ChapterInitially released in the SFI Bulletin Winter/Spring 1992, From a talk offered at the 1992 Complex Systems Winter School, Tucson, Arizona
More than thirty years earlier, I was the very first going to teacher at the College de France in Paris, with a workplace in the lab of speculative physics. I saw that my speculative associates were often drawing little images in their note pads, which I presumed were diagrams of speculative device. It turned out that those illustrations were primarily of a gallows for hanging the vice director of the laboratory, whose stiff concepts drove them insane.
I was familiar with the sous-directeur and talked with him on numerous topics, among which was Project Ozma, the effort to spot signals from another technical civilization on a world of a neighboring star. SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is the contemporary follower of that task. “How could you interact if you discovered such a civilization?” he asked, presuming both interlocutors would have the perseverance to await the signals to be transferred backward and forward. I recommended that we may attempt beep, beep-beep, beep-beep-beep, for 1, 2, 3, etc, and after that maybe 1, 2, 3 …, 92 for the steady (other than 41 and 63) chemical components, and so on, and so on “Wait,” stated the sous-directeur“that is ridiculous. The number 92 would suggest absolutely nothing to them … why, if they have 92 chemical aspects, then they need to likewise have the Eiffel Tower and Brigitte Bardot.”
That is how I ended up being familiarized with the truth that French schools taught a sort of neo-Kantian viewpoint, in which the laws of nature are absolutely nothing however Kantian “classifications” utilized by the human mind to comprehend truth. (Many likewise taught, by the method, that creative criticism is outright and not a matter of taste, while the viewpoint that creative requirements are relative was dealt with as a function of Anglo-Saxon pragmatism.)
Another idea of a rather various kind, even more platonic, is swarming in mathematical circles in France (and somewhere else). That is the concept that the structures and things of mathematics– state, Lie groups– have a truth, that they exist, in a sense, someplace beyond area and time. (It is simple to see how one can pertain to believe that method. Start with the favorable integers– they definitely exist, in the sense of being utilized to count things. Number theory– alright. Absolutely no and unfavorable numbers– why not? Portions, square roots? Solutions of algebraic formulas in complicated numbers? Most likely– one is on a domino effect.) These 2 viewpoints are argued in a book, Matière à Penséereleased just recently by the biologist Jean-Pierre Changeux and the mathematician Alain Connes. I will not cause all their philosophical arguments on this congenial group, and anyhow I have actually never ever studied them thoroughly. Let me state simply that the authors do raise the concern of what is the function of mathematical theory in our understanding of the world,
