AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Mar 23, 2021 3:01 am
Alchemy was technically false science but spiritually very useful. Which again goes back to pragmatic definition of "truth", a philosophical outlook that has no problem with
any mathematical system which can be employed towards productive ends.
Newton's Alchemical meditation of gravity field is very good spiritual addition to Metta, heart breathing.
"Sin" means to miss the target, i.e. to aim at something and miss.
Spear throwing is a concrete meaning, as is calculating how to hit with a cannon ball. The more general meaning of missing one's purpose, taking a wrong turn, is more plausible in spiritual context, than the meaning of use of a weapon.
If Cantor's math ever stops being capable of helping one hit the target one is aiming at, then I will gladly cast it aside.
So, ends justify the means? Or, as Dawkins justifies technocratic scientism: "It works,
bitches!"?
You get it the wrong way,
pure math is not, or at least should not be derived from the practical purposes of
applied math. Deciding how pure math should be founded and constructed from the teleology of calculus is the wrong way of doing pure math. Pure math does not deprive engineers and artillery officers their applied math of calculus, but to stay honest, pure math can't be enslaved by mechanical teleology.
In pure math ends do not justify means. Pure math is constructive, not destructive target hitting.
Oh, so now we are taking it back to the roots of Western civilization. I think everyone gets what you are on about with this stuff, even without being well-versed in math, but what's hard to fathom is why you place metaphysical-spiritual importance on it for any reason other than to critique what you also feel is the essence of the Western world in its continuous chain of "colonial" cultural domination.
So now you identify your projection of "Western world"
only with Cantor's paradise, Hilbert's formalism and materialist technocracy, and nothing else? Seriously? Brouwer and intuitionism are not part of Western world? Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic spiritual mathematics don't belong in it, or spiritual alchemy etc.? All the renowned mathematicians, Berkeley, Wittgenstein etc. who never accepted "completed infinity", are not part of Western world?
What on Earth is the "Western world" you keep talking about, really? What
exactly is the nerve that feels targeted and getting hit by discussion of pure mathematics starting from idea of continuity instead of discontinuity, from processes instead of objects?