THE JOY OF MATH (rumination) My long term business partner Jim was a math guy. W

THE JOY OF MATH

(rumination)

My long term business partner Jim was a math guy. Worked at JPL. That kind of thing. Loves numbers the way I love philosophy.

Math is an endlessly fascinating puzzle. I prefer to solve problems instead of puzzles. In fact, because of a deliberate choice in college, I intentionally eschewed all puzzles as ‘character flaws’.

The difference between puzzles and problems is whether the outcome causes material benefit or harm in real time. And that’s partly because you know that puzzles are solvable, and that problems often are not. So you know if you stick with a puzzle it can be solved. But with a problem, you are working against a clock that will run out, and you don’t know in advance that it can be solved.

But that that doesn’t mean that I’m not easily seduced by puzzles. A video game, or a computer game, is a puzzle, not a problem. Puzzles are entertaining.

Jim used to say that he couldn’t get too interested in math because it was just such an entertaining puzzle, but it didn’t produce anything. And in the end it wasn’t a good use of his time.

It’s like crack. Puzzles really are like crack – addictive. And I’m getting that feeling again, working on this rather strange little problem of philosophy. Math is the nerd’s equivalent of world of warcraft, and it may be the ultimate game of world of warcraft – how do we create deductions of all possible relations? It’s fascinating. Is it possible to create a description of all possible relations (a proof)? I don’t see why not. There may not be a route from every position in every field to every other position in every other field; but their might be, and I can’t understand, even if circuitously how their couldn’t be. I mean, maths is just an enormous truth table.

And intuitively I would much rather solve a puzzle. The reason being that all the information needed to solve the puzzle is present. I don’t have to go out and perform empirical tests to guarantee what I sense and what I record are causally related. In math the study of pure relations, independent of time, and under formalism, independent of correspondence and context, I don’t have to concern myself with the cost of tests, the passage of time, or contextual constraints on relations OTHER than whether I can construct a proof (deduction) for those relations.

But it’s incredibly interesting. And just like suppressing the desire to play videogames, I feel like I have to suppress my desire to play with math. Not because it’s unimportant, but because in the division of labor, my particular craft is not pure relations, but those actions which result in the possible and preferable cooperation between individuals and groups in increasingly great numbers.