[lit-ideas] Re: How long is the coast of Britain?
- From: palma <palma@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2010 02:45:30 -0400 (EDT)
Dear M. R henninge,
I am very little impressed by your intuitions since they are not
evidence.
If you were to lokk at Baker on cicadas or on the (immense) literature
on Fibonacci you may have the time and the elements to rethink on the
idiocies invented by this weirdo so many people worship (said
wittgenstein)
as for the junk on heAvy lifting I restrain to be shown and similar
nonsense, you may want to check that, to my knowledge, there is no
mandelbaum involved in anything and that the discoverer of fractal
structures is benoit mandelbrot--
perhaps all yidds have the same name?
On Sat, 23 Oct 2010, Richard Henninge
wrote:
In response to three responses from Mr. Palma:
(1)
says who?
On Wed, 20 Oct 2010, Richard Henninge wrote:
What's this I hear about fractals describing nature? If fractals describe
anything, what it describes is on the Kantian "this side" of nature.
Fractals are just fancy grammatical and syntactical constructions.
Fractals can only be created by computers, hence by us, nothing outside of
us.
------Says me on the basis of the counter-intuitiveness of nature's creating
of objects or "shapes" that have been generated by the following of a rule.
Granted, people too can create fractals, but it is so tedious that their
"discovery" would not have occurred without the development of computers.
Further, even if nature could work by following a rule, the object so created
would immediately and constantly be subject to outside influences which would
destroy, or at least compromise the perfection of its rule-generated
structure (unlike the hermetically propagating computer-generated fractals).
Despite what I say, I can still hope that someone will do the heavy lifting
that Mandelbaum has apparently avoided, or simply left undone--it *is*
daunting--and demonstrate why nature does, if it in fact does, "choose to go"
or "have to go" the fractal route in generating structures. As long as he
spoke of such structures in relatively small, organism-internal structures,
such as ferns, one could have imagined he was interested in the "why" or
"how" question and investigated the fractalization of growing plants. But as
soon as he waxes fractal over such obviously amorphous structures as
coastlines and clouds, he showed he was content with playing the part of the
advocate of the pseudo-explanatory power (consisting only of heuristic
analogies) of these "cool" computer-generated shapes.
One basic error is to confuse mathematical "generation" (the forming [of a
geometric figure] by describing a curve or surface) with natural generation,
such as procreation. There is about as much rhyme or reason to a mountain
range's crest as there is to a city skyline, and by "rhyme or reason" I am
referring to the kind of patterned, concerted, purposeful, intentional, and
eventually rule-based products as those produced exclusively by humans with
their basically dumb, but rigorously obedient flunky processors churning out
fractal upon fractal--resembling--the natural world, if only in complexity.
(2)
what if we find that coast is fractal?
is that kantian coast?
On Wed, 20 Oct 2010, Richard
Henninge wrote:
What's this I hear about fractals describing nature? If fractals describe
anything, what it describes is on the Kantian "this side" of nature.
Fractals are just fancy grammatical and syntactical constructions.
Fractals can only be created by computers, hence by us, nothing outside of
us.
Kant's checker on that one, as it was for Wittgenstein the engineer, was to
submit the "findings" of the "Kantian" subjectivity to the unbiased jury of
mathematics and/or truth-value logic: unbiased in that the scientist cannot
approach the coast with the fractal figures dancing like sugar-plum templates
in his head, ready to be sprinkled over the chaotic world, until "PAFF!" it
organizes itself into the desired fractals. The more realistic alternative,
acceptable, I would venture, to both of them, would be a mathematical
measuring as-if structure, holdable by multiple minds simultaneously in the
mathematical and rigorously truth-value logical way that allows for effective
discussion and, eventually, consensual adjustment.
(3)
>
> "The best prophylaxis to brake these hubristic heuristic tendencies is
> Wittgenstein's checker: The world is everything that is the case, and
> that
> of which we cannot speak, of that we must remain silent.
precisely. and what told anybody that the coast of x is not fractal?
Or Wittgenstein also predicted it?
If it is the case that the coastline of x is fractal, then we would be able
to speak of it by reproducing its form in a fractal equation, we would be
able to program a computer to generate just that coastline. The equation
corresponding to the curve of that coastline would then image the world. You
can bet that Wittgenstein would have begged Mandelbrod to exercise a more
judicious restraint in his speculative utterances.
Richard Henninge
University of Mainz
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/begin/read__>sig.file: postal address
palma
University of KwaZulu-Natal Philosophy
3rd floor of Memorial Tower Building
Howard College Campus
Durban 4041
South Africa
Tel off: [+27] 031 2601591 (sec: Mrs. Yolanda Hordyk) [+27] 031-2602292
Fax [+27] 031-2603031
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EMAIL: palma@xxxxxxxx
EMAIL: palma@xxxxxxxxxx
MY OFFICE IS A290@Mtb
*only when in Europe*: inst. J. Nicod
29 rue d'Ulm
f-75005 paris france
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Ratio, enim, nisi judex universalis esse deberet, frustra singulis datur.
[ _Quaestiones Naturales_, Adelard of Bath ]
Signora granda, testa che massa
massa ne passa, che quasi schissa,
Dia dei sostegni de cese e palassi
Dia de le taje che su ne tien fissi
Dia de le onde che le ne fa grassi,
ne ingrassa de ogni grassia, Dia Venessia -
aàh Venessia aàh Venàssia aàh Venùsia
Andrea Zanzotto, Filò, (Sezione: Recitativo Veneziano)
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