8 ms·

Hegelian contradiction and the prime numbers (part 2)

45 points by h0p3 7y ago

challenger22 7y ago
https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2018/11/24/hegelian-contradiction-and-the-prime-numbers-part-1/ https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2018/11/24/hegelian-cont... Both TFA and the linked article referenced by TFA seem to me to be the ramblings of somebody trying really, really, hard to pull a rabbit out of a hat. By linking together abstract concepts you can prove that philosophy and mathematics are one and the same! >So it’s very remarkable that Hegel’s mystical starting point, which is purely conceptual and abstract – and makes no reference to physical reality or empirical knowledge whatsoever – nonetheless implies a structure of ‘becoming’ that is equivalent to the fundamental structure found everywhere in physical science. Well, you can read Hegel this way... I guess. Figure it makes for some really warm and fuzzy insightful feelings, regardless of whether they are meaningful.
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  Given how intertwined between philosophy and mathematics is the history and foundational logic underlying computation, programmers of all people should not be quick to dismiss the mathematical insights found in philosophy.
- archi42 7y ago
  There are those philosophers which are as concerned with logic as you'd expect from a pure mathematician ;-) If you're interested, Shapiro's "Thinking about Mathematics: The Philosophy of Mathematics" gives a nice introduction into that topic, discussing several schools of philosophy and their thinkers (without forcing the authors pov on the reader). We had a seminar discussing that book, and while most philosophy students seemed happy to skip that seminar (too much math/logic), those of us with a MINT background (CS major here) found it quite amazing.
- tw1010 7y ago
  Philosophical thinking has its own kind of structure which is very lovely but quite distinct from the rigorous logical way you learn by studying mathematics. I learned the latter in school and the former after. (The former is a lot about 'thinking with words' in a very long attention-span manner, and about holding multiple perspectives in your head at the same time and refining analogies by slowly making your ideas clearer and clearer. Very unlike the intense intuitive sort of thinking done in maths.) Both are very useful but I feel like totally different people when I apply one or the other to making sense of things, and I'm still not sure how to mesh them together into one brain-tool. Maybe one day with enough practice will brain-plasticity make me enlightened, or maybe I'm too old and cemented for them to merge.
  - rficcaglia 7y ago
    Try looking at a Monet painting very close (like leaning over those protective wire barriers at the museum until the guards shoo you away)...it’s a mess of gloppy paint. After awhile you see structure and you can start to build up an understanding of his method in the madness. Now step back 30 feet...oh, it’s water lilies or a bridge or a willow tree. The brain is very plastic indeed both in constructing things or interpreting them.
    - tw1010 7y ago
      Ok but how do you know which perspective/interpretation of things is the 'correct' one? Or are all correct and you just have to hold them all in your mind at the same time? (This is a question I'm struggling with for real right now so if I could get some kind of answer to this it would ease a lot of my brain pressure. I never used to have this problem before I learned how to 'generate' new perspectives by 'thinking with words'. It always used to be just one perspective, just one identity.)
      - klingonopera 7y ago
        I think that's up to your "human" interpretation of the "correct" one. We can go even further down and say the painting is just a collection of atoms, or further up and say it's just a piece of the museum building it's contained in. All of them are "true" and "correct", but which one is relevant? That's when you need to start to place things into context, and it wildly varies depending if you're an ant, a human being or a rock.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  "Hegel aims to merely observe what is there – once we drop all our knowledge, all our presuppositions, all our theories, and even the sense of our own existence. ... "I think it’s worth emphasising that when Hegel talks about pure being he isn’t talking about an abstract concept. He’s actually talking about a real phenomenon, an actually existing thing, which he claims we all have immediate access to, if we’re prepared to perform the mental exercise." I cannot help but read the claim of the second paragraph as being a presupposition of the sort disavowed in the first.
  - Avshalom 7y ago
    well, hegel did-apparently-love his contradictions.
    - cryptonector 7y ago
      Doublethink is a powerful thing!
- isolli 7y ago
  Your criticism reminds me of the book "Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie"; it is only available in French, but Wikipedia has a good summary [0]: > Jacques Bouveresse is interested in the incompleteness theorems of Kurt Gödel and their philosophical consequences. On this account, he has attacked, in a popular work Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie, the use made of these theorems by Régis Debray. Bouveresse denounces the literary distortion of a scientific concept for the purpose of a thesis. This distortion, according to him, has no other purpose than to overwhelm a readership which lacks the training necessary to comprehend such complex theorems. Bouveresse's reproach to Debray is not that he uses a scientific concept for the purpose of an analogy, but that he uses such a difficult to understand theorem in the attempt to provide an absolute justification in the form of the classic sophism of the argument from authority. According to Bouveresse, the incompleteness of a formal system which applies to certain mathematical systems in no way implies the incompleteness of sociology, which is not a formal system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bouveresse#Incompleteness_and_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bouveresse#Incompleten...
Causality1 7y ago
>Hegel aims to discover the fundamental structure of everything from pure reflection alone. Ok, so after his navel-gazing was tested against observation, how accurate was it at describing life, the universe, and everything? The problem with linking small pieces of science to large works of metaphysics is like finding shapes in the clouds or "Five ways TV shows predicted the future!" If you have enough material to sift through you can draw a circle in it and decide this particular piece of the morass is significant while ignoring the rest of the meaningless unfalsifiable piffle.
- beat 7y ago
  If you read Hegel (or read someone interpreting him, I don't recommend reading Hegel unless you're a masochist), you'll find a key part of his approach was the limitations of observation. And Hegel wasn't even first to the gate on that one - philosophers have been questioning the value of observation relative to a comprehensive understanding of reality since the ancient Greeks (and the ancient Chinese, if you bring Taoism into it). There's a lot more to it than "meaningless unfalsifiable piffle".
- coldtea 7y ago
  >Ok, so after his navel-gazing was tested against observation, how accurate was it at describing life, the universe, and everything? Judging by its adoption, quite a lot.
tim333 7y ago
The prime numbers of course would have been just fine and irreducible as ever if Hegel had never existed. He did however manage to influence a lot of other iffy stuff: > Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that "all the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel."(wikipedia)
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  The prime numbers would also be irreducible if there weren't mathematicians, though. To use Feynman's analogy, birds would still be doing what birds do even if it weren't for ornithologists. Although the author is a Marxist economist (and I have some sympathies with him), it's probably better to consider Hegel on his own grounds - Hegelianism does not lead to Marxism and existentialism just as rationalism does not lead to the ontological argument. On the contrary, far from being iffy, I'd say that Marx and Nietzche (even if you would only concede due to their fundamental place in the culture of suspicion - doubting the notions they doubted) and existentialism from that list, at least, are worthy of some praise. Psychoanalysis is a different beast, but there has been some interesting recent (post-Popper, which I must mention since people seem to end psychoanalysis with Popper which seems premature) work on it, even from outsiders and psychologists.
  - intuitionist 7y ago
    > The prime numbers would also be irreducible if there weren't mathematicians, though. This is a lot more philosophically fraught. If you believe that mathematical entities exist in some acausal, nonphysical realm separate from the activity of beings doing math, you need to explain how those beings can access them. If you take Brouwer’s position that mathematics is the free languageless creation of the mind, then it’s no longer true that prime numbers would be irreducible if not for mathematicians.
    - claudiawerner 7y ago
      That's true, and I accept that - though my claim was more intended to attack the notion that a certain analysis is useless just because the thing being analyzed would exist otherwise - whether that existence is due to initial theorists (i.e primes are a creation of the mind) or whether it's due to their non-physical existence as Platonic forms was a little beside the point of what I was trying to say. I meant it more in the way that we could say science would still exist even if Popper hadn't theorized falsificationism.
ptah 7y ago
I wonder what zizek has to say about this
jwgarber 7y ago
> The success of Riemann’s project is strong evidence that the whole numbers – which we think of as static, unchanging quantities – are really some kind of shadow or projection of the Hegelian integers. The Zeta function reveals more because it represents whole numbers as what they actually are, that is dynamic contradictions of being and nothing. > But, in addition, the Zeta function represents the whole numbers as a sublated unity, where the entities internally relate via the exchange of a conserved substance. And this whole moves and changes with time. This is quite unlike the vision offered by set theory. The way modelling normally works is you have a certain phenomenon (falling rocks, fish populations, market booms-and-busts) that you attempt to describe numerically, and then create a mathematical model to make conclusions about the phenomenon. Here we have the opposite: the author takes the phenomenon (the Hegelian contradiction) and uses the model to make conclusions about mathematics!
not_a_moth 7y ago
This claim will be hard for anyone to assess without having read and understood Hegel, particularly the incredibly long and dense "Science of Logic." While I haven't read the latter, his interpretation on the surface seems like a gross simplification of something that few scholars agree on, regarding a book that few have read. If Hegel's ontology were as simple as the author described, it would be standard knowledge in how to interpret Hegel, something I would have learned in my college modern philosophy class.
gjm11 7y ago
This is pretty silly. The only real connection to Hegel is that Hegel talks about "being" and "nothing" kinda-sorta turning into one another, which the author riffs on in terms of differential equations and takes as corresponding to the differential equation for a harmonic oscillator. The rest -- the idea that you can see the Riemann zeta function as something a bit like a Fourier transform of the integers -- is old hat. (As Terry Tao put it at one point: "the Riemann zeta function is essentially the Mellin transform of the Dirac comb on the natural numbers". See also du Sautoy's popular book about RH, "The music of the primes".) The idea that sometimes you have two things turning into one another is not exactly startling, nor is it original to Hegel. The idea that this yields harmonic-oscillator-like dynamics is also not exactly startling, and in any case it's not something Hegel had any idea about. The thing that's distinctly Hegelian here, so far as I can tell (note: I am very far indeed from being a Hegel expert) is the idea that it's being and nothing that are in this relationship, and that specific aspect has nothing to do with the author's calculations. (He just writes them as x and y. They could equally have been "ham" and "eggs" or "Vishnu" and "Shiva" or "Linux" and "Windows" instead of "being" and "nothing".)
- hermeticist99 7y ago
  Yes, it's well known that Riemann's zeta is the Mellin transform of the Dirac comb of the natural numbers. The philosophical, rather than the mathematical, question the author addresses is: Why is the Zeta representation uniquely informative of the order in the primes? Why must we move to the complex plane? Why analytic number theory? What is the possible meaning of this mathematical move? etc. The central claim is the efficacy of the Zeta representation is strong evidence that the natural numbers are, contrary to appearances, not static and independent quantities, but fundamentally dynamic and interdependent structures of being and nothing (literally Hegelian contradictions). So this is a philosophical or metaphysical interpretation of existing results in number theory.
  - gjm11 7y ago
    I'm afraid this seems all wrong to me. First of all: If that's your idea of "strong evidence" then there are a bunch of other things that seem preposterous to me but have "strong evidence" for them. For instance: Mathematicians have found it very useful to build mathematics on top of set theory; that is, to think of numbers (and everything else) in terms of structures of things belonging to other things. This is "strong evidence" that the notion of belonging-to is fundamental, and therefore that capitalism is the One True Economic System. (This absolutely honestly seems to me no more far-fetched than your argument here.) Second: so far as I can see, even if we take the argument of the OP seriously, there is absolutely no reason to say that the things in these "dynamic and independent structures" are being and nothing. As I said above, they could just as well be any two things. Horizontal and vertical. Penn and Teller. Red and blue. But taking them to be "being and nothing" is the only thing that really connects this to Hegel at all. Of course anyone's welcome to see parallels to anything anywhere. If the Riemann zeta function makes you think of Hegel, fair enough. It might make someone else think of Beethoven, or civil engineering. The only thing I take any exception to here is the idea that this somehow indicates that there's something specially insightful in Hegel rather than that human brains are good at spotting patterns, including patterns that aren't really there.
thanatropism 7y ago
I actually recommend reading Lacan to everyone interested in Hegel. It takes some suspension of disbelief (but then, the scientific psychologies that took over clinical practices are skating on thin ice and only successful in certain serious mental illnesses ) but it's well worth reading at least Malcolm Bowie's intellectual biography of him and maybe Zizek's "Less than nothing" to have some access to Lacan. (Lacan, of course, is a long self-winding reiteration of Hegelian theory on a pseudoclinical domain)
steve76 7y ago
I've always been partial to Hume. Kant rules the theoretical physics landscape until we manifest matter or start engineering orbits. > Say I give you 45 pebbles and ask you to arrange them in a rectangle. No problem, and you quickly assemble a 9 by 5 rectangle. > But now I hand you 2 more pebbles, and ask you to build a bigger rectangle. > No matter how long you try, or how hard, you’ll never make a rectangle from 47 pebbles. What if I stack them on the corner, and say the rectangle runs on a skewed plane? What if the process of calculating large primes interferes with their value? Bitcoin goes on forever? Or does the heat and copper get so big, it inherently flips bits and row hammer's itself? Can I flip and flop being and non-being so fast, some see being, other's don't? And if so, can I stack these events on top of each other? Dogs cheat at poker. That's called law. A team of monkeys take apart a car. That's called medicine. Nature is whatever does anything to survive!

45 points by h0p3 7y ago

https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2018/11/24/hegelian-contradiction-and-the-prime-numbers-part-1/ https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2018/11/24/hegelian-cont... Both TFA and the linked article referenced by TFA seem to me to be the ramblings of somebody trying really, really, hard to pull a rabbit out of a hat. By linking together abstract concepts you can prove that philosophy and mathematics are one and the same! >So it’s very remarkable that Hegel’s mystical starting point, which is purely conceptual and abstract – and makes no reference to physical reality or empirical knowledge whatsoever – nonetheless implies a structure of ‘becoming’ that is equivalent to the fundamental structure found everywhere in physical science. Well, you can read Hegel this way... I guess. Figure it makes for some really warm and fuzzy insightful feelings, regardless of whether they are meaningful.

inflatableDodo 7y ago
Given how intertwined between philosophy and mathematics is the history and foundational logic underlying computation, programmers of all people should not be quick to dismiss the mathematical insights found in philosophy.
archi42 7y ago
There are those philosophers which are as concerned with logic as you'd expect from a pure mathematician ;-) If you're interested, Shapiro's "Thinking about Mathematics: The Philosophy of Mathematics" gives a nice introduction into that topic, discussing several schools of philosophy and their thinkers (without forcing the authors pov on the reader). We had a seminar discussing that book, and while most philosophy students seemed happy to skip that seminar (too much math/logic), those of us with a MINT background (CS major here) found it quite amazing.
tw1010 7y ago
Philosophical thinking has its own kind of structure which is very lovely but quite distinct from the rigorous logical way you learn by studying mathematics. I learned the latter in school and the former after. (The former is a lot about 'thinking with words' in a very long attention-span manner, and about holding multiple perspectives in your head at the same time and refining analogies by slowly making your ideas clearer and clearer. Very unlike the intense intuitive sort of thinking done in maths.) Both are very useful but I feel like totally different people when I apply one or the other to making sense of things, and I'm still not sure how to mesh them together into one brain-tool. Maybe one day with enough practice will brain-plasticity make me enlightened, or maybe I'm too old and cemented for them to merge.
- rficcaglia 7y ago
  Try looking at a Monet painting very close (like leaning over those protective wire barriers at the museum until the guards shoo you away)...it’s a mess of gloppy paint. After awhile you see structure and you can start to build up an understanding of his method in the madness. Now step back 30 feet...oh, it’s water lilies or a bridge or a willow tree. The brain is very plastic indeed both in constructing things or interpreting them.
  - tw1010 7y ago
    Ok but how do you know which perspective/interpretation of things is the 'correct' one? Or are all correct and you just have to hold them all in your mind at the same time? (This is a question I'm struggling with for real right now so if I could get some kind of answer to this it would ease a lot of my brain pressure. I never used to have this problem before I learned how to 'generate' new perspectives by 'thinking with words'. It always used to be just one perspective, just one identity.)
    - klingonopera 7y ago
      I think that's up to your "human" interpretation of the "correct" one. We can go even further down and say the painting is just a collection of atoms, or further up and say it's just a piece of the museum building it's contained in. All of them are "true" and "correct", but which one is relevant? That's when you need to start to place things into context, and it wildly varies depending if you're an ant, a human being or a rock.
mannykannot 7y ago
"Hegel aims to merely observe what is there – once we drop all our knowledge, all our presuppositions, all our theories, and even the sense of our own existence. ... "I think it’s worth emphasising that when Hegel talks about pure being he isn’t talking about an abstract concept. He’s actually talking about a real phenomenon, an actually existing thing, which he claims we all have immediate access to, if we’re prepared to perform the mental exercise." I cannot help but read the claim of the second paragraph as being a presupposition of the sort disavowed in the first.
- Avshalom 7y ago
  well, hegel did-apparently-love his contradictions.
  - cryptonector 7y ago
    Doublethink is a powerful thing!
isolli 7y ago
Your criticism reminds me of the book "Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie"; it is only available in French, but Wikipedia has a good summary [0]: > Jacques Bouveresse is interested in the incompleteness theorems of Kurt Gödel and their philosophical consequences. On this account, he has attacked, in a popular work Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie, the use made of these theorems by Régis Debray. Bouveresse denounces the literary distortion of a scientific concept for the purpose of a thesis. This distortion, according to him, has no other purpose than to overwhelm a readership which lacks the training necessary to comprehend such complex theorems. Bouveresse's reproach to Debray is not that he uses a scientific concept for the purpose of an analogy, but that he uses such a difficult to understand theorem in the attempt to provide an absolute justification in the form of the classic sophism of the argument from authority. According to Bouveresse, the incompleteness of a formal system which applies to certain mathematical systems in no way implies the incompleteness of sociology, which is not a formal system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bouveresse#Incompleteness_and_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bouveresse#Incompleten...

Causality1 7y ago

>Hegel aims to discover the fundamental structure of everything from pure reflection alone. Ok, so after his navel-gazing was tested against observation, how accurate was it at describing life, the universe, and everything? The problem with linking small pieces of science to large works of metaphysics is like finding shapes in the clouds or "Five ways TV shows predicted the future!" If you have enough material to sift through you can draw a circle in it and decide this particular piece of the morass is significant while ignoring the rest of the meaningless unfalsifiable piffle.

beat 7y ago
If you read Hegel (or read someone interpreting him, I don't recommend reading Hegel unless you're a masochist), you'll find a key part of his approach was the limitations of observation. And Hegel wasn't even first to the gate on that one - philosophers have been questioning the value of observation relative to a comprehensive understanding of reality since the ancient Greeks (and the ancient Chinese, if you bring Taoism into it). There's a lot more to it than "meaningless unfalsifiable piffle".
coldtea 7y ago
>Ok, so after his navel-gazing was tested against observation, how accurate was it at describing life, the universe, and everything? Judging by its adoption, quite a lot.

tim333 7y ago

The prime numbers of course would have been just fine and irreducible as ever if Hegel had never existed. He did however manage to influence a lot of other iffy stuff: > Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that "all the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel."(wikipedia)

claudiawerner 7y ago
The prime numbers would also be irreducible if there weren't mathematicians, though. To use Feynman's analogy, birds would still be doing what birds do even if it weren't for ornithologists. Although the author is a Marxist economist (and I have some sympathies with him), it's probably better to consider Hegel on his own grounds - Hegelianism does not lead to Marxism and existentialism just as rationalism does not lead to the ontological argument. On the contrary, far from being iffy, I'd say that Marx and Nietzche (even if you would only concede due to their fundamental place in the culture of suspicion - doubting the notions they doubted) and existentialism from that list, at least, are worthy of some praise. Psychoanalysis is a different beast, but there has been some interesting recent (post-Popper, which I must mention since people seem to end psychoanalysis with Popper which seems premature) work on it, even from outsiders and psychologists.
- intuitionist 7y ago
  > The prime numbers would also be irreducible if there weren't mathematicians, though. This is a lot more philosophically fraught. If you believe that mathematical entities exist in some acausal, nonphysical realm separate from the activity of beings doing math, you need to explain how those beings can access them. If you take Brouwer’s position that mathematics is the free languageless creation of the mind, then it’s no longer true that prime numbers would be irreducible if not for mathematicians.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    That's true, and I accept that - though my claim was more intended to attack the notion that a certain analysis is useless just because the thing being analyzed would exist otherwise - whether that existence is due to initial theorists (i.e primes are a creation of the mind) or whether it's due to their non-physical existence as Platonic forms was a little beside the point of what I was trying to say. I meant it more in the way that we could say science would still exist even if Popper hadn't theorized falsificationism.

ptah 7y ago

I wonder what zizek has to say about this

jwgarber 7y ago

> The success of Riemann’s project is strong evidence that the whole numbers – which we think of as static, unchanging quantities – are really some kind of shadow or projection of the Hegelian integers. The Zeta function reveals more because it represents whole numbers as what they actually are, that is dynamic contradictions of being and nothing. > But, in addition, the Zeta function represents the whole numbers as a sublated unity, where the entities internally relate via the exchange of a conserved substance. And this whole moves and changes with time. This is quite unlike the vision offered by set theory. The way modelling normally works is you have a certain phenomenon (falling rocks, fish populations, market booms-and-busts) that you attempt to describe numerically, and then create a mathematical model to make conclusions about the phenomenon. Here we have the opposite: the author takes the phenomenon (the Hegelian contradiction) and uses the model to make conclusions about mathematics!

not_a_moth 7y ago

This claim will be hard for anyone to assess without having read and understood Hegel, particularly the incredibly long and dense "Science of Logic." While I haven't read the latter, his interpretation on the surface seems like a gross simplification of something that few scholars agree on, regarding a book that few have read. If Hegel's ontology were as simple as the author described, it would be standard knowledge in how to interpret Hegel, something I would have learned in my college modern philosophy class.

gjm11 7y ago

This is pretty silly. The only real connection to Hegel is that Hegel talks about "being" and "nothing" kinda-sorta turning into one another, which the author riffs on in terms of differential equations and takes as corresponding to the differential equation for a harmonic oscillator. The rest -- the idea that you can see the Riemann zeta function as something a bit like a Fourier transform of the integers -- is old hat. (As Terry Tao put it at one point: "the Riemann zeta function is essentially the Mellin transform of the Dirac comb on the natural numbers". See also du Sautoy's popular book about RH, "The music of the primes".) The idea that sometimes you have two things turning into one another is not exactly startling, nor is it original to Hegel. The idea that this yields harmonic-oscillator-like dynamics is also not exactly startling, and in any case it's not something Hegel had any idea about. The thing that's distinctly Hegelian here, so far as I can tell (note: I am very far indeed from being a Hegel expert) is the idea that it's being and nothing that are in this relationship, and that specific aspect has nothing to do with the author's calculations. (He just writes them as x and y. They could equally have been "ham" and "eggs" or "Vishnu" and "Shiva" or "Linux" and "Windows" instead of "being" and "nothing".)

hermeticist99 7y ago
Yes, it's well known that Riemann's zeta is the Mellin transform of the Dirac comb of the natural numbers. The philosophical, rather than the mathematical, question the author addresses is: Why is the Zeta representation uniquely informative of the order in the primes? Why must we move to the complex plane? Why analytic number theory? What is the possible meaning of this mathematical move? etc. The central claim is the efficacy of the Zeta representation is strong evidence that the natural numbers are, contrary to appearances, not static and independent quantities, but fundamentally dynamic and interdependent structures of being and nothing (literally Hegelian contradictions). So this is a philosophical or metaphysical interpretation of existing results in number theory.
- gjm11 7y ago
  I'm afraid this seems all wrong to me. First of all: If that's your idea of "strong evidence" then there are a bunch of other things that seem preposterous to me but have "strong evidence" for them. For instance: Mathematicians have found it very useful to build mathematics on top of set theory; that is, to think of numbers (and everything else) in terms of structures of things belonging to other things. This is "strong evidence" that the notion of belonging-to is fundamental, and therefore that capitalism is the One True Economic System. (This absolutely honestly seems to me no more far-fetched than your argument here.) Second: so far as I can see, even if we take the argument of the OP seriously, there is absolutely no reason to say that the things in these "dynamic and independent structures" are being and nothing. As I said above, they could just as well be any two things. Horizontal and vertical. Penn and Teller. Red and blue. But taking them to be "being and nothing" is the only thing that really connects this to Hegel at all. Of course anyone's welcome to see parallels to anything anywhere. If the Riemann zeta function makes you think of Hegel, fair enough. It might make someone else think of Beethoven, or civil engineering. The only thing I take any exception to here is the idea that this somehow indicates that there's something specially insightful in Hegel rather than that human brains are good at spotting patterns, including patterns that aren't really there.

thanatropism 7y ago

I actually recommend reading Lacan to everyone interested in Hegel. It takes some suspension of disbelief (but then, the scientific psychologies that took over clinical practices are skating on thin ice and only successful in certain serious mental illnesses ) but it's well worth reading at least Malcolm Bowie's intellectual biography of him and maybe Zizek's "Less than nothing" to have some access to Lacan. (Lacan, of course, is a long self-winding reiteration of Hegelian theory on a pseudoclinical domain)

steve76 7y ago

I've always been partial to Hume. Kant rules the theoretical physics landscape until we manifest matter or start engineering orbits. > Say I give you 45 pebbles and ask you to arrange them in a rectangle. No problem, and you quickly assemble a 9 by 5 rectangle. > But now I hand you 2 more pebbles, and ask you to build a bigger rectangle. > No matter how long you try, or how hard, you’ll never make a rectangle from 47 pebbles. What if I stack them on the corner, and say the rectangle runs on a skewed plane? What if the process of calculating large primes interferes with their value? Bitcoin goes on forever? Or does the heat and copper get so big, it inherently flips bits and row hammer's itself? Can I flip and flop being and non-being so fast, some see being, other's don't? And if so, can I stack these events on top of each other? Dogs cheat at poker. That's called law. A team of monkeys take apart a car. That's called medicine. Nature is whatever does anything to survive!