Sublime

Bronowski quoted von Neumann’s response: “‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now, real games,’ he said, ‘are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists o

If you can’t simply explain your thinking to other people (or yourself), it’s a sign that you don’t fully understand things and need to dig deeper and gather more information.

Now assuming that Wittgenstein does indeed regard Pascal’s characterization of how she feels as an instance of bullshit, why does it strike him that way? It does so, I believe, because he perceives what Pascal says as being—roughly speaking, for now—unconnected to a concern with the truth.

Logic doesn’t help you think. It helps you find out where you’re thinking wrong. When Grothendieck sends out “probes” to interrogate objects he wants to understand, he gets his answer by writing: Often, you only have to write it down for you to see it’s incorrect, whereas before writing there was a vagueness, a bad feeling, instead of this evidence

My lifetime motto is that mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and…fools in words.

Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom. The illusion of separation of subject from object is best removed by the elimination of physical activity, mental activity and emotional activity.

PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS.

For us, almost all knowledge is what a Taoist would call conventional knowledge, because we do not feel that we really know anything unless we can represent it to ourselves in words, or in some other system of conventional signs such as the notations of mathematics or music.