/lit/ - Literature

>>5482333

To be honest and for the sake of full disclosure, I don't know enough about Hegelian philosophy to be dangerous.

I'm working off of what little I do understand and from those he influenced. Having tried to do legwork reading troll Heidegger threads to see why he is so popular here, I'm aware that the concept of Dasein could have interesting interactions with that passage's interpretation, but I can't speak for the whole there.

>>5482345

I accidentally left that statement at the top. I was going to combine those into one post; but decided to splice a koan would be criminal.

>>5455173

All operations where all values are given can ultimately be reduced to these four types. Multiplication is iterated addition. Subtraction can be notated as addition of a negative number. Division reverses multiplication which is interated addition. Taking a number to a power is multiliplication by itself n times, which can again be reduced to interated addition. Logs, derivatives, integrals, sums: If all values are given they're all reversible algorithms which could be described in terms of addition.

If intuition is correct, if we really wanted to we could derive the following for, say, 272+864:

1+1+1+1+1+1... = 1136.

Intuitively this makes sense. "What gives you the right to say that's always true if you don't even know what it means when you say 1+1", you might reasonably ask. Mathematicians felt the same way and wanted to find a fundamental core to mathematics rooted in logic and fundamentally true. They needed to know that the same stream of 1's from above would always act consistently and couldn't do something like

1+1+1+1+1+1... = 109

where

109 =/= 1136.

Having a rigorous understanding of such a fundamental operation then becomes very desirable.

Even if we now know it was a futile goal because no nontrivial logic system can be used to prove itself, it's not all that far fetched either. Math is weird and things which seem fundamental can't be assumed. The number sequence 1+2+3+4+5+6+... taken "all the way to infinity" is supposed to equal -1/12.