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Left on Read: When We Cease to Understand the World (Patreon)

Published:
2024-01-19 00:01:01
Imported:
2024-01

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Riley and Alice read yet another piece of South American literature in translation, this time it’s Benjamin Labatut’s fictionalised historical account about the unravelling of certainty that came with the discovery of quantum mechanics. Think “scientific horror.”

Comments

Anonymous

Haven't read the book, but the characterisation of Grothendieck described here does a great disservice to him. Grothendieck didn't leave academia for some vague sense of doom, he left because he couldn't escape the scourge of military funding of academia, and its ties to the oppression of Vietnam, a country whose people he had strong ties to. Ironically, by trying to make a political point with Grothendieck, it ends up stopping him of his actual anticolonial and pacifist politics.

Anonymous

Please read Embassytown by China Mieville already. I wanna know where it rests on the Blindsight scale. I think it will be over .5 but not .8

Anonymous

If we’re allowed to pitch authors: Cory Doctorow has a new book coming out at the end of february.

Anonymous

Please read anything by Roberto Unger — Brazilian legal thought represent!!

Anonymous

Mathematics is an interesting addition to this because I'm a maths student with most interest pointed in the pure direction, which i do think is a fundamentally different way of contending with the problem of not knowing, which is sort of a different way of blinding oneself. In doing physics you allow for certain pieces of information to be fundamentally unknowable, or in the case of the uncertainty principle certain pieces of information to be fundamentally in conflict, and you accept that lack of knowledge and you move on, hoping to get more of a shred of it, but maths does something entirely other In maths you, in a sense, blind yourself on the way in. Instead of looking at the real world you construct for yourself a seperate reality, one that does not and cannot truly exist, but that resembles the reality you percieve, provided you don't look to closely at both at the same time. In maths we call this construction of reality "axioms", the things we accept without proof. I think its better to call this axiomatic rather than "dogmatic" as some people do, because dogma has a sense of being believed totally, even in the face of possibly being false, but axiom is more like a construction. We construct a mathematical space to do our thing, where we say for example "Some natural number, called 0, exists" and the point is less that we believe it to be true regardless of context, but more that we don't care about a world in which it isn't, that world isn't of concern to us. By doing this you construct for yourself a world of nice round numbers, perfectly smooth curves, lines without width, a world of abstraction. While you make that world, as best you can you attempt to recreate the real one, but any attempt to drag you away from that world of paper is scoffed at. Mathematics in a sense is a way to achieve perfect knowledge, absolute certainty that what you're saying is unimpeachably correct to the last analysis. And in return you accept that you have created a perfect map of a land that does not and cannot exist. Incidentally if you want more proof of how much god plays dice, in group theory, the study of symmetry in mathematics, a group is a collection of things that you can do to some object while having it maintain symmetry (im eliding some detail but thats broadly right, shut up about group actions), and for a group of finite size, they can each be said to be in a sense the same as a product of "simple groups" sort of like how all intergers greater than 1 can be reproduced as a product of prime numbers. After decades of work, 100,000s of man hours, 10,000s of pages of paper after paper, we categorised every single simple group. Its 18 infinite families of groups, followed by 26 unrelated groups called the "sporadic groups", where one is called the monster group, which has 8x10^56 elements, along with 19 subgroups of that monster group, collectively called the "happy family" (it was the 70s, lots of acid), and then the 6 remaining groups are called the pariahs. The fact that this taxonomy describes the fundamental objects of the study of symmetry is such a beautiful demonstration of the pointlessness of existence, like seeing the true face of god and hes pissing himself laughing at you.

Anonymous

Hey November and Riley. First time, long time. You mentioned you're interested in talking with some authors, so I thought I'd put my hand up. I wrote Repo Virtual, which came out in 2020 and is about the personhood of AI, told as a sort of 'cyberpunk of the now' novel. If that sounds interesting, I'm happy to send the ebook - just email me at contact at coreyjwhite dot com. Otherwise, keep up the great work.