things, language and scientific calculations
There are things and they are moving and there are relations between things, between movements and between thangs and movements ... and there is no ultimate objective location from which to view it all. (That is, there are no slices of space-time, per se. I take this to be one of the main deductions from Einsteinian relativity.)
Each of us has a perception of the world from a particular vantage point.
The scientific vantage point is something more like the center of mass of these particular individual vantage points. In practice, though, vary few of the individual vantage points are (as we use the term in economics) "price setters", most are "price takers".
I speak here of modern science ... of mathematical and logical formulas. I disclude even the linguistic descriptions of what these formulas mean.
Primitive societies have no such vantage point. The still have price setters and price takers in describing the way things really are from some assumed greater (but need not be ultimate) vantage point ... similar to the above mentioned center of mass.
[In reality ... the shape is not precise and, like an ellipse, will have multiple foci (centers of mass). ]
Now ...
From an evolutionary stance the representation of the world from a particular vantage point makes sense.
The evolution of language as a means of sharing information between these very close particular vantage points also make sense. The utterances are close enough together in space and time, though, as to not necessarily make the notion of a greater vantage point an abvious intuition. (Perhaps writing and sharing information across greater ranges of space and time made that intuition move obvious.)
What is important here ... from the evolutionary point, natural language is tied to the usefullness (fitness, in evolutionary terms) of the particular vantage point.
The odds that language would be equally useful from some greater less particular vantage point is significantly small. Very very small.
Humans who had first posited such a notion (of a higher vantage point, a more objective vantage point) did so initially in natural language ... but in the course of moving through history were very likely to find something that maps better on to the non-particular vantage point than does natural language.
Math and logic is the discovery that best does this, so far.
So ... to a particular vantage point on phenomena, there is a natural language description that best suits mapping the things and movements of that phenomena and the relations between all said things and movements. Natural language is the (closest ... I don't know that i want to go so far as to make that claim) functionally equivalent mapping system for the particularist vantage point.
And ... that greater objective vantage point, the things it would see are not best mapped by natural language but by math and logic. (Since we, humans, have defined the type of vantage point that it is, a discovery of a better way to map the relations amongst things and events seen from that vantage point is a legitimate judgement.)
The question remains of wether that defined vantage point is better than the natural vantage point.
It seems unlikely that the natural vantage point would be "the best possible" ... it merely needs to be functional from the evolutionary standpoint.
[From the Creationist standpoint a parallel claim can be made ... that the gods wanted happiness for people, not true knowledge of the material world ... so the natural perceptions and language are naturally attuned not to map to such knowledge and only accidently does so. That humans found a better mapping may be the case, and it may also be the case that it has lead them off the path.]
{From the nihilist standpoint, it only needs to be said that things as they are are complete accident and that finding a better way to accomplish some sideline tasks is not surprising. None of it can be ultimately better or worse, though, as there is no ultimate goal.}
The evolutionary stance has its own goal, up to a point. Since we are still stuck on a rock by gravity within a perhaps delicate environment, it has not yet played out its usefullness. Ones humans are dispersed throughout the galaxies, then nihilism will strike the paradigm down.
Right, off with me then ...
Each of us has a perception of the world from a particular vantage point.
The scientific vantage point is something more like the center of mass of these particular individual vantage points. In practice, though, vary few of the individual vantage points are (as we use the term in economics) "price setters", most are "price takers".
I speak here of modern science ... of mathematical and logical formulas. I disclude even the linguistic descriptions of what these formulas mean.
Primitive societies have no such vantage point. The still have price setters and price takers in describing the way things really are from some assumed greater (but need not be ultimate) vantage point ... similar to the above mentioned center of mass.
[In reality ... the shape is not precise and, like an ellipse, will have multiple foci (centers of mass). ]
Now ...
From an evolutionary stance the representation of the world from a particular vantage point makes sense.
The evolution of language as a means of sharing information between these very close particular vantage points also make sense. The utterances are close enough together in space and time, though, as to not necessarily make the notion of a greater vantage point an abvious intuition. (Perhaps writing and sharing information across greater ranges of space and time made that intuition move obvious.)
What is important here ... from the evolutionary point, natural language is tied to the usefullness (fitness, in evolutionary terms) of the particular vantage point.
The odds that language would be equally useful from some greater less particular vantage point is significantly small. Very very small.
Humans who had first posited such a notion (of a higher vantage point, a more objective vantage point) did so initially in natural language ... but in the course of moving through history were very likely to find something that maps better on to the non-particular vantage point than does natural language.
Math and logic is the discovery that best does this, so far.
So ... to a particular vantage point on phenomena, there is a natural language description that best suits mapping the things and movements of that phenomena and the relations between all said things and movements. Natural language is the (closest ... I don't know that i want to go so far as to make that claim) functionally equivalent mapping system for the particularist vantage point.
And ... that greater objective vantage point, the things it would see are not best mapped by natural language but by math and logic. (Since we, humans, have defined the type of vantage point that it is, a discovery of a better way to map the relations amongst things and events seen from that vantage point is a legitimate judgement.)
The question remains of wether that defined vantage point is better than the natural vantage point.
It seems unlikely that the natural vantage point would be "the best possible" ... it merely needs to be functional from the evolutionary standpoint.
[From the Creationist standpoint a parallel claim can be made ... that the gods wanted happiness for people, not true knowledge of the material world ... so the natural perceptions and language are naturally attuned not to map to such knowledge and only accidently does so. That humans found a better mapping may be the case, and it may also be the case that it has lead them off the path.]
{From the nihilist standpoint, it only needs to be said that things as they are are complete accident and that finding a better way to accomplish some sideline tasks is not surprising. None of it can be ultimately better or worse, though, as there is no ultimate goal.}
The evolutionary stance has its own goal, up to a point. Since we are still stuck on a rock by gravity within a perhaps delicate environment, it has not yet played out its usefullness. Ones humans are dispersed throughout the galaxies, then nihilism will strike the paradigm down.
Right, off with me then ...
posted by Thomas F. Schminke at 11:56 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home