Math Platonism

Valentin Turchin (TURCC@CUNYVM.BITNET)
Mon, 20 Mar 1995 13:47:09 EST


Bruce Buchanan writes about my paper on Cybernetic epistemology:

>In brief, it seems to me, these views take their stand within what Popper
>has called World 3 - the world of language and abstract concepts - and do
>not give at least equal and coordinate status and reality to Worlds 1 and 2
>- except as reflected in World 3. The problem for Turchin is that it would
>seem impossible to do otherwise, i.e. to take into account the
>nonconceptual in ways that are not essentially conceptual. Yet I do not
>think a real world interpretation of the principles of cybernetics requires
>an approach restricted in this way.

I think it does. Even when the cybernetic principles are applied to
artistic or religious experience, they remain conceptual constructions.
Cybernetics used so does not cease to be cybernetics, a branch of science;
it does not, and it should not, become art or religion.
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>...Yet the assumptions involved appear to me to
>suggest that the concepts are considered primary, and human experience and
>action, including that special action which is language behavior, are to be
>included within the universe of concepts, rather than that human concepts
>are no more than tools of use to man, within an environing universe which
>is from a practical standpoint infinite in relation to human knowledge.

I do not quite understand this remark. I strongly agree that
"human concept are no more than tools of use to man". Human experience
an action remain the primary reality in my philosophy.
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>In other words in might be said that it is the role of philosophy to define
>the place and scope of science, not the role of science to assimilate
>philosophy.

Yet a considerable part of philosophy: about the structure of the Universe,
its past and future, and how the Cosmic order is maintained --
what the Germans called Naturphilosophie --
disappeared, because science came to a point where
it could speak about these things with confidence, while philosophers
only expressed views. I believe that epistemology now comes up
to a point where it is becoming science.
This is not to deny that philosophy defines the role and place of science.
But there is a feedback -- as always. Long live Cybernetics!
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Thanks for comments. Valentin Turchin.