Venator reflects:
"...the human mind had its own dark mathematics, which was not that of logic or causality. It was chaotic.
"His task was to hold chaos at bay." (p. 194)
"...dark mathematics..." is a good poetic description of the human mind. See also Hopkins' description quoted here and here.
In Poul Anderson's first future history, the Psychotechnic Institute addressed the problems of the human mind but focused on primitive motivations, not on mental chaos. In Anderson's Operation Chaos, Three Hearts And Three Lions and The Shield Of Time, chaos, or "Chaos," is merely destructive whereas what Venator calls "chaos," others call "freedom."
Can any mathematics describe the chaotic human mind? I spoke to two mathematicians. The first failed his University exams whereas the second did post-Doctoral research, then worked at interpreting astronomical data. The first guy claimed that mathematics can describe anything. When I suggested that, to describe some phenomena, he would need to invent a lot of new terms and to construct some very complex formulae, he accepted this but insisted that nevertheless mathematics could describe anything. I replied that I could describe anything in English if I was allowed to invent a lot of new terms and to construct some very complex sentences.
The second guy laughed at the suggestion that mathematics could describe anything and was unsurprised that the first guy had failed undergraduate exams. He, the second guy, said that mathematics was less about numbers and more about patterns. I think that there are statistical patterns in chaos.
2 comments:
Reality is probabilistic. The thing about that is that you have to remember that -less likey- does not mean -impossible-.
Unlikely things happen all the time. A 70/30 split on a given result is -high risk-.
Kaor, Paul!
Too bad Venator's idea of holding chaos at bay included putting chains on the freedom of the human race! And those were chains the Teramind was ever so gradually wrapping around human beings, no matter how gentle and luxurious they were.
Ad astra! Sean
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