so we can't (strictly speaking) apply any mathematics in space.

Are all of "structure", "form", "shape" and "geometric FFS" (whatever that is) to be synonyms?

I quite like: "maths is the study of things".

I think my definition summarizes the OED one quite well:

============
No... throwing in the acronym "FFS" bugs me. Is it "Finite Fourier Series"? "Free-Formed-Surface"? "Flying Focal Spot"? "Fast Food Supplier"?

You didn't understand a word I said. Sorry... you don't have the proper concepts to engage in this discussion.

Language is a form of math, if a mathematician can't understand language then he's not much of a mathematician. Words are mathematical, a real mathematician would know that. If you mean clarity of concepts, well you'll need a bit of physics to grasp what I'm saying. In the real world things are made of stuff, your thoughts are made of energy. That energy has structure that you can detect and modify, therefore a number is merely a neurological concept. But notice how

a house
1 house

Both map to the same concept, because language and traditional math are merely two expressions of the same underlying neurological functions and data. But of course many people here don't keep up on what has been discovered in the last 30 or so years in the cognitive sciences.

Language is merely math expressed in another form, you could do calculations with a, since a and 1 are equivalent. Just because men conceived their knowledge in a certain way doesn't mean it's the only way to express something, and many mathematicians know that.

Most would say that math is a form of language. A language which is clear and concise. Math what can be thought can be thought clearly, and math what can be said can be said clearly, to paraphrase Wittgenstein. And you my friend, are not being mathematically clear.

Not unless our real mathematician was actually a semiotician with an identity crisis.

And you made a beeline for metaphysics.

And here you're absolutely wrong. No cognitive scientist worth their salt would say that the formalities of math have much of any relationship to the actual conceptual representation of things, and it is well documented that people epically suck at even crude logical inferences.

You didn't understand a word I said, this statement proves it.

If I have misunderstood you, it is because you have not spoken clearly. In mathematics, everything can be said clearly. If you cannot say it clearly, then you are not talking about mathematics (and very likely science even).

Expectedly enough, your first statement is true.

As the discussion is actually about chever's vector analysis, I am perfectly able to engage in it.

To which end... chever! You still haven't shown us your proof. IIRC showing that the dot product is zero was a nice way to do it, but it's a while since I played with this. I had to dig out my Schaum.

Wrong because all language is unified, if you don't have the proper concepts you will never understand a word I said, it's not that I have not explained enough, it's that most people here do not know about the advances in neurosciences over the last 30 years... I will pull some quotes from the below book when I have the time. This is what I hate about people who claim math is the only form of truth, or only precision system of things, it's a load of crap when we look at the science and neurological basis of thought. You need to keep up with neuroscience, neuroscience shows the neurological system of language is multi-modal.

http://www.amazon.com/Molecule-Metaphor ... 262562359/

Get it and read it, keep up with what science has discovered. You are not informed enough to participate in this debate, its quite obvious you still operate under the enlightenments false view of reason.

http://i35.tinypic.com/10fruxh.jpg

Update:
Quotes:""Thought and language are neural systems, they work by neural computation, not formal symbol manipulation." -- Page 8, embodied processing.

"Language is inextricable from thought and experience" - Page 1.

'Fraid that's not how it works, at least not in math. You got something to say, say it right.


This is a math thread for christ's sake.

And even if you were right about the basic idea that I lack the "concepts", I'm more than 50% sure that much of what you're saying is pseudoscientific philosophical gobbledigook. I'm not a naked neophyte in the field of cognitive science.

-> "From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language"


I may well read it, but with an open mind. From the reviews, it sounds very much as if it is Jerome's theory, rather than anything science has discovered. I find it odd that he feels the need to (impolitely) criticise his commentators; telling them to read his book. Quite the salesman, I suppose.


I do wish you would stop saying this to everyone.


?

Typed up, to save others the trouble of reading black, then yellow, on dark blue:

Is there some reason you wished to only show a still from this video?

Is the rest of the video even more silly?

And finally, does not the above quote conflict with your earlier exhortation to us, to: "keep up with what science has discovered"?