Skepticism Mentioned versus Skepticism Embraced

How interesting it is that the only things that can be certain are those which we decide in advance to delimit as “true” or “certain,” because math is (certainly) the only realm where certainty lies, and math is founded upon an initial prejudice that consistency should be valued over other things like "diversity” or "the pure joy of movement.” What I mean by this is that the foundations in math, the hand-waving and ad-hoc demonstrations that we take and run with for quantitative thinking, is relative.


Admittedly, consistency and tautology are good places to start for any formal deductive system: assume that something is not the case, and you get that it is --- that seems like exactly the type of thing that you would want grounding your argument. But what if things are not that binary in truth value? What if the way you frame your argument from the get-go is wrong, is question-begging... What if other values are better at grounding our logic (if "logic" doesn't exist), our thinking, and, therefore, our lives?


Just because our mind looks for something does not mean that it exists -- a lot of the nihilism and thoughts of meaningless in life simply come from ascribing a meaning to the question of whether or not a universal meaning to life could be won without ascribing what a satisfactory answer to this question would look like. It therefore becomes a meaningless and therefore "unscientific" (inconsistent) question to ask.


In lieu of the acknowledgment that math (of all things!) cannot be grounded upon logic, we are left with the hair-raising result that proofs of certainty, of truth, of meaning are fragile (and a matter of taste!). It is true that there is always a gap between the is and the ought, but it seems like it must be the case (all instances of necessity would now become musical, as it were) that we are to listen to mathematics as one listens to music. Because it (knowledge) is fragile. Because we (math) are fragile. Because we (human beings are, basically everything...) are fragile. I don't draw the lines you would expect here because how can they be wrong? What are we left with to search for if any time you try to make a point, it won't go over, every time you put out energy it consumes itself, and the faster that you spin your wheels, the faster you have to run to stand in place?


What I don't get is how other people force necessity into their words and actions (their language), if the only thing we must do (of necessity) is to stop thinking of necessity literally. I'm assuming they don't force it, because then it would just be force, and not necessity. Either a) other people are really good at faking it, and we are to become genuine fakes, or b) this hasn't the slightest relevance to things at all and I've totally missed the mark. Probably the latter. Isn't it wrong to fake it, especially if that's something your doing as a "noble lie"? It is all dancing -- but it's not dance, because dance "is founded" on the joy of pure movement -- it acknowledges line and shape and form in and of themselves, it values emotion, and color, and an emergence of meaning that isn't so bluntly literal. This is what I try and put in a math proof, and they'll say it's wrong or not this, or not that. Okay. Alright. Growing process, I'll get there. It all comes in time... and no one can tell you how to get there, or where it goes, or where you are...


If there's any truth to this, don't take it too seriously! You'll crush it... There are people who will disagree with you not because of the content of what you'll say, but from the sheer fact that you try to make points. Pointy people like points! Un-pointy people do not! And there isn't the slightest difference between them. I have no way of knowing how fast your wheels are spinning when you give a response, or whether or not this is something to be valued. I have no way. If you find something you like, launch it into the sun. Just don't stoop. Don't stoop in your thoughts or your language, or when the sun comes up (or doesn't). There is no good response to this! There is no science of meaning! I mean it!


What do you run from? (The cure). My point is that making sense is not literal. And that is therefore a very hard thing to explain from a standpoint of use: we can mention this all of the time. But what is the difference between mentioning, and using? I do not think that we have fully grasped this difference. What does it mean to actually use math in our lives? To be distracted? What does it actually mean to "do politics" in our lives? To be distracted? How many people am I stealing these arguments from? How do you know who they belong to? How can there be a process by which we claim to call some forms of ideas 'common knowledge' by which we can extradite some forms, some assumptions from people, without citing them? How can there not be? What does it mean to be a skeptic about meaning... The fact that we can say "skeptic about meaning" and have it register in the same way something registers when we hear "the car is red" means that skepticism isn't taken seriously. It is taken as an attitude, a scoff, a 'fly in the ointment.' Wouldn't it be wonderful (and terrible) if we needed that skepticism in our lives? When we say healthy skepticism, this is never what we mean. We mean: "take the points that are being given, and see whether they can be verified. Or falsified. And repeated." We do not mean: "Throw the whole thing out. Discard it wholesale! Launch it into the sun! See if it grows back. See if it does do what I say it does in our absence." And this is because, knowledge is fragile. It takes nourishment, and love, and warmth. It takes belonging, it takes holding your views up and suspending their judgment. So, if this is the case -- what is a debate? What is a "political fact"? Is it "politics"? Is it making points...


I actually believe some of what I'm writing, and therefore need to let it go. It doesn't belong to me anymore. (Because if the argument isn't already tautologous and grows back in its absence, why keep it? Why "hold on" to anything, if there is such a thing as logic whose essence implies its existence, who springs from the void into a simultaneously coherent and accurate picture of itself and, therefore, everything else).

The reason I am writing this is because if logic is a matter of taste, then academic math can't really be as rigid as it is believed to be in practice. Maybe a lot of other people have these same sentiments. Maybe the whole point is to acknowledge that and keep going because, as stated above, logic is a matter of taste, and the better taste loves working on in silence more than stopping and asking questions. 

All I can really say is that I love finals. I love the cramming, I love the tests, I love the homework, the studying... I love all of the things that I spend so much time memorizing only to never use again. I love the things that I spend so much time learning that I will use again, and everything in between. I can't believe that the gap between academia and everyday life is so big that the things that we learn in school have no bearing on our daily lives, but it's also a very privileged thing to say that I value education because it is competitive. Because it is a competition, because it is a race that we are always running whether we choose to or not, so why not run faster than everyone else so that you finally outrun the question of why we are running at all in the first place? On my best days, I completely sideskirt the question of "why?" I'm learning anything at all, because I basically function by bullying the questioning parts of my brain out of existence from 9AM-5PM. I can't say where it leads or where it's going...

The only sustainable answer I can give to "Why learn math at all?" is that, maybe we will find something that is thought of as a contradiction, and offer a new way to deal with it that revolutionizes the theory, because that's how science moves forward. But it's all just running, to keep running, for more running, so that we can keep running, and then run some more...

These are very basic questions in the philosophy of science, and I feel like they are important because there is an opportunity cost to studying, and part of my conscience always wants to know why I'm spending any time at all on math, especially if it's not the type of thing that brings me closer to the world ("...keep your two feet on the ground!"). It's also definitely not the case that there are mathematicians or professors out there just waiting for someone to come around and save them by solving a problem or offering them help.

Is everything just a competition? How do you get a stable mathematics, if the only reason it exists at the highest levels is to beat other people to a pulp? How can we get logic out of competition that doesn't bully itself out of coherence and existence? Most days I feel like my own mind would leave me behind at any chance it would get, and I'm just left trying to keep up...

This is the circularity that I see in things: 1) Math is not giving a framework of the world. 2) Math is giving a framework and a foundation for math. It is self-fulfilling 3) Each has their own subjective definition of mathematics. 4) "Math is different from a hallucination because _________"

How do I fill in that blank? Because it's math? Because it's logical...? (Then what isn't susceptible to this circularity?) The thing that I actually tell myself is that math is the sort of thing that is worth listening to more than the part of ourselves asking "Why are we doing this?" As though we could just outrun it. I guess you just have to be hungry for it, and navigating the world is more like aesthetics than we thought.