DO NOT DO ONTO OTHERS THAT WHICH YOU WOULD NOT HAVE THEM DO ONTO YOU!

IF ONLY WE WOULD ALL OBEY THE GOLDEN RULE IMAGINE WHAT OUR WORLD WOULD BE LIKE!

 

IS THERE THE EQUIVILENT OF A MATHEMATICAL LAW UNDERLYING THE GOLDEN RULE? One of the world's most famous philosophers thinks it is so.

"All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything he had trusted should betray his trust, and in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every great fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death. ------
But what, without death, would happen to every man, with death must happen to some man. At the same time, death makes the number of our risks, of our inferences, finite, and so makes their mean result uncertain. The very idea of probability and of reasoning rests on the assumption that this number is indefinitely great. We are thus landed in the same difficulty as before, and I can see but one solution of it. It seems to me that we are driven to this, that logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community. This community, again, must not be limited, but must extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual relation. It must reach, however, vaguely, beyond this geological epoch, beyond all bounds. He, who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively. Logic is rooted in the social principle. ---To be logical men should not be selfish; ------ " Pp. 1338-1339

Peirce, Charles Sanders,(1878). "The Red and the Black" in Newman, James R.ed. "The World of Laws and the World of Chance", Simon & Schuster, N.Y. 1956 1334-1340, Library of congress Catalog Card Number 55-10060.

DO OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN HAVE TO EXPERIENCE A MEANINGFUL EMOTIONAL HUMANISTIC MATHEMATICAL EXPERIENCE,(MEHME), SUCH AS PAUL C. W. DAVIES DESCRIBES, IN ORDER TO COMPREHEND THE RELEVANCE OF THE MATHEMATICS UNDERLYING THE GOLDEN RULE TO THEIR FUTURE?

“In any event, theory better suited my temperament and conformed to my long-standing quest for meaning. I had discovered the charm of pure theory some years earlier, while still at Finchley. I had taken a fancy to a dark-haired girl called Lindsay, who was studying only the humanities and so spent long hours in the school library reading English literature. I contrived to sit opposite her one day, charged with the homework task of computing the trajectory of a ball projected up an inclined plane. As I was partway through several sheets of mathematics, the ravishing Lindsay looked across at me with a mixture of admiration and puzzlement. ‘What are you doing?" she asked. When I explained, she seemed completely mystified. “But how can you tell where a ball will go by writing squiggles on paper?"

Lindsay’s question has haunted me ever since. How is it, indeed, that we can capture the workings of nature using human mathematics? I came to see the equations of theoretical physics as the universe’s hidden subtext. By learning the arcane language and procedures of mathematics, I could access an occult world of forces and fields, of invisible subatomic particles and subtle interactions---a wonderland at my fingertips every bit as compelling as the dark night sky above our heads but somehow more exciting because of its abstract nature. I felt as if I had been inducted into a secret society, where by following a set of special rules I could unveil an alternative reality---in fact, a deeper level of reality, which somehow came closer to the soul. The soul of the universe, perhaps. I realized then how Galileo must have felt when he wrote that the book of nature is written in mathematical language, and I experienced something of the same thrill: the sense that nature itself was speaking to me in code.”

Davies, Paul C. W. “Cosmology Calls”, in Brockman, John edit. “Curious Minds: How a child becomes a scientist”, Pantheon Books 2004, p. 59. 05/01/20

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Interesting Links:

Depolarizing Mathematics and Religion by Sarah Voss
God of Chance by David Bartholomew
Life is Lognormal by Eckhard Limpert and Werner A. Stahel


 

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