Mad Math
Wondering about mathematics and reality.
Take five apples. Put them in front of you on a table. Five apples right?
Wrong.
Current mathematics might be terribly flawed. It very likely helps create wars and famine, and worse, stops all real efforts to stop the ecological disaster. Let’s investigate.
Note: I explained this post to a friend in education. Because of this post he suddenly understood how abstract mathematics in early childhood (Yes, even stuff like 12x12) forces children to disconnect from their real world experience. Many get or feel lost because of this. It explained to him how this hurts children. They feel being lied to, or sucked into something that feels wrong and therefore so many suffer in education. Consider this for yourself when reading onward.
Is 5 really 5?
Look at the 5 apples again.
Accustomed to math you probably already separated these apples from the table, room, you, and the rest of reality you’re part of. The reality is that there are five apples laying on a table with a human-looking at them, within a wider context. Each apple is also slightly different from the others. Also, the value of those apples is not constant but relative. As we’ll see: context and definition may change everything.
Next to the context and definition, there’s the reconstruction of those apples in your head. How do you personally see them? Perhaps a mix of red and green and or yellow. There may be a childhood memory popping up. All refigured to pictures in your brain. And then there’s the representation of five apples into a number, a mathematical reality. We pretend they’re all the same when confronted with numbers. It all feels all the same. Only that it isn’t. And that is a fundamental problem. Fixed numbers are a deception. We only pretend they aren’t. That’s how we’ve been educated.
“A problem is never solved on its own level; being complex, it must be understood in its total process. To try to solve a problem on only one level, physical or psychological, leads to further conflict and confusion. For the resolution of a problem, there must be this awareness, this passive alertness which reveals its total process.” ~ Krishnamurti
The Reality Gap formula.
The fact that many people will stop reading this bit, because they will have a hard time relating is exactly the point. In that case read on after the picture of the fiver. For those that read on, it’s me trying to make the point against the effect of mathematics on most humans… using mathematics. ;)
The problem is we humans tend to think: Reality is the same as what my brain makes of my sensory input, which is the same as the mythical mathematical representation I use to symbolize that concept in my head with. Hey, it’s generally excepted when we talk money. This is what happens: We observe X in reality = then X is reconfigured (neurological in our brain) finally X = represented (we have reality framed in a symbol or word). Think five apple on a table = 5 apples in my head = 5. This X seems right, 5 appels, but is just a symbol representing a mathematical construct, pointing out a small aspect of reality, deeply separated from it.
The little superscripted double faced R means (multi-facetted) Reality, the backwards R Reality Reconfigured and the normal R Represented, read X turned into mathematical symbol. To understand a number really we must consider what influences our observation. For example, any reconfiguration in the brain may be influenced by how these people experience certain numbers. They may get neurologically happier when their lucky number turns up, or the date of their birth. Thus their observation of reality is changed and thus their relationship to it.
In this formula above the line, we consider the three Xr’s as the same, when in reality they aren’t. Below the line, differences become apparent. The bigger the gap, the bigger the problems. And trust me, though we expect them to be the same, the outcome always will have gaps, that create noise.
So each Xr is different from the others. X in reality ≠ X reconfigured ≠ X represented. The bigger the gaps between above and below the line, and in between the Xr’s, the more harm it can do. A calculated amount of collateral damage may be represented as 200 dead in the media, yet will in reality mean propaganda, mostly not telling about 10.000 people in mourning for these deaths. Consider all the relatives who are now traumatized and or wounded because of what the attack did to them. It means parents and children heartbroken. Shouldn’t we be including them in the ‘telling’ number?
Numbers only may seem solid, like with the 5 apples on a table. Yet if no steps are taken these five will rot and your kitchen has dozens of fruit flies. These apples also mean something different to people who don’t get to eat, than to the accountant who is checking the numbers. Doing the calculations he forgets all about the context of people outside waiting for something to eat. What we consider normal math is therefore purely trained self-disconnection from context.
This thus also means that X ≠ X, because, all too often, we are talking about different x’s, except in pure math, where the symbol of X, meaning Xr, the representation of X = X. As soon as one person projects his Xr as in reconfiguration of X in his head on another person’s Xr (Can you even guess which Xr is meant here?) trouble begins. We humans quite possibly even put an added estimated emotional value to the Xr widening the gap with any Xr of another. Thus confusing each others Xr’s makes the idea of straightforward numbers weaker and less realistic. The numbers seem the same because of social compliance and lack of awareness by the players.
And if we include fuzzy logic (Yes, an actual serious part of mathematics and philosophy, look it up) then also true is both ‘X is X and X is not X’.
“The Tao that can be talked about, isn’t the real Tao.” ~Lao Tse
The problem of 5=5
We end up having no choice to every number in context. $5 isn’t the same $5 from one person to the next. Say a police agent fines a person with 5 dollars. For this cop, 5 dollars means he’s getting his target, and it’s only a fiver. But for the fined person that fiver may mean food that evening, or mean nothing when he has 10.000.000 of those in the bank. And if someone has 50.000.000 in the bank, but not on him, does he then have them or not? It’s like someone who knows Schrödinger’s cat is alive, but currently, it’s dead to the police officer wanting to see it. All we know the fine says $5 and when it’s been paid, then the math says everything is alright. That’s how we learned to see math in school. If a man pays a $5 fine and he has $7,03 in total then how much does he have got left after paying? Why don’t they teach us that the calculation doesn’t represent the full story.
Now we can see why poor people often cower when stopped by the police. They can’t afford to lose more. But very rich people, with no money on them, will get angry because of the fuzz over a fine that means nothing to them. One might even argue that thus equal fines for certain events, are actually unfair as they mean very different things to different people*. And anyone studying law should be able to tell you there are huge disparities between the punishment of different people. A black person, with 200 gram of illegal opioid pills on him, often gets much heavier punishment than the white pharmaceutical company CEO who killed thousands of people, by getting the sales targets. The CEO may get off scot-free and even get a bonus.
The number 5, therefore, means 5 separated from the context it stems from. There’s no five separate from reality, there’s almost always five of something in context. 5 apples as 5 apples make no sense when any number of hungry kids start screaming they want the biggest one. This means that any number, when applied as reality, may be very harmful. Sharp calculations may make a plane engine safer, they also can bankrupt an economy when the context of the numbers is forgotten. And 200 dead children because of a drone strike isn’t just a number, is it?
*) In Finland, you do pay different fines for the same speeding offense according to your income.
To conclude
We act from our context and relationship with any given reality and any number. And context and relationship may change everything. Too often bankers confuse the representation of x in their register with the meaning or reality of x for a customer. Mathematicians will say that x=x, and that our emotions about it don’t count. But anyone near extreme greed or extreme poverty knows that the context of a number influences its meaning and therefore creates different actions in reality. Thus x ≠ x.
Imagined numbers pose a huge problem in our society. They warp the truth. Being informed how wealthy I am may influence your opinion about this article. And it doesn’t have to be true, it’s what you believe. We believed we’d be safe. We believed the chance that something like Fukushima would happen after Tchernobyl was less than one in a million. We are numb to such huge numbers without an experiential part. The 75% loss of insect life on the planet in recent years is a global disaster**. Yet this number means nothing to the people, it’s too big to comprehend. It means nothing to the companies who keep selling the poisons that kill those insects. It means nothing to the politicians who listen to the corporate lobbies. Because we all believe in disconnected crazy math. We teach, read drill, children disconnect from context and reality to make their sums. We listen to numbers in the news and check how the stock numbers change because of it. We forget, ignore, are disconnected from the impact on real people and our planet. No wonder the world is a mess. Yet, we keep going as long as the numbers all match up, isn’t it?
Note: If you want to read on or know more, check out this article on science. It shows how science can’t really advance because of a similar disconnection.
**) This article was published in 2017! Did you hear of it? Even the Guardian posted about it. But no government actions I heard of, let alone daily updates in the news on progress towards healing the world. Why? They should! It’s globally urgent.
