Maths, Metaphysics and the Mind
Interviewing a Doctor and understanding emotion in the context of survival
When we think of maths, the last thing that comes to mind is, well, the mind. But, is this understanding that mathematics is an entirely rational subject, with no emotion or human touch, actually accurate? Going further - can humans understand anything with complete rationality, or are we confined by the emotional tendencies of our hunter-gatherer minds? Is this actually confinement?
Today, I want to delve into all these questions, and how these concepts of rationality, emotion, and the mind relate to our understanding of the world around us and our lives.
To answer these queries, I interviewed Dr Daniel Buxton, a maths teacher having worked on four academic publications on the topic of human genomics.
I first wanted to cover the topic of projection of emotion onto mathematics - I know I can certainly do this. Often times I’ll find myself focusing on solving for X rather than Y, for no reason other than X comes before Y - perhaps this is habitual bias, perhaps I like the letter X more than the letter Y, but here’s what Dr B had to say on the topic:
“Do you ever find yourself projecting emotion onto a maths problem, or displaying bias in any way?
“Yes, definitely. I think part of my job is to project emotion onto maths a little bit really. To enthuse students. Hopefully it’s usually positive and not negative - I’d say 90% of the time I’m projecting positive emotions, excitement - I guess you could say it’s like cracking puzzles.
For me, it’s the beauty of getting something right that’s difficult in maths - that’s the satisfaction in maths for me. When going through problems, I think that instead of seeing a big wordy question that you often do, I think you can see it as a challenge instead of a barrier.
A lot of students don’t have much resilience, and what they do instead is they look at it and think “Oh God I can’t answer this, it’s just too much”, whereas if they just shift their focus to seeing it as a hurdle to overcome, like a little bit of the puzzle to solve, spinning it on its head and making it a positive thing, I think that’s probably what I try and do in lessons, to turn someone who doesn’t like maths or is indifferent to it, to actually starting to enjoy it a little bit more”
I think this is a super interesting perspective - and is clearly a very human one! What fascinates me about this is how he describes the process of shifting perspective from a tough problem to a fun challenge - which is ultimately all about emotion and the way we perceive things.
So, I just had to ask the question,
“Do you then think that Maths is a truly rational subject?”
“What do you mean by rational?”
“It’s objective; There’s no element of emotion there.”
“In its nature itself, yes. So, maths does not care about your feelings, at all. It’s true or false in most cases, and that’s probably why I like it a lot more than other subjects. But that’s not to say that you can’t attach emotion to it.”
He’s right: Maths doesn’t care about our feelings - nor does the natural world at all, which I discussed in a previous blog post on the topic of objectivity. But, if you can’t do maths without emotion, something that is, at its core, entirely logical, then can we do anything logically at all?
“Playing on this theme, do you think that humans will ever be able to, or can do anything completely rationally, or do you think we are limited by the fact that our brains have not evolved past that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors?
I’d be very surprised if humans could get to a stage where we could detach those two things [emotion and rationale]. I think they’re just intertwined; I think we can’t have one without the other, unless you’re programmed to be as such, and therefore you are no longer human.”
I followed this up with the question, would we want to be “no longer human”? Is post-humanism a good idea?
“So, do you think on this topic of rationale, it would be necessarily a good thing to try and detach ourselves away from emotion, to, well, to be better at maths?!
There’s always a yes and no for that question. Yes, in the sense that it would advance our intelligence maybe, and help us to unlock more things we have yet to unlock, but at what cost? If you completely detach [emotion] from yourself, then you find yourself in morality problems where, you know, an AI would decide the whole train track problem - To save 10 criminals or 1 non-criminal, which way would it go?
If it were purely mathematical, you would just assign frequency 10 to this one and frequency 1 to this one, and therefore we will save frequency 1 over frequency 10, even though they’re horrible people and cause a lot of misery upon the world. But then you could attach maths to that, and ask whether they have any, well, I don’t want to go down the route of social score, but some sort of risk factor, like ranking people based on how much good or bad they can do in the world, and therefore evaluate that model in a different way.
But you always have those situations where things come to a head. And logic sometimes has to win over ethics and morality, and sometimes vice versa, and I don’t think you can ever truly separate those completely.”
This links into the idea of utilitarianism - that being, a school of thought in ethical philosophy that dictates that all action should bring the maximum happiness for the maximum amount of people. Here, Dr Buxton argues that this thinking is flawed to a degree, as with all mathematical models, but can be expanded upon, in this example by perhaps assigning a social credit system to solve the trolley problem, but this creates even more ethics problems - some of which can’t be solved with maths, he argues.
I continued by asking about how the study of mathematics may have influenced this line of thinking and his understanding of the world:
“Have you found that your study of maths has altered your view of the world, and your perception of place?
I’m pausing because I’m thinking, in what way?
It must have. The unique situation I find myself in that perhaps other maths teachers and other people don’t is that I have used maths to try and make some sort of impact on the world. So, with my PhD project, it was to try and apply maths in a setting that would eventually, the end goal, to cure disease.
So I guess yes - I don’t know how to elaborate on that more to be honest.
Do you think that, having studied maths, it’s given you a unique philosophy?
I don’t think I’d be able to answer those questions if it didn’t. If I hadn’t studied maths, even at A Level, yet alone university and PhD level, I don’t think that I would have the insight to tell you that. I completely agree.”
It’s undoubtable that our life experience shapes our perception - be it good or bad. But would studying maths actually be beneficial for our development? Or, should we reverse the trend of pushing STEM education, and study humanities more?
“So, do you think that studying maths is good for someone’s personal development as well as intellectual development?
Yes, definitely. For the reasons we’ve discussed, it helps you make an informed opinion on a lot of various things that people wouldn't realise maths is related to on first inspection. We discussed the idea of assigning risk scores to human beings, I mean if you don’t appreciate and understand mathematics at its very basic level, you’re not going to get to that stage.
Say you get to that stage: We have such a big push on STEM education and humanities are falling flat, with departments in universities across the country closing down, do you then think that we should supplement understanding of logic [and STEM with humanities?]. They say “STEM will tell you how to make a nuclear bomb, but the humanities will tell you whether you should” Do you think it’s important that we should push for them more?
Definitely. Why is STEM more valuable? Because the government finds it more valuable. They dictate what is important, and therefore they’ll put the funding into STEM more than the humanities, and really, it is important, you know, saving lives is important, but if you save a life and the quality of life isn’t there, and I’m simplifying a lot here, but quality of life comes from seeing theatre, and listening to music and all these things that aren’t science.
And if you have a certain quality of life because of science; Let’s say that you are saved by science, but you have a bad quality of life because there’s no art in the world, then is it worth it?
Obviously, if there’s such good quality art in the world, and things to experience and see and do, you would want science to be there to experience it at its fullest. So they absolutely go hand in hand; I don’t see science as above the humanities and the arts at all. And I definitely think you can’t have one without the other.”
This is certainly a difficult topic, and so I did some more reading, to see what science of the present and philosophy of the past has to say on this topic.
The Flawed Architecture of the Human Mind
As complex as we like to think we are, we are still just sophisticated animals.
We might have societal systems in place to keep us safe, and most don’t have to fight for survival every day, yet the stress response that kept our ancestors alive hundreds of thousands of years ago in a life-or-death scenario still fires in a situation as simple as being late for the bus.
One would think that, logically, we should not need the same magnitude of response as fighting a sabre-toothed tiger in the event of missing a bus. And that’s absolutely true.
But unfortunately, we’re still survival machines, not AI. We had to adapt to an environment in constant flux, whereas computers only need a steady flow of electrons to stay “alive” - they don’t have a biology that needs updating to deal with an environmental change. They don’t have a programmed drive to survive like we do.
Even with all our knowledge and wisdom provided by our big brains, it’s still handicapped by the fact that this can be manually shut off by the survival instinct.
A great example of this is the cold-water shock response: In the moment of contact with cold water, we take an involuntary inhale and hyperventilate. Of course, the caveat here is that this can be trained, but with a great deal of effort.
And ultimately, whilst our brains might be neuroplastic and have the capacity for change to a degree, we cannot re-wire the fundamental circuitry of the brain that is necessary for survival. Otherwise, well, we die.
Metaphysics and the Mind
If you’re unfamiliar, the term metaphysics refers to the branch of philosophy concerning the fundamental nature and first principles of reality - but how does this relate to the mind?
As I discussed in the aforementioned blog post about objectivity, we understand the world through our five senses and the manner in which our brain interprets these signals, and herein lies the problem: Our senses are easily confused, our brain easily influenced, and our bodily state, affecting all three, is easily altered.
If you take psychedelics, for example, your world suddenly becomes very different, because of the chemical reactions taking place inside your body.
So, it’s quite unreliable to use the human perspective to understand the material world, since it doesn’t paint an entirely objective picture.
Plato was a strong believer in this school of thought, and argued that we cannot have exact conceptions of things using our senses, but instead our logic, through fields like mathematics.
But, is even this a stretch? We’ve already discussed today how maths can easily be influenced by our emotional state and perception. Is Plato wrong on this one?
The conclusion - through our evolution and the way in which we interpret the world, our fundamental understanding of it is not entirely accurate.
Emotions and our Sense of Place
As a Geography student, one of the key concepts we discuss is sense of place - a person’s subjective feelings or emotional response triggered by a certain environment.
This can be a learnt behaviour, or an innate one. For example, we are born with a fear of heights. So steep cliffs probably make you feel a bit queasy.
But, most learnt perceptions of place are based on our fundamental needs. We don’t like the dark alley and feel anxious and stressed, because we feel vulnerable in not being able to perceive potential threats from the environment – so our body gets ready for a potential fight,
Hence, the way we feel about an environment is often dictated by the fact we’re survival machines.
Emotion is actually a survival adaptation - Even minimal entities like bacteria have them. They use chemotaxis - the movement of an organism due to a chemical stimulus - to produce swimming responses in order to move away from a suboptimal environment and move towards a more favourable environment.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the vast majority of what we do is driven by our desire to survive, and so our understanding of the world is not as objective as we might like it to be. Whilst subjects like maths are fundamentally logical, we still project the human condition onto them, simply by virtue of our existence.
Is this a curse or a blessing? That’s up to you to decide.
I’ll be putting up the full interview on my YouTube channel soon - so stay tuned for that!
Thoughts on this topic? Let me know by reaching out on Instagram or commenting below.
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A big thanks to Dr Buxton for speaking to me about the topic – you can read some of his work here:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Daniel-S.-Buxton/145934756
Take care!
- Tom
DISCLAIMER
The content provided in these posts are designed to be educational and informative. I am not a medical doctor, psychologist, therapist, nutritionist, or registered dietitian. The contents of these emails should not be seen as medical, psychological, dietary, nutritional, or healthcare advice of any kind. Always consult a qualified health professional on any matters regarding your health.