In a message of Wed, 22 Jul 2015 10:49:13 -0700, Rustom Mody writes: >Nice Thanks for that Laura! >I am reminded of > >| The toughest job Indians ever had was explaining to the whiteman who their >| noun-god is. Repeat. That's because God isn't a noun in Native America. >| God is a verb! >>From http://hilgart.org/enformy/dma-god.htm > >On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 10:48:38 PM UTC+5:30, Laura Creighton wrote: >> One way to look at this is to see that arithmetic is _behaviour_. >> Like all behaviours, it is subject to reification: >> see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification > >This is just a pointer to various disciplines/definitions... >Which did you intend?
I meant -- depending on your background -- go find a meaning for reification that makes sense to you. And then extend this to some other areas. >By and large (for me, a CSist) I regard reification as philosophicalese for >what programmers call first-classness. Me too. But there are more people out there who know something about reification than there are that know about first classness. >As someone brought up on Lisp and FP, was trained to regard >reification/firstclassness >as wonderful. However after seeing the overwhelming stupidity of >OOP-treated-as-a-philosophy, >Ive become suspect of this. >If http://steve-yegge.blogspot.in/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html >was just a joke it would be a laugh. I believe it is an accurate description >of the brain-pickling it does to its religious adherents. >And so now I am suspect of firstclassness in FP as well: >http://blog.languager.org/2012/08/functional-programming-philosophical.html >(last point) > >> >> and especially as it is done in the German language, reification has >> this nasty habit of turning behaviours (i.e. things that are most like >> a verb) into nouns, or things that require nouns. Even the word >> _behaviour_ is suspect, as it is a noun. >> >> This noun-making can be contagious .... if we thought of the world, not >> as a thing, but happening-now (and see how hard it is to not have >> a noun like 'process' there) would we come to the question of 'Who >> made it?' For there would be no 'it' there to point at. >> >> It is not too surprising that the mathematicians have run into the >> limits of reification. There is only so much 'pretend this is a >> thing' you can do under relentless questioning before the 'thing-ness' >> just goes away ... > >Yes but one person's threshold where thing-ness can be far away from another's. >Newton used thingness of ∞ (infinitesimals) with impunity and invented >calculus. >Gauss found this very improper and re-invented calculus without 'completed >infinity'. >Yet mathematicians habitually find that, for example generating functions that >are obviously divergent (∴ semantically meaningless) are perfectly serviceable >to solve recurrences; solutions which can subsequently be verified without the >generating functions. >Which side should be embarrassed? Embarassment is a function of the ego. The ego is _another_ one of those nouns where if you try to stalk it, it falls apart because it was produced by behaviour, rather than the cause of behaviour. Descartes: I think, therefore I am. (Because there must be an I that is doing the thinking.) Modern Day Western Neurologist: Thinking is going on. Therefore an I is produced. Laura -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
