Your man Gower had some particularly good passages that suggesting that math's ability to come to a usable conclusion depends on how it is interpreted, not only on the math itself.
I cannot tell from your example whether I would agree that your Harvard philopher is doing philosophy. He may be saying very wise things and not doing philosophy. If he starts somewhere, more or less arbitrarily, and shows how you can get somewhere else through sound argument, he is being a philopher, as well as being wise. Nick From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2011 11:42 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Grand Design, Philosophy is Dead, and Hubris BTW: voting doesn't count: Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 9:22 PM, Owen Densmore <o...@backspaces.net> wrote: For my homework in philosophy (and sins in life), I've been observing a modern philosopher, who I enjoy, giving a series of lectures. http://www.justiceharvard.org/ The discussion has been on fitting schools of philosophy to events in human life. The current (second video, 4th lecture) is on Utilitarianism. In particular, on how to derive a utility function especially when human life is at stake. The initial readings are on Jeremy Bentham. Listening to the students, who are the foil, so to speak, for the speaker, the major problem is how to assign a number, say a dollar figure, to the worth of things that are not generally sold .. such as human life or whether or not it is even possible. Fascinating historic examples include the risk-benefit analys of smoking in the czech republic (it gained the government $1,200+ per premature death) and the Ford Pinto exploding fuel tank ($130 million to fix vs $45 million in losses, including human life). It occurred to me that it was yet again a difficulty of mathematics. The assumption of both the audience and the speaker, at least at this point in the series, is that all "numbers" have a metric, which of course we know is only an interesting subset of say vector spaces. So how was it that an entire school of philosophy, one with great adherents and even a really rational outlook, fail to understand that not all "numbers" have a metric? That high dimensional spaces do not include comparison functions? -- Owen
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