|
|
|
|
|
|
by Agentus
540 days ago
|
|
|
sorry, humans are stupid and what intelligence they have is largely impotent. if this wasnt the case life wouldnt be this dystopia. my crassness comes from not necessarily trying to pick on a particular group of humans, just disappointment in recognizing the efficacy of human intelligence and its ability to turn reality into a better reality (meh). yeah i was just thinking how a lot of thoughts which i thought were my original thoughts really were made possible out of communal thoughts. like i can maybe have some original frontier thoughts that involve averages but thats only made possible because some other person invented the abstraction of averages then that was collectively disseminated to everyone in education, not to mention all the subconscious processes that are necessary for me to will certainly thoughts into existsnce. makes me reflect on how much cognition is really mine, vs (not mine) a inevitable product of a deterministic process and a product of other humans. |
|
|
What I find most fascinating about the history of mathematics is that basic concepts such as zero and negative numbers and graphs of functions, which are so easy to teach to students, required so many mathematicians over so many centuries. E.g. Newton figured out calculus because he gave so much thought to the works of Descartes.
Yes, I think "new" ideas (meaning, a particular synthesis of existing ones) are essentially inevitable, and how many people come up with them, and how soon, is a function of how common those prerequisites are.