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Zetetic comments on No coinductive datatype of integers - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: cousin_it 04 May 2011 04:37PM

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Comment author: Zetetic 04 May 2011 06:44:51PM 1 point [-]

I could give it a shot. Technically I think they are Rafael Nunez's ideas more than Lakoff's (though they are framed in Lakoff's metaphorical framework). The essential idea is that mathematics is built directly from certain types of embodied cognition, and that the feeling of intuitiveness for things like limits comes from the association of the concept with certain types of actions/movements. Nunez's papers seem to have the central goal of framing as much mathematics as possible into an embodied cognition framework.

I'm really not sure how useful these ideas are, but I'll give it another look through. I think that at most there might be the beginnings of some useful ideas, but I get the impression that Nunez's mathematical intuition is not top notch, which makes his ideas difficult to evaluate when he tries to go further than calculus.

Fortunately, his stuff on arithmetic appears to be the most developed, so if there is something there I think I should be able to find it.