Greetings Economists, On Feb 6, 2006, at 8:20 AM, ravi wrote: My apologies since from your entry on my blog, it seems that you are a Nussbaum enthusiast... I write "Even Martha" because, from my vague recollection of her writings on the issue of pomo/relativism, she seemed to want to toe the establishment line despite offering what I saw as a weak reasoning in favour of that position.
Doyle, No need to apologize. She says a great deal about disability rights and her focus on emotions has helped my thinking develop. I find joy in that Sabri has a similar view of emotions to mine. I was just kidding you back. Ravi writes, I will not even attempt a comparison to Mathematics, since I will admit to an excessive bias in its favour. Mathematics, to me, is the most beautiful and purest of human analytical activities. Doyle, Raghu's view is somewhat closer to mine. I don't really see the work in say quantum computing, or high performance computing in parallel problems as not interesting or equal to physics or high math in demand upon brainwork. The problem of writing software in a non-linear problems is quite interesting (bit torrent). My view of math is different from yours. Beauty is an emotion structure descriptive. I will ignore it for the moment. I wrote back to Autoplectic about my interest in grammar. One persistent error in mathematical thinking is the widespread labeling of mathematical languages and in CS programming languages. Whereas human language has grammar. Mathematics is not language like. We can say a great deal about language production in the sense of how it organizes the brain to produce a certain kind of work. This as I wrote to Autoplectic is reflective of the body. Mathematics appears later in humans than language, although there is some evidence for a subitizing or counting instinct in humans. Mathematics appears to me broadly to be like a tool tied to script (writing systems). It does not develop as communication as facilely as does language. What is obvious is that math thinking is a different arena of human thought which develops outside of grammatical language. One can assume then we see how an alternate thinking path can be cultivated in humans. Meaning that language arose by body reflection in routinized structures, but other possible structures (language like body reflections) might be possible. I would think that field like scripts (pictures) having the properties of networks might lead to another sort of language schema than we are familiar with in spoken language now. Thanks, Doyle
