Discussions, incl. FW Lawvere C McLarty, A MacIntyre, M Wright

5:00 This type of thing can be pursued as quote serious mathematics. On the other hand, there are these wild speculations. I think I met him once. He may be given the definition, but certainly not beyond that, even though... That's right, when he left he had a graduate student that he abandoned there, and Chanuel and I were somehow saddled with the task of directing this graduate student. By that previous experience, there was no way that he could grasp...

7:30 Well, I got pragmatism. I mean, it was just, I mean, I lost any kind of, it was an experience for Shannon. Well, after reading some of Rosen's stuff, I ended up reading all of it. I just went, chaos, or it's chaos theory. Yeah, I mean, when I saw that he couldn't do the definition, I wanted to say there's some, I didn't think it was going to be relevant to explaining it. I lost it nowhere. I just wondered if he, he's not really Canadian, he's from Nova Scotia.

10:00 Right. You see, that's what's very interesting. The crisis of the French social model. The French think they have this excellent transportation and very good health care and all these other public services and protection for employment protection.

20:00 They're all about this. The people should work. Bill was saying just yesterday, I have a higher gear now, but right back in the 60s when all the pressure for women to enter the workforce. The rate of exploitation could not be raised high enough if you just relied on one income per family, and the French are almost completely isolated, so there's no way your social model with this kind of level of welfare provision can be allowed to stand. The problem in America is that people make too much money. Now, not me or anybody I know, but they manage to sell to all kinds of people the idea that the problem was that everybody's got too much money, except your friends.

22:30 You can only incentivize rich people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by and you can only incentivize poor people to work harder by No, it doesn't say anything about Van Helmont in this, except spontaneous generation. Dr. Jan Van Helmont noted three centuries previously that mice would arise from wheat after 21 days. Similarly, observations were made that frogs and fish develop from clouds and appear after a rain fall. Certainly some Greeks mentioned that. Flies were produced from dead and decaying bodies of animals. Okay, that doesn't help. What we were trying to do was to find that the, um, the first... We've come up with this guy, Van Helmont, who was a Dutch in the early 17th century. It says the first use is 1658. It comes from him, but his date of death is 1658. And that it comes from the Dutch mispronunciation of Greek chaos. Yeah, yeah. But that it originally meant ultra-rarified water. I remember vaguely that there was this person involved.

25:00 We still haven't found the link. Well, one way you know it comes from water is when you're trying to vacuum pump, when you're trying to dry a mine by vacuum pumping, after a certain height, gas starts forming above the water. It won't draw the water past it. And so you can see that this stuff is ultra-rare water. That's perfectly rational speculation. Yeah, they do say that an awful lot of what became gas chemistry, and even the whole idea that weight is concerned in chemical reactions, came out of efforts to pump mines dry. I was looking at air, the word air in Aristotle, Greek air. After one afternoon on it, because Aristotle sometimes feels that if an amphora has nothing in it, then there's nothing in it. But he does note that if you turn it upside down and put it underwater, nothing will go in it either. And he must have noticed that if you don't tilt it, bubbles come out, so it's almost as if something's in the air. And he has this word air, but he discusses air only in terms of pre-Socratic theories. He only attributes views on air to other people. He doesn't say what he would mean by it. Everything has been taken out, but still outside of this major effect of the period of time. Yes, yes, yes. He did talk about that, doesn't he? I suppose there are successive approximations to the vacuum. Who uses, uh, who uses vacuum? I don't know. It's Latin, alright. Was it the translation of the Greek? No, we didn't have some kind of tracking air because, of course, you would need to get air, France, air, Canada, air.

27:30 Yes, that was a silly, that was a really silly one to do. I say to Bill, I didn't know when we were trying to search for first use of the word gas not to do, not to enter, gas versus, because I, you know, two months ago I was talking about the Australians. I knew I was going to get 800 entries for the Battle of Ypres. Yes, yes. I'm just remembering, I mean, several of the pre-Socratics say there's fire, air, earth. What was air? And Aristotle won't say. He'll say they said it. But he has no opinion on what they meant by it, and he seems to mean it. I know what all the others do, but I don't know what air was to these people. Yes, it's very something distinct from space. They're interested in rafts and in wind. Aristotle does that sort of thing. He says that wind is the... So that's something. Loads and loads. Of course, you get 16,800,000 entries for vacuum, and of course, a short history of vacuum terminology, starting from Avogadro, but a collection of Avogadro. Let's leave this for now, shall we? We'll decide what we're going to do.

30:00 You got my password anyway, but you told me yesterday. It sounds like they're very recent. Yeah, I know. They've discussed this coming in, haven't they?

35:00 This entire thing was sort of a 9-to-5 guy who would go into subvergency about the suppression of... So they had this War Measures Act that suspended civil liberties for six years. When it burned down our bookstore, it put hundreds of people in jail without any offense to any of that nonsense. So, actually, the particular group dissolved and only one person remained, now the senior professor of category theory. He trained Richard Wood, who Richard Wood in turn trained very well.

37:30 No, no, no, don't tell the guy you collaborated with. He was a student of Wood, because he was the one who was totally responsible for the internet, what we probably call the catnet. Yeah, yeah. So the mailing list. Yeah. It has various names. Further discussion takes place, as well as the journal Pack, the electronic journal, which I hope you noticed is one of my favorites, is run by Roosevelt, and they have had other students, so categories here in the Atlantic provinces are still great, in spite of the efforts to wipe it out by getting rid of me and all these people. Well, of course, they were all sort of temporary. They were revitalized. It grew up again. Can I go back there? Yes, I would love to have been there for the meeting last year. Well, that was ten years ago. But you gave that talk in the last year. I gave that talk there last year. That's what I thought. Well, that wasn't for any special meeting. That was as well. It was a meeting of the Canadian Maths Society. We had a special session, Chip. Miles Tierney. But it wasn't a special session on sophistry. That's okay. That's what I was thinking of. No, but it's a huge anniversary. 50th anniversary, 25th anniversary of this 94, 95, 95. Did anybody record that or just make a, or just keep the set of notes single-handedly, put it on to a large, large part of it?

40:00 Yeah, so we have, you've got that much, much, much smaller than VHS. Well, at some point we should definitely try and merge our archives. I should try and get all of this into much more compact form. Now, of course, with the bandwidth, I mean, all of that needs to be done pretty quickly, too, because it could be put down in a, you know, it could be merged with Fatima's archive. The vigorous Saunders and MacLean by Oz Kiernan. I loved it. Well, next time I see Fatima, I'm going to ask her transmissible form, then obviously I want to know about copies of everything in it, and indeed to other categories. For instance, I've got a recording in there of that. You remember in Cove in 1990, I think that was the last category meeting that Sammy Eilenberg attended. And there was a very good, vigorous debate in the open session at the end with a Bible couple of that. Yeah, that's all in there. Yeah, that's all in there. Of course, it's all in there. So all of your discussions, everything you said to me, I'm a Birkin Cobo in 1990s America doing stuff. Yeah, that's it. You're too short, which is what we have done. Oh, my God. We really should be merged with what Fassner's got. It's really important, not preserved just because it's just kind of on. I will then tell it. As long as it's on. Just down the road from us in Buffalo there at Transform. I used the VHS and the DVD overnight. I used it. Del Castro. I'm happy to send the payment for it.

42:30 It's a continuing thing, yeah. But in his case, as much as he had a library, it was the Beaverbrook Library. His family, his son, who was a lousy... What he wanted was to be serious.

45:00 And the other reason I thought that he might be an interesting person was that I thought he had written an essay about...

52:30 There must have been some point where they claimed that this happened, but one can't find out where it is. Our discussions with Peter Fry last week were very cordial as our discussion comes in. We go back and forth, which meant I showed up while he talked. Violent confrontations whenever I objected to what he said.

55:00 At that point, I described an idea that he was presenting as a fascist idea, understanding full well that society is full of fascist ideas and people pick them up quite innocently. But for years after that, he was claiming that I had called him a fascist. Yeah, yeah, of course, it wasn't easy, you know, a jump to make was obvious. And as anti-conscious with respect to the dynamics of the connection between collective and individual thinking. But anyway, you know, he's improved drastically over the years. There was one point during the past week when he raised this point, because I kept pressing on this same point. So, because there was this, again, not to extend the debate, but the only time that Eilenberg shouted at me was 1970. Which when I asked him, you know, what does computer science have to do with computers? And he said, neither I nor, no, neither you nor anyone else has the right to ask me because he wrote these books on algebra, which, you know, his, his basic line was he worked with, worked for IBM. So, concocting, you know, these things and, and these things suggested algebra. And so he developed this pure algebra. It was another source of algebra for him. This was the main thing. Well, wouldn't that have been a perfectly honest interview? No, no, he did tell me that before and after he even got me a job. I gave a series of ten major lectures at IBM in 1968, when this time when Danilo was born. Huge international meetings, orders of magnitude larger than any math meeting of theoretical computer scientists. And so I thought that he must have some inkling now of what the actual connection was.

57:30 How is this theory being applied to the design of hardware and as a guide to the design of hardware and software? So I thought, oh, wonderful, he can act as our, that is, mathematicians' agent in those circles and tell us what's happening. But he certainly didn't take it that way, you see. He took it immediately as a class warfare thing, you see. He had to defend the right to pure thought and so forth. Amazing. This was actually at Miles Tierney's house in Zurich. So there was a rather large group of people there. One of us must have been a KGB agent because I was later offered a position. If I had only defect to East Germany, I would be made an anti-Ottenberg, quote unquote, head of an anti-IBM, quote unquote. An agent was sent from East Berlin to Warsaw with the sole purpose that I was in Warsaw. The sole purpose of meeting me and making this proposition can only have stemmed from that because there was no other evidence. Of course, they knew I was communist. They had explained to them, well, I'm not your kind of communist. But this very particular aspect, anti-IBM, but even anti-IBM, okay, they wanted to have their own enterprise. Stylas anti-IBM would not be completely off the wall in terms of relations to reality. Anti-Hellenberg in the head. So from time to time I've continued to ask this question whether computers are authentic or not, meaning theoretical computers. And Bill never got a satisfactory answer. Did you, did Peter Fry give a general answer? So it's just that we're going to get something that sounds a little more interesting. Yes, but we mention certain names that are famous.

1:00:00 Milner, Robin Milner, Robin Milner, Robin Milner, who is British, very famous British scientist, and Edinburgh's, he said, all right. I'm so sorry, I just heard Milner, but he, no, he allegedly, no, I mean, no doubt that he's one of the more productive in terms of theoretical work in this field, not saying that he does nothing, but insofar as specifically, see, the misleading thing is that the electrical engineers, they have developed such marvelous machines. And even group names. You know, they can take any theory and make it appear on the screen. This is in no way an application of the theory of physics. Well, no, obviously it is. It's the only way around. Exactly, of course it is. In fact, it's exactly the point you were making yesterday with the illustration of naturality. It's the only way around. I mean, one of the world's centers for computer science is Edinburgh. Yeah, absolutely. But just a full list of people. I was impressed that these corridors went off in all directions and computer scientists, logicians mostly, have been in a few categories, more and more categories, especially in Britain, more and more categories, and so they all have these sun workstations on their desks, right, all of them, and say, oh my god, this is fantastic, who of these people actually has some idea about how these things work?

1:02:30 Well, no, they all use it for email, just like everybody else. That's the only thing they use it for. Well, I mean, as I say, they also occasionally, you know, again, some engineers have figured out how to display whatever thing you concoct, you see, and make the computer do it, you see. But science, for 300 years and even much more, has meant, you know, that it actually guides the engineers in designing and designing. All of this hardware or software is designed and developed under the guidance of, you know, like space travel, for example, a clear example where you have, without the general theory of Newton and of Hamilton and so forth, you couldn't do that, and that continues to guide every day, and the computers are programmed in order to solve Hamilton's equations or whatever, but you see, the so-called computer science, therefore, is... It's not a science in that sense. It's reversed and then used as propaganda. Major attention to Heaviside is made explicitly in his response about the need for general applicable mathematics. And telephone lines. And telephone lines. No, I'm sorry, is it? The... So, that's what's wrong with that. Well, that's the one that I know of. Well, maybe it's just one of the few which is mainly claiming to be based on category theory. Right. So it's a strange profession, probably tens of thousands of people now who call themselves computer scientists, paradigms and jargons, use computers for displaying their latest speculations, but I might probably sound like a nut when I say this, so I pressed Peter Fried down to a certain level and I said, yes, Peter, just give me some hint.

1:05:00 See, I actually have faith that somewhere, somehow, as I did when I asked Islander 35 years ago, somehow, somewhere, that there actually is some, you know, feedback from the theory to the practice. At that point, he said, you always get hot at that point. Yeah. Just so I had it. Yeah. It was just completely... He calls me hostile. Besides when he's becoming hostile, he calls me hostile, because I wasn't really pressing the point. Yeah, but he thinks you're being sarcastic. I think that's the problem. Because you are genuinely searching to get your teeth into it. He thinks I'm being sarcastic. Maybe you're right. No, because these people just internalize so completely the presupposition that of course computer science is, okay, we may not have it very good, generally. I was actually worried for a moment, because I do like to maintain a friendly relationship with Peter Fry, but then the next day we were back to KGB or East Germans or whoever, they were totally, totally wrong as well,

1:07:30 Wittenberg never shouted at me again, we were close friends, even closer and so forth, but, I mean, this was just a passing incident in terms of personal relationship with Coleman, and there's no way you would have gone on to let yourself become the anti-Eilenberg of a bunch of... They had an argument, you see, and I said, well, I'm not that kind of communist. They said, well, you realize that East Germany is highly democratic. We actually have a multi-party system, assuming that I would define that as being the earmark of democracy, whereas Wazis themselves often do. So we have so many, we have parties, you see, and these parties all take part in the major decisions, you see. I forget now, we had worker's parties, we even have the Nazi party, he said. We even have the Nazi party, which is small, but... It's Del's that's part of that. So this should convince you how really democratic we are. Exactly the same. Exactly the same. This was the same sort of argument by which I had been fired from Dell Housing. Because, besides the War Measures Act directed at the Communist Party, He had as a friend Otto, one of the founders of Nazism, with whom Hitler had broken at a certain time in the 30s.

1:10:00 No, I mean, they were actually right. There were two brothers. No, there weren't. Gregory von Strauss, and I can't remember the brother's name, but it might have been on there. Oh, I think so. It was the one who actually, you see, so, so, so this person, this Nazi, this, you know, was, the plan was that he was going to retire to Nova Scotia on some of the estates that, you know, he had controlled, and moreover that he was going to be... This was the big plan, you see. And you know how, you know, Marxist-Leninists in the time of the great influence of the Proletarian Revolution in China, they... Witten, Piao, and so on. We had this habit of going to denounce reactionaries whenever they tried to hold a meeting and so on, so there was a sure thing that we were going to disrupt anything that Strasser did at Dalhousie, and this was one of the main reasons why they had to get rid of me. Exactly, exactly, you got it, you got it, you got the free speech for it.

1:12:30 Pre-speech, but especially for Nazis, especially for Nazis. This was the thing, so I certainly was not going to feel a warmer feeling for East Germany because they were so democratic that they still included Nazis, contrary to international agreements at the time in Nuremberg, Casino, and so forth. Just to move back for a second to the question of mathematical structures of computer science, you're better thinking you attended in Galway, I believe. Right. Yeah, okay, when you were talking to that guy, Makanokani. Makanokani. Makanokani, I think I've got the... I remember you asked me how to pronounce it. It's pretty close, yeah. I agonized. I actually had it read out by a friend of mine. What do you like and what do you think? I'd say it's like, it's not just in computer science. There is something called the Journal of Applicable Mathematics, without the fact that most of what is called applied mathematics, in fact, is just nothing but an inferior form of pure mathematics. In the sense that it doesn't have to be quite up to the same quality as pure mathematics in order to be published in a journal like the Transactions of the AMS or anything like that.

1:15:00 The slogan is applied, but the assumptions are always completely oversimplified, and they concentrate on pure mathematical aspects. For instance, certain operators and things like this, under a guy, always constantly under a guy. Now, occasionally there's very good work that comes out, you see, but the, so Kalmos says pure mathematics is, applied mathematics is bad mathematics. Meaning not necessarily really, really, really bad, but it's hiding behind this. So this journal of applicable mathematics is one of the few places where this is kind of openly stated, they think of it as applicable, so the computer science is almost all like that. So, yeah, in Dublin, in Trinity Dublin and Galway, there's a lot of that going on, but the point is, obviously, you may say, well, why do I participate in all this? Because there are lots of young people who want to be educated in the category theory, and there's always the chance that some of them might actually turn to science, you know, it's just basically, I mean, I oscillate, I keep saying no, no, no, and most of the emails that I get, I either don't answer or get some cursory, but on the other hand, there is this clear phenomenon that there is a community. Where more people know more category theory than any other, even within pure mathematics. Now the way that they know it is inferior, but still, that's a very nice geometry. I continue to correspond to it. They learn rather quickly to have in some sense a low expectation of what the result of investigation would be, and so that's bad.

1:17:30 I mean, I haven't been able to come up with anything much more sophisticated than the Vietnam War, namely that the role of mathematics is not to guide engineering, but to provide a propaganda smokescreen for the ruling class that can hide any decision that they want to make and define it as being, quote, justified by mathematical proof. And when we would write a grant proposal to the Pentagon or have a huge appendix, which was again basically pure mathematics material for it, why did we decide to do that? You question this? Well, if you can't understand, you just have to accept. It's theory then, so it needs to be to reject that as being contradiction. And there's no, what you see, no really serious mathematical theory. I certainly can refine the theory in one respect, even though the general theory was applying to, well, it's just science in a narrow sense, but computer science in a narrow sense, I mean, there's a theoretical way

1:20:00 You can immediately sweep aside 99% of it, which is that it's all based on bad infinity, and bad infinity doesn't exist, so how could it possibly apply to anything existing? When they talk about P equals NP as being the great problem of the century, this is basically absolute bullshit, because, you know, we're in polynomial time, exponential time. Bonjour. Bonjour. Bonjour monsieur. Bon appétit. Oui. Oui. Très bien. Bonjour. Bonjour. Monsieur. Monsieur. Bonjour. Bonjour. C'est fini? Ah oui, nous, nous avons fini. There's clearly a practical distinction between feasible and non-feasible. And it seems to have some, you see, there's no mathematical theorem that says that that's modeled by, you know, recursion versus non-recursion, like polynomial time versus exponential time, like P versus NP, or any of that, because those things, those distinctions are all based on that infinity. So, and indeed... The computer people themselves will admit, well, yes, of course, even an exponential program, if we only tread along for the first ten steps or so, there's no problem in doing that.

1:22:30 And many programs, in fact, would run an exponential time if they were run for a long time. And on the other hand, even linear time with a huge coefficient, CT, right? You know, it is in fact unfeasible if C is big enough. So the theoretical distinction that they make, they even admit. And then you say, well, what's the justification for identifying feasible with polynomial unfeasible? They will admit, well, it's a rather vague connection, but it seems to work in practice. You get away with it in practice. Well, how do we get away? We get away with saying it. We get away with getting paid for saying it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What do you mean it works in practice? Well, as a rough guide to whether a program is working or not, but you see, it gets down into some completely unjust, theoretically unjustified correspondence. Except, of course, by the assumption. I remember John Mabry making quite an important connection with his own ice and water and time and natural numbers without the assumption that what you serve is a matter of infinity. It's not well posed. I have to assume that's a well posed problem. I have to assume that in order to assume that this is a well posed problem.

1:30:00 No, seriously, can I say that you and Bill want to talk? Can I ask you guys to do one favour before we kick off? Um, now there's all four of you, yeah, yeah, it's okay, if the four of us do it, it shouldn't be too difficult. Just let me clear the junk off there, and that's going to make a little bit more room. Just let me get this, no, as long as we, it is heavy obviously, but hang on, yeah, just get, uh, with four of us it really... uh it's going to be the the salt with this actually really ideally i want to get it over the other way because those are the paths ideally yes but that could be what i want to do is to push it right over i want to turn it right over on this other end because yes i thought in other words careful angus have you got the weight of it Okay, that's right. And then, if we can, if I pick it up here on the bar, if just two of us, say you, Angus, and me, Bill, you can back off for now. Put your hand under here, lift the whole thing up and just move it back towards me. It's okay, that's not too bad. Okay. Okay. Now, swing it back towards you, i.e. that way. Well, we've now got it in its right end to go. Have you got the weight? swing it back down there okay right and now all four of us um so if you get this end bill

1:32:30 okay and lift to get right under it okay yeah done yeah push it towards this end yeah fine it's done done and dusted thanks thanks guys that's a little