"Michael Ragland"  wrote in message
news:ccmghe$1d9b$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
>
> http://www.primitivism.com/number.htm
> This is a "very" long article which traces the history of math and
> argues it is largely responsible for current alienation in civilization
> and from our human nature. Since "numbers" and math are often used on
> s.b.e. I was curious to see what other posters thought of the thesis. I
> don't agree with everything the author says and he did seem a little
> touched but at the same time I think he presents his case.

People become alienated when they cannot understand what other
people are doing, and why.  Some people are alienated because
they don't understand math, and are annoyed that other people
persist in using it.

But it works both ways.  I am alienated by the author, who quotes
(or at least name-drops) Dingle, Horkheimer, Adorno, Wittgenstein,
Max Black, Levy, Parsons, Whitehead, Hegel, Heyting, William James,
Boas, Hallpike, Allier, Clive Gamble, Bryan Morgan, Dorothy Lee,
Sahlins, Mauss, Belshaw, Clastres, Childe, Hannah Arendt, Hermann
Weyl, Coon, Marx, Freud, Turner, Herodotus, Sesostris, Bernal,
Brainerd, Pythagoras, Plato, C.I. Lewis, Euclid, Aristotle, Mumford,
Roger Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Copernicus, Jaspers,
Galileo, Descartes, Franz Borkenau, Husserl, Collingwood, Gillispie,
Pascal, Leibniz, Issac Newton (born in 1642, the year of Galileo's
death, or so I learn here), Hill, Fontenelle, LeMetrie, Bach,
LeShan & Morgenau, Kant, Condillac, Rousseau, Blake, Goethe, John
Constable, J.M. Jacquard, Charles Babbage, Bolyai, Lobachevski,
Riemann, Klein, Boole, Bertrand Russell, Frege, David Hilbert,
Lord Kelvin, Frederick Taylor, Capra, Heisenberg, Gillespie, Kurt
Godel, Tarski, Church, Rucker, Morris Kline, Nagel & Newman,
Raymond Firth, Singh, Shannon, Feinstein, Turing, Mazlish,
Minsky, Hobbes, Heidegger, Levi-Strauss, and Chomsky.  He averages
about three of these per paragraph.  But he also has a few
paragraphs where he offers his own thoughts:

 If mathematical reality is the purely formal structure of
 normative or standardizing measure (and later, science), the
 first thing to be measured at all was time.  The primal
 connection between time and number becomes immediately evident.
 Authority, first objectified as time, becomes rigidified by the
 gradually mathematized consciousness of time.  Put slightly
 differently, time is a measure and exists as a reification or
 materiality thanks to the introduction of measure.

Gee, I'm glad he put that slightly differently.  I was afraid
I would have to find and read Adorno to figure out (so to speak)
what he meant.

I suspect that the author feels bullied everytime he encounters
a mathematical formula he doesn't understand.  Well, some scientists
do wield symbols as a weapon of intimidation, but most don't.
I suppose that most scholars don't wield scholarship as a weapon
of intimidation either.  Yet I feel that someone is trying to
bully me here, and I consider myself to be fairly well read.

According to someone - I won't try to snow you by dropping the
name - there are two cultures in academia.  Many more exist outside
the ivory towers, I believe.  All are to some extent alienated
from each other.

The blame for this situation does not lie with any one of
these cultures.  Nor do I think that the situation is necessarily
a bad thing, as long as there are a few "ambassadors" that can
pass between two cultures and interpret them to each other.
Maynard Smith was one such ambassador, I think.
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