New Harvard math

No. 2,574

Harvard Promotes Claim that ‘2+2=5’

On Sunday, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health promoted research on Twitter by one doctoral student that claims that two plus two can equal five. 

Later in her life, Ayn Rand embarked on a study of mathematics, attracted no doubt by its necessity for precision and exactitude, but also I think perhaps to rescue the field from the modern philosophers.

"You should always think of these statements as associated with an underlying reality,” Carr wrote.

He Insinuates that there are multiple realities, not just one.

If you think that’s crazy for a Harvard professor to say, try Wkileaks’ coverage of the Set Theory and then wade into Plato’s discussion of Kant’s theory of Mathematics. The idea behind set theory began in the late 19^th century.

For example, if a subject says, "The sun shines on the stone; the stone grows warm," all he perceives are phenomena. His judgment is contingent and holds no necessity. But if he says, "The sunshine causes the stone to warm," he subsumes the perception under the category of causality, which is not found in the perception, and necessarily synthesizes the concept sunshine with the concept heat, producing a necessarily universally true judgment.”

Carr is obviously a Kantian. Something underlies the number two thus changing its value to X allowing Winston Smith write 2+2 = 4, and not 2+2 = 5 or 50. Carrr bills himself as a data analyst, not a mathematician. What is contained in his data? Numbers, objects, entities with names? Somethings?

From the lexicon

With the grasp of the (implicit) concept “unit,” man reaches the conceptual level of cognition which consists of two interrelated fields: the conceptual and the mathematical. The process of concept-formation is, in large part, a mathematical process.

When Winston says that "freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four," he is asserting that truth exists independently of the Party's ideology. Crucially, this also asserts that the conditions of truth rest in part upon the external world; if Winston has the freedom to say that "two plus two make four," he has the freedom to acknowledge existence independent of the Party's say-so. 

If you’re, ambitious, dogged, and hearty enough to read the Plato entry on Kant’s essay on mathematics, you may wind up, as I did, substituting the terms “synthetic” and “synthesis” with “elastic” and “elasticity, which would mean the number could mean anything or any value.” If you can read perhaps a fraction of Plato’s explanation of what Kant was claiming what mathematics was or wasn’t., enduring all the Kantian gibberish without your mind becoming twirly, then you’re a better man than I am. “Intuition,” “construction” are terms that occur repeatedly in Kant’s discourse and also in Wiki's explanation of it.

Kareem Carr tweeted: “Statements like "2+2 = 4" are abstractions. What that means is they're generalizations of ‘something’. You should always think of these statements as associated with an underlying reality.” Generalizations “synthetically” divorced from objectivity and reality and associated with an “intuitive” (non-objective) sense of what “something” may be. Carr uses “2+2=5” as a scarecrow to demonstrate his point. 

But his numbers ultimately are based on their actual, recognized value. His numbers are not seen as absolutes or have unchanging values.

He employs a variation of what Rand calls a “stolen concept .” In Orwell’s 1984, Smith writes in his diary: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” (p. 72, Berkley edition, afterword by Erich Fromm)

”As they feed on stolen wealth in body, so they feed on stolen concepts in mind, and proclaim that honesty consists of refusing to know that one is stealing. As they use effects while denying causes, so they use our concepts while denying the roots and the existence of the concepts they are using.

“When modern philosophers declare that axioms are a matter of arbitrary choice, and proceed to choose complex, derivative concepts as the alleged axioms of their alleged reasoning, one can observe that their statements imply and depend on “existence,” “consciousness,” “identity,” which they profess to negate, but which are smuggled into their arguments in the form of unacknowledged, “stolen” concepts.”

What completes Smith’s statement – “all else follows” – acknowleges open heart surgery, space travel, computers, building skyscrapers, and everything we take for granted today and which depends on reason and objectivity. None of it would be possible if we relied on “intuition” and the “synthesis” of problems. A caveman wouldn’t even be able to light a fire if he followed Carr's -- or Kant's -- prescription for perceiving and knowing anything.

Our caveman would freeze to death before his elastic “intuition” allowed him to discover or “synthesize” the cause of his cold.

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Blogger's note: The illustration is of me preparing to address an audience on Sparrowhawk at the Mariner's Museum in Newport News, VA.