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 Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2009 5:24 pm
ok i have two questions but i find it rude to post twice so question one is if you were to define life in one word what would it be and why? my second question is can you turn words like love and amazing and mystery into numbers to make a valid math prob. thanks for your time.
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Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2009 10:11 pm
How might IEmotions, such as "love" or "amazing", are known as qualitative measurements, meaning that they are defined by what we see, feel, etc. You cannot put a number to a qualitative measurement. So, no, "love" and "amazing" cannot be made into a valid mathematical equation.
Quantitative measurements, which are the measurements taken with a number (e.g. 3 centimetres), can be made into mathematical equations.
As for your idea of a one-word definition to life: I choose "life". The reason should be pretty obvious.
be of assistance?
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Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2009 11:18 pm
Whether the concepts of love and mystery can be turned into mathematics depends partially on your metaphysical understanding of love, and partially on how cynical you are.
Suppose that love can be reduced to science, to biology and chemistry and psychology and neurology. And suppose that we eventually get these branches of science developed to the point where we can apply mathematical modeling to them, the way that physics these days is done in terms of mathematical models. Then yes, love could be turned into a mathematical object, or a set of mathematical objects, subject to equations and other mathematical relations.
This is assuming that love has no existence beyond the scientifically observable, that emotion contains no inherent true randomness.
Mystery is a bit more difficult, but cast in terms of belief states and hidden variables, the set of mysteries can have some mathematical structure imposed onto it, given a (large) number of possibly absurd assumptions regarding epistemology.
Amazing (or perhaps amazement) would be psychology, aesthetics and expectation and intuition/non-analytic induction and more belief states.
I'm not sure if "number" is the right way to think about these things, but given some strict definition of the concepts, and a firm belief in the possibility of formalization of the logically-bound branches of science and metaphysics, then yes, those concepts would be translatable into mathematics. This is a somewhat strong assumption, though.
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Posted: Fri Sep 11, 2009 5:24 pm
Mystery can probably be 'reduced' to a some sort of combination of entropy and Kolmogorov complexity. Mysterious things are either unpredictable (entropic from the point of view of information theory) or governed by very complicated rules (at least, we generally suppose that if we manage to unify phenomena into simpler rules, then we have more understanding). Layra-chan This is assuming that love has no existence beyond the scientifically observable, that emotion contains no inherent true randomness. Inherent randomness is no bar to mathematical description. Actually, it will probably make the enterprise easier.
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Posted: Fri Sep 11, 2009 6:21 pm
Life in a few words:
chaos
love
happiness
time
existence
purpose
And I can't think of any more.
But as for putting words into numbers, I don't think it's possible. A concept can't be represented by any definite number, but rather by a variable.
For example, you could have love, mystery, and religion. Love = l; mystery = m; religion = r. It could either be "lm = r" or "l+m = r"
lm = r
lm-r = 0
l+m = r
l+m-r = 0
And either way, you'd be saying that love and mystery without religion would be nothing, which is untrue. And so, this example is invalid... sorry. sweatdrop
But this may also lead us toward the conclusion that these concepts cannot become mathematical... which, personally, is what I currently believe.
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Posted: Fri Sep 11, 2009 6:22 pm
VorpalNeko Mystery can probably be 'reduced' to a some sort of combination of entropy and Kolmogorov complexity. Mysterious things are either unpredictable (entropic from the point of view of information theory) or governed by very complicated rules (at least, we generally suppose that if we manage to unify phenomena into simpler rules, then we have more understanding). Layra-chan This is assuming that love has no existence beyond the scientifically observable, that emotion contains no inherent true randomness. Inherent randomness is no bar to mathematical description. Actually, it will probably make the enterprise easier. I guess perhaps I meant unpredictability or uncomputability of sorts. A randomness whose distribution doesn't converge as the number of instances goes to infinity, and such that value of the distribution at a given point, taken as a distribution over the possible values at that point, doesn't converge either, and so on. (Is such an object possible?)
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Posted: Fri Sep 11, 2009 6:33 pm
Cool so that means all of you agree with my teacher in saying either it cant be done or i cant do it.
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Posted: Sat Sep 12, 2009 6:00 pm
Layra-chan I guess perhaps I meant unpredictability or uncomputability of sorts. A randomness whose distribution doesn't converge as the number of instances goes to infinity, and such that value of the distribution at a given point, taken as a distribution over the possible values at that point, doesn't converge either, and so on. (Is such an object possible?) I suspect that a randomness that defies mathematical description at any level is impossible at least in the sense that it cannot be imagined, in as much as it does not seem to be possible to imagine something completely devoid of structure. Although I wonder how far this can be pushed, especially given AC. Something that doesn't have a probability distribution is simple to conceive--imagine a black box that spits out natural numbers in such a way that for any subset A for which lim_{n→inf}[ |{a in A: a≤n}| / n ] exists, the ratio of counts that it spits out a member of A over the total tends to that value. Such a box cannot converge to a probability distribution, for it breaks σ-additivity, although there's an interesting "pseudo-uniform" behavior going on anyway (dropping σ-additivity, there exist many finitely additive measures is that satisfy the above limit criterion, but the box is not obliged to converge to any of them either). This black box obviously has a great amount of mathematical behavior (just not probabilistic). Again, I'm not sure how to even start conceiving something which has no structure whatsoever. Actually, I'm not even sure how to understand what "random" would mean in that context.
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Posted: Mon Sep 14, 2009 4:24 pm
To be honest, I really don't know.
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