What was the main effect in your mind, in your perception of reality and in your life after several years of Reading literature?
To mathematicians and mathematics/physics students, same question: What was the main effect in your mind, in your perception of reality and in your life after several years of math training?
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Mathfag here
>What was the main effect in your mind,
Not sure, you just learn to see things in a different way, I became more skeptic for examlpe and my procces of thought is more rigorous (or so I believe).
> in your perception of reality
The thing is that math has nothing to do with "physical reality", I guess I am more "platonic" because for me math exists in a different plane of reality. On a physical level I would say that now I look at nature with another eye, for example one can see fractal patterns in trees and plants.
>and in your life after several years of math training?
As much as I like math, I know that not everything in life is as simple as math, feeling play a much more important role in every day life than just logic, each has it's own place, but people tend to use one instead of the other in the wrong circunstances. Knowing when to think and when to feel and how to mixthem is the most important thing in life.
>Not sure, you just learn to see things in a different way, I became more skeptic for examlpe and my procces of thought is more rigorous (or so I believe).
>On a physical level I would say that now I look at nature with another eye, for example one can see fractal patterns in trees and plants.
that's quite interesting and valuable
>for example one can see fractal patterns in trees and plants.
I starting noticing them when I was like 4
>tfw to intelligent for math
You realise everything and nothing are true
>“The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.” Aristotle, Poetics.
What I can say is that my comprehension of reality was forever altered after several years of reading literature, especially poetry. The major change was not a greater knowledge of souls and minds other than my own; it was not the soul-hydration of a continuous immersion in different or more profound philosophies; it was not a greater sense of empathic thinking toward other beings earned by nesting myself inside the brains and the skin of other humans. All of those things will happen in a certain degree if you are willing to read good-quality literature, but that was not the most extreme change in thinking that I experienced. The real change was the one that slowly erupted due to the constant exposure to this figure of speech and central artifact in human language: the metaphor.
The metaphor was the thing that really transformed me. My most profound transformation was one of language, not of philosophy.
When I started to read poetry and pay attention to the metaphors used on it, when I fell in love with metaphoric-textured-language, I realized that all things in the universe seem to be related, that all material things and all abstract concepts and ideas present in themselves aspects of an infinity of other things. Before this slow advent and gradual realization words to me were like hard-shelled entities, all of them firmly individual and separated, like blocks or bricks, that one could use to build phrases and paragraphs.
After my training words became organic entities with no firm envelopment: now they are like cells whose membranes is always oozing its inside fluids of meaning, while at the same time absorbing the meaning-oils of other words. Words to me are something like the gas-planets, that can be perceived as a whole, a single unity, but that, when one actually tries to penetrate them, are made of mists, of nebulous material, a dense smoke of several different meanings and connections (the precise word that identifies this property is “connotations”).
As a result of this mental change now I tend to see things in my day-to-day world experience and generally think on other things, very distant – or near - things that can be summoned by the great power of metaphorical thought. For example, a few days ago I pictured the stars in the night as clothe-moths of light eating the old blanket of the dark, the black flesh of the abyss. Wondering about mathematics and its formulas I pictured the idea that they are something like a diamond-skeleton, the crystal-bones that sustain the organism of the universe. A few days ago I was near the sea, a cold, brownish, frothy and violent sea, and I imagined it like a great bull, foaming and sweating with anger, the sound of the crashing waves was his mooing (a short way of making this metaphor is just to say that the “waves were mooing”), the sea air his breath.
Picturing the break of day from my window I can say something like this about it:
“When the morning tears up the black flesh of night, and the heavens bleed rust;
When the glacial crystal-moths and moist fireflies of the stars
Flee from the sun, the sun who, growling honey of light, lifts his blonde head and the mane of wheat,
Then the soft kingdom of the blankets and warm nest of the beds is abandoned:
The blear and gummy cobweb of sleep and the yawning veneer of dreaming evaporate.”
A cup of coffee can be seen as the solution that the brain uses too make mouthwash and spit out the lazy and rancid jelly of sleepiness. Or it can be seen as the dark and bitter blood, the true nectar of the active God of Production.
Thinking about torture and its effect on the soul - the crippling and maiming of feelings like tranquility, friendship, affection, will-power, confidence, joy, laughter, trust and creativity that continuous torture can produce - I imagined something like this: torture crushes the clitoris of the soul as if it were a soft and fragile grape. Analyzing the relations of the members of the Congress I could not avoid seeing them as wolves dressed in suits.
This happens all the time with me now, this perception that the walls between words and concepts have melted and that their organs and souls are exposed, free to pollinize and be pollinized by other ideas. This was the major change that years of reading literature have produced in me.
The things you are describing sound more like the result of being introspective
I'm not a mathfag and I relate to what you are saying
Is not something I can really put into words, if I could I would be a writer, but overall I think it helped me mature and it gave me some sort of guide that you just cant get from people in real life. It also helped me view things from different points of view without pre judging them.
sounds beautiful and inspiring, thank you for input
Thank you. I'm glad you like it.
>The things you are describing sound more like the result of being introspective
>I'm not a mathfag and I relate to what you are saying
Agree, I guess that means I've become more introspective through math.
Yeah, but the interesting part is when you think about why that happens.
Going to add a bit more on my original post.
>What was the main effect in your mind
Understanding a concept is one of the best feelings one can experience. Not just knowing the formula or the algorithm for something, I mean true understanding which is the one you have when you're able to "handle" such concept in different/no-standard ways. And the most important "effect" in your mind is when you come up wih questions on your own (i.e. when doing research), that's when you learn ont only with books but by "exploring" (some times unexplored) ideas.
>Yeah, but the interesting part is when you think about why that happens.
Any books on this or do I have to be a hardcore mathfag?
Non that I've read, but there are some known ones.
"The Fractal Geometry of Nature" by Mandelbrot, he was one of the first mathematicians who studied fractals in more depth. It's not a rigorous text but it doesn't seesms to friendy either.
"The Self-made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature" by Philip Ball is much more easy to read and will probably be more fun for someone who doesn't want to get into the math part of things.
>What was the main effect in your mind, in your perception of reality and in your life after several years of math training?
Math problems became much easier to solve and I can intuit more difficult problems more easily. It didn't really affect my thinking in other ways, other than that math soaked up my mind so I put it to other things less often. I used to read more often.
Words like "group" sometimes look funny when used in a non-mathematical context. Learning from a math text and casually reading are much different modes of being in the world, so they don't much affect each other.
bump
I love the library of congress
great post
I study physics, however I matured a lot in the past two years, so I can't tell you to what extend my perception of reality has changed by studying physics vs. maturing.
Reality as we observe it can be described by mathematical formulations. They are used to predict and explain phenomena. You have to ask yourself what you percieve as reality. For example there is wave-particle duality, we can observe paritcles, and see the statistical effects of the wave. Does that make a particle being a wave a true thing? From the outcome of the experiments it is likely that a particle is indeed a kind of wave. That doesn't explain why a particle behaves like a wave, what a particle actually is, or how the wavefunction collapses (aka how does the 'world' know where a wave collapses, and makes the particle appear there).
We can continue by looking around us. On basis of physical principles we shouldn't have existed in the first place (look up matter-antimatter anomaly wired.com
So studying physics has taught me how to describe reality, but at the same time it has taught me to question what we see as real.
On the effect it had on my mind: In general you are taught to solve problems, so the problem solving skills can be applied to any field. If you want to solve (physical) problems, you have to have a very structured approach, so it taught me how to be a structured person, and how to creatively solve any problem.
Effect on my life: Positive overall, without physics I wouldn't have been as structured, or be able to accept others' view on life. I can solve many simple problems in a whim. The only negative effect it had, is since I am surrounded by fellow smart phycisists all day long: I see myself slowly being less able to interact with normal people on a normal level about normal things. Which reduces my chances of finding a significant other a lot. However the good outweighs the bad.
Also I appreciate fiction more, since I read fucking mathematical notations all day long, and crave for a simple fun story at the end of the day.
were you good with math before you decided to study physics or you learned with some difficulty because you had to
Well, I didn't have the natural talent for mathematic that I had for physics. There is not really a thing such as as 'not being able to do math'. For mathematics: You must somewhat enjoy what you learn, otherwise it is impossible to study.