Math: a fatally flawed technology

[California98Civic]

Serious question:

The below Veritasium video describes a hundred and fifty years of math debate and concludes that math is a discursive technology that is incomplete and undecidable ("fatally flawed"). Excellently presented on the basis of high quality reading and consultation with professionals, I find it compelling partly because of its pragmatism. It concludes in a meditation on technology, echoing the classic pragmatic test of truth, rather than with radical epistemic skepticism or naive realism.

Question: in what ways might its conclusions be relevant to automotive and other transportation technologies?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=HeQX2HjkcNo

[freebeard]

Veritasium is Okay, but he doesn't go as deep as Exurb1a.

Take, for example, The Mystery at the Bottom of Physics (Beware, there's a word that begins with F)

At ?t=513 he asks for Synergetic Geometry, as if it weren't documented in Fuller's Synergetics.

Originally Posted by DDG

Synergetic Geometry for All! - Buckyideas
https://buckyworld.me/synergetic-geometry/
Synergetic Geometry is Bucky's magnum opus. It explains nothing less than the nature of the universe itself, and the fundamental building blocks of nature. According to others who have read and understand it Bucky's concepts, they accomplish nothing less than demonstrating how nature works to create reality.

Production values are higher, and one of my favorite phrases in this one is "Cosmic Terms of Service'.

See also:
Bear and Goose at the End of Everything
The Moon Is a Door to Forever
Sleep Is Just Death Being Shy

[aerohead]

Seems like things have never been better as far as automotive aerodynamic math.
Multi-core processors are routinely taking on the full, 3D Navier-Stokes Equation.
CFD is already so good, ( if you have the time to wait) that it will basically do whatever a full-scale wind tunnel will do. And without dimming the city lights.
If you want to land a manmade satellite on another planet or asteroid, the math is plenty capable.
Computers will only get better, faster.

[California98Civic]

Originally Posted by freebeard

...
Take, for example, The Mystery at the Bottom of Physics (Beware, there's a word that begins with F) ...
Production values are higher... ....

There it is again, ... the pragmatic test of truth, but not the ultimate truth of the knowledge of origins and fails. Cannot explain "why" the constants work and cannot be entirely certain they are in fact constant. It works, so therefore it is true.

Originally Posted by aerohead

Seems like things have never been better as far as automotive aerodynamic math.
Multi-core processors are routinely taking on the full, 3D Navier-Stokes Equation.
CFD is already so good, ( if you have the time to wait) that it will basically do whatever a full-scale wind tunnel will do. And without dimming the city lights.
If you want to land a manmade satellite on another planet or asteroid, the math is plenty capable.
Computers will only get better, faster.

Yeah, I see the pragmatic test of truth again: it works, so it is "true" ... our math technology is good at technology and not so good at larger human questions about origins and meaning and future.

I guess the answer to my question really is that such "flaws" in math may not be all that significant to automotive and transport tech... unless we focus alot on the meaning, ethics, beauty, and the great "WHY" of such tech. A post-humanist approach.

[freebeard]

[T]he meaning, ethics, beauty, and the great "WHY" of such tech.

Meaning, ethics, and beauty are second-order effects. Automotive and transport tech are engineering, which is fundamentally pragmatic. According to Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurrasic Park, 'can' is less important than 'should'.

Anyways, it's a poor logician that blames his tools.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by California98Civic

There it is again, ... the pragmatic test of truth, but not the ultimate truth of the knowledge of origins and fails. Cannot explain "why" the constants work and cannot be entirely certain they are in fact constant. It works, so therefore it is true.



Yeah, I see the pragmatic test of truth again: it works, so it is "true" ... our math technology is good at technology and not so good at larger human questions about origins and meaning and future.

I guess the answer to my question really is that such "flaws" in math may not be all that significant to automotive and transport tech... unless we focus alot on the meaning, ethics, beauty, and the great "WHY" of such tech. A post-humanist approach.

Perhaps, when AI achieves consciousness, and machines become sentient beings, the more subjective aspects of mathematics and modelling can be explored.
A 'Watson', that's digested everything ever spoken or written about philosophical implications of technology, will have an upper hand. No human can possibly have a command of all that data.
RAND Corporation, NRO, NSA, CIA, FBI, Dr. Evil, would be candidates for early adopters.

[California98Civic]

aerohead,

Yes, AI is a good thing to bring up in this context, since an AI piloting a car would be making ethical and moral choices about certain situations. Classically, avoid a property damaging collision by running-over a dog, or damage a car (with a risk of non-lethal injury to a human) because it avoided killing the dog?

Such dilemmas raise the question of WHY we want AI piloting cars and what limits there would be? I don't think these are second order questions. They're the kind of questions to which we should develop satisfactory answers before launching a technology. The math seems terrible for such judgement. An utter fail.

I know you are being ironic, aerohead, when you suggest AI would be so vastly superior in such judgements that we should surrender human ethics to its mathematical logic. I just wanted to spell it out a little more.

[aerohead]

Do we actually know what the real driver for pushing for autonomous driving is?
I have ideas, but doubt that it could be discussed here.

[California98Civic]

Originally Posted by aerohead

Do we actually know what the real driver for pushing for autonomous driving is?
I have ideas, but doubt that it could be discussed here.

Nah. I am not in the lounge with this topic specifically to restrain the penchant for going off topic into politics and such, stuff we agreed we would avoid when we freely joined this site.

The TOPIC here is the incompleteness and other limits of math as human technology and how those limits affect our cars, those of the past, those of the future. Your point about A.I. is well taken... it might be the great example because of how it will supplant human judgement with a mathematical logic. Our misplaced confidence in the completeness and authority of such logic is definitely an implication of the presentation in the OP.

[aerohead]

One glaring attribute for the machine logic would be the speed at which threat could assessed, and instructions signaled for action to mitigate.
It's said that the computer is 10X faster than us.
Hierarchy of priorities will be interesting.
Do you dodge the pink-polka-dotted elephant that's just fallen from the palm tree, or pool of glycol which has just exploded from a ruptured radiator hose?
If a collision with a car full of kids is imminent, and you have a moment to react, do you steer for the nose of that car, passenger compartment, or trunk.
AI will have to make the right call. Something we might take for granted as humans. And something programmers must be realizing more and more as they attempt to get a CPU to 'think.'